The European nuclear dimension: From Cold War to post-Cold War

Studying the relationship between the process of European integration and nuclear energy means coming to grips with two of the central issues of the international system that emerged from the Second World War. Ever since the fateful dropping of two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the key questions of international politics has been whether the power of the atom is compatible with a world of nation states or whether its immense destructiveness needs a radical rethinking of the international system and the creation of some form of supranational framework to manage it. But is the atom really shareable, or – as General de Gaulle supposedly said – le nucléaire ne se partage pas? Such a question is obviously linked to the second issue, namely what can be achieved by the experiment of European integration. How far can it go? How much of their traditional powers are European nation states willing to abandon, and how far are they willing to go in sharing some of their most jealously guarded national secrets and prerogatives? Can Europe truly share the management of nuclear energy, in all its scientific, civilian and military applications? And if so, to what purpose? Is the ultimate goal of European integration the restoration of a Europe puissance or something else? This chapter tries to provide a historical analysis of how Europe has grappled with these crucial questions. Predictably, it concludes that the development of a common nuclear policy by the European Community (EC)/European Union (EU) has been made extremely difficult by the fact that managing the atom poses some truly fundamental questions about state power. The management of nuclear energy, in other words, epitomizes – and to a certain extent magnifies – all the aspirations, limits and contradictions of the process of European integration, both during and after the Cold War. A common European nuclear policy has often been possible only by reducing to the lowest common denominator any expectations of what may be achieved in a supranational context, or alternatively by acting outside of the EC/EU framework, as well as by resorting to a certain amount of opacity either to paper over the most substantive differences among the member states or to conceal their aspirations. By looking at what Europe was – or wasn’t – able to achieve in the nuclear field, therefore, one gets a better sense of the structural issues of the integration process.