But it would be wrong to reduce de Gaulle’s interventions to pure showmanship. He did not succeed in ending the Cold War, or reshaping the world order, or creating a ‘political Europe’, but many of the questions he posed and the issues he tried to address – how to create ‘Europe’, the problem of European defence, how to plan for a post-Cold War order – were genuine ones. It is true that his vision of the future of Europe looked more like the Europe of 1914 than the Europe in which we live today – but his intuition that a European project built by technocrats would have difficulty in creating a
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