The European search for aeronautical technologies, and technological survival by co-operation in the 1960s-1970s: with or without the Americans? Steps, ways, and hypothesis in international history

Did European aircraft firms have the occasion “to overtake” the US “incumbents”, the US leaders in aeronautical market, and when? The launch and the survival of “Airbus operation” would suggest in the 1960s-1970s... but EEC Members, did they have really a serious willing to challenge the USA by cooperating, and by cooperating exclusively at European level, by an “intra-European” cooperation? We would propose to suggest an answer by reconstructing the attempts, or better the reflexions and the debate developed since the end of the 1960s and up to the first half of the 1970s around a sort of “European Air Space” to be organised by coordinating “communitarian” co-production of aircraft and engines. This analysis will be the occasion to present our research approach based on the interconnection of government and more rarely firms documents from French, British, US, Italian and Spanish Archives, and EEC institutions, and aiming to cross from a transnational point of view different histories, and particularly history of International Relations, history of European Integration and history of technology . In our researches, we have stressed the relevance of the different national decision making processes in their action at transnational level, and specifically the role of “experts”, not only technical experts, and not only engineers . We translate “experts” in the more large signification: firms’ representatives, civil servants, diplomats, military personnel, high military authorities, industrial, scientific or technical advisers to chiefs of State or government, ministers or politicians engaged in scientific-technical policies or lobbying, Prime ministers and chiefs of State who could be, and when they have to be particularly interested to technological innovation . We would attempt to insert our researches in, and we believe that our approach could be next to works aiming to interconnect history of international relations and technology as a means of State power , or more specifically the technological innovation as a diplomatic “tool” to confirm or to affirm a leadership, a political but also a commercial and economic leadership, as well as a “cultural” leadership. Then technological and commercial control applied in the international dimension can suggest new or different views for the historiography on Cold War, or on European integration process . First of all, inside transatlantic relations, the use and the control of technology can enlighten the origins and the development of a sort of transatlantic competition. As concern the European construction, historiography on European integration has paid little attention to technology, and particularly to technological cooperation between EEC members as well as a possible common policy on R&D or on a particular technological field . First of all, analyzing technology in Europe from a transnational point of view, or technological cooperation of European countries since the Second World War - and regarding some fields just before the end of the War - this analyze can enlighten how European construction process follows not exclusively the institutional way represented by the EEC evolution. At the contrary, we are able to reconstruct several and durable examples of intergovernmental cooperation which concurred to manage, to organize the relations among European countries. Then the techno-industrial faces of the relationship with the USA searched since the end of the 1960s by all European western countries can enlighten in one hand the degree of the actual intra-Atlantic competition, and then the level of the Euro-American one, in the other hand the real will of the European countries to cooperate each other, namely without the American participation, and then to compete at techno-commercial level with the USA. On the contrary, it would be possible to enlighten the strategy followed by all the most relevant aircraft producers in western European countries to obtain the best technology at the time, at the best price and with the best market perspectives in the world, i.e. the American technology. By this way, not only Italy and Nederland, but France, UK and FRG too tried to secure the survival of an aircraft industry at National level thanks to the innovative capabilities of US technology characterized by less R&D costs and major sharing of the world market. In conclusion, in the first half of the 1970s, the most relevantly engaged in aircraft production among EEC members, i.e. Great-Britain, France and Federal Republic of Germany decided that aircraft cooperation in Europe had to be firstly an intergovernmental cooperation and secondly an Euro-American cooperation. This would mean that they had to cooperate outside EEC framework, i.e. completely free from EEC rules, but also completely free each other in concluding agreements with the USA besides an eventual European or “Communitarian solidarity”, and last but not least completely free to sell and/or to propose a techno-industrial re-production or cooperation to “socialist” countries as well as to “communist” China , and in this case by challenging US technological, commercial and diplomatic supremacy at global level.