Europe and Le Défi Américain: a Nonsense Question? The European Strategy for an Intergovernmental and Euro-American Techno-Industrial Cooperation

On the occasion of the launch of Eureka in July 1985, the EEC member states had chosen for their techno-scientific cooperation to move outside the framework of the EEC itself, thus according to intergovernmental arrangements. In doing so, the European negotiators, like the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Roland Dumas, had other projects in mind, symbol of the European's will of independence from the cumbersome US ally: Ariane, Airbus... and there had been others, and there would have been more. The EEC member states, though on the outside of the same EEC, did they really manage to launch a series of truly Euro-European techno-scientific and techno-industrial cooperations excluding the United States from their game? This is what we would like to clarify starting right from the debate on the technological gap, increased in the second half of the 1960s, and mediatically exploded in 1967 with the famous pamphlet Le défi américain written by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. In posing this question, what is really interesting, at least according to my approach, is attempting to situate how much the governments or more precisely the different national decision making processes ended up choosing. Otherwise are not we risking to reconstruct a reliable picture of some interesting "reflections", yet forgetting at the same time what had actually been decided? Each reflection, project, proposal, cannot be anchored in a contest which itself may well influence but, from which they cannot receive stimuli and "suggestions"... How and when the choice was made just in the 1970s - and not only by governments, but with the participation of a group of actors, and the intersection of several levels of national interests - the aeronautical industry can show it synthetically, clarifying some shady areas of the difficult, if not obscure, relationship between technology and European construction. It is only a matter of explaining why the aeronautical cooperation was first of all voluntarily kept out of the EEC management, and afterwards how such cooperation was not developed outside the EEC, but was not even meant to be intra-European. All the members of the Community of Nine wanted it to be a Euro-American cooperation, as we believe it will help to understand the Italo-American agreement Aeritalia/Boeing at the base of the success of Aeritalia/Finmeccanica and the contemporary French-American agreement SNECMA (National Company for the Design and Construction of Aviation Engines)/General Electric at the origins of the current leader of aircraft engines CFM International. We will present the debate on the technological gap, the common national strategies for the survival of a national aeronautical industry, finally beyond the projects of the 1970s for a Community solution, the decision of governments to proceed on the intergovernmental path outside the EEC.