Le jeu de dupes… The SNECMA/General Electric Agreement or Survival and Cooperation in Aircraft Cooperation between Communitarian Tensions and Atlantic Alliance

While economists have taken interest in the relationship between market and introduction of technological innovation, our long-term analysis starts from a political-institutional approach because we aim above all to map the decision-making process. In other words, on one hand counting exclusively on the higher state authorities, namely Heads of State or Government, Cabinets and Ministers, and on the other hand disregarding the role of other centres of decision making at national level as well as at the transnational one, History of International Relations as well as History of European Integration could risk, in our opinion, to lose a meaningful part of their explanatory capabilities. Such decision-making centres are only apparently peripheric. In my researches, they have acquired more and more relevance, and especially since the second half of the 1960s. Following Tornado project, Airbus has given us the opportunity to deal with the interconnection of different "players" in the context of European construction and to revise our analysis that reinforced its validity anyway. Our research on aircraft cooperation in Europe suggests three points for developing an analysis on technological innovation as an atout of Trans-Atlantic and Intra-European competition / cooperation in aircraft production: 1°) first of all, the re-consideration of the role played in Foreign policy making process by governments, by higher state authorities engaged particularly in the "poussée technologique", i.e. in that specific process where only engineers would be able to understand the originality and the technical potentialities of their "inventions" but, anyway, without defining completely all their commercial consequences. An example is the negotiation of the SNECMA/General Electric agreement in 1971 at the origins of the present CFM International, the Franco-American consortium holding today 54% of the civil engine market in the World. This is the test case that we will analyse in this paper thanks to the White House original documentation. In our opinion, it will give some interesting suggestions particularly regarding the historiography on Trans-Atlantic relations and European construction. 2°) The point of view of firms is yet the fundamental one, above all when they are in touch with their governments, and this apart from their nature of private or state-owned enterprises. 3°) At last, relating to the innovative recent book by John Krige [American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 2006], we should like to know, on one hand, the real significance of Intra-European technological exchange, and on the other, if the US approach to control any cooperation in aircraft production was the same particularly in the 1970s, the crisis decade of US "hegemony". The SNECMA/ GE agreement is alleged to suggest a negative answer; nevertheless Washington didn't change policy towards technological leadership. Particularly as far as aeronautical technology was concerned, the USA dealt with a very favourable situation following the Second World War, which European allies tried continuously to upset. In order to preserve this privileged situation, "an astutely balanced strategy involving some sharing of US advanced technology" was necessary. The traditional way of bilateral relations could represent the ideal solution, on one hand the UK entry in the EEC, and on the other German Ost- politik could well attenuate the techno-scientific relations that were traditionally close with the USA. In February 1973, Pratt & Whitney was organising a group -Turbo Union - constituted by Rolls-Royce, MTU and Fiat for the production of a 10-ton engine in 1976. Like GE/SNECMA entente for Airbus, this new 'consortium' aimed to supply an engine to Boeing/Aeritalia 7x7, but to new Airbus too. As a consequence of this parallel rush for an agreement with European firms, the technology counselor of Nixon, William Magruder, remarked that the USA presented two giants of engine production that were competing in Europe in order to reduce to three the engine suppliers in the world. "Not a very healthy posture" considering the critical situation of the market, Magruder underlined. For this reason, the US industries asked Washington to reduce the risks of investment because [...] "Foreign governments backing of their industries puts our manufacturers at a poor bargaining vantage point during joint venture negotiations". Consequently, the Nixon administration had to decide to search in Europe for money to invest in US aeronautical firms.