Paris Summit Conference

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The Paris summit was a joint summit meeting between the USA , the USSR , Britain and France on the 16th and 17th May 1960 in the French capital Paris . As a result of the affair involving the US pilot Francis Gary Powers' espionage flight with the Lockheed U-2 , the conference failed right at the start.

background

The conference took place against the backdrop of the Cold War . The still smoldering Berlin crisis created great tensions between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. After the visit of the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to Moscow in February 1959, he made intensive efforts to organize a summit conference. Above all, he wanted to defuse the Berlin crisis and ban nuclear weapons tests. At first, Macmillan's attempts were unsuccessful. However, Nikita Khrushchev 's visit to the United States in September finally paved the way for such a summit conference. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was determined to resolve the Berlin crisis before the end of his term in office. The French President Charles de Gaulle , who initially had a bilateral meeting with Khrushchev himself in view, sought to postpone the summit conference to May or June 1960 and instead brought a 'Western summit' into play in the run-up to the conference.

The German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer , Eisenhower, de Gaulle and Macmillan therefore met in Paris from December 19 to 21, initially for a western summit, where they wanted to agree on the place, time and the negotiating strategy of the East-West summit to be followed . Adenauer, who was only invited to a few selected meetings, displayed an emphatically unyielding attitude, wanted to maintain the status quo and also opposed changes in Berlin's legal status. Above all, he spoke out against intensifying German-German contacts and also asserted domestic political reasons. However, he was unable to assert himself against his western allies, who for the most part sought an open discussion about the status of West Berlin .

In the direct run-up to the east-west summit, on May 1, 1960, the US pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by the Soviet air defense near Sverdlovsk in the Urals . The US spoke first from a pure weather observation mission of NASA , to the Soviet Union a confessed Powers and spy equipment to the world presented. US Secretary of State Christian Herter now admitted the espionage flights. On May 11, Eisenhower also publicly confessed and assumed full political responsibility for the incident, but contradicted Khrushchev's formulation of an aggressive US act.

conference

The conference began again on May 15, 1960 with an informal meeting of the three Western powers. The following day, an angry Khrushchev, accompanied by Foreign Minister Gromyko and Marshal Malinovsky , caused a scandal in an aggressive and rude manner. At the preliminary meeting of the four heads of government he demanded a public apology from Eisenhower, a punishment of those responsible for the espionage flight and a guarantee that no more U-2 flights would be approved in the future. Khrushchev also withdrew an invitation to the Soviet Union that had previously been given to Eisenhower. De Gaulle, as the host, unsuccessfully noted that France was also being monitored by Soviet satellites. Eisenhower, encouraged by de Gaulle, could not and would not give in to Khrushchev's demands and the session ended prematurely. Macmillan, who refused to accept the failure of the summit, initially unsuccessfully tried to wrest a conciliatory statement from Eisenhower. In the evening he met again with Khrushchev for a two-and-a-half hour bilateral conversation and tried, again unsuccessfully, to convince Khrushchev to give in with an emotional speech. The next day the Soviet delegation did not show up for the afternoon opening session. The three western powers then published a statement on de Gaulle's initiative, which declared the conference to be over.

consequences

The failure of the conference meant a continuation of the arms race and further political tension between the Warsaw Pact and NATO . Khrushchev came under fire in the Politburo (then called the Presidium). British Prime Minister Macmillan, who had high hopes for the summit, saw the failure of the summit as a personal defeat. A contractual regulation banning nuclear weapons tests was only reached in 1963 without France's participation. In contrast, Chancellor Adenauer was very satisfied with the outcome of the conference; Always highly suspicious of the possibility of an agreement between the Western powers and the Soviet Union at the expense of Germany, he had feared a success of the summit far more than he wished. He then said to his press officer: “Excuse me, Herr von Eckardt , if I speak the Cologne dialect now . We had one more nasty luck. ”The summit conference was also the last big meeting of the so-called“ big four ”. Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy , preferred strictly bilateral meetings with the Soviet Union; In addition, the decline in power politics in Great Britain - and gradually also in France - ensured that the four-way conferences came to an end.

literature

  • Christian Bremen: The Eisenhower administration and the second Berlin crisis, 1958–1961. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-11-016147-8 .
  • Heiner Timmermann (Ed.): 1961 - Wall building and foreign policy. LIT, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6293-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Bremen: The Eisenhower administration and the second Berlin crisis, 1958–1961. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1998, p. 442.
  2. ^ Peter Mangold : The Almost Impossible Ally. Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle. IB Tauris, London 2006, p. 131.
  3. ^ Christian Bremen: The Eisenhower administration and the second Berlin crisis, 1958–1961. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1998, p. 440 f.
  4. ^ Daniel Gossel: British, German and Europe. The German Question in British Foreign Policy 1945–1962. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, p. 214.
  5. ^ Peter Mangold: The Almost Impossible Ally. Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle. IB Tauris, London 2006, p. 132.
  6. ^ Christian Bremen: The Eisenhower administration and the second Berlin crisis, 1958–1961. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1998, p. 439.
  7. ↑ Peter Catterall: The Macmillan Diaries. Prime Minister and After, 1957-1966. Macmillan, London 2003, p. 296.
  8. ^ Daniel Gossel: British, German and Europe. The German Question in British Foreign Policy 1945–1962. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, p. 215.
  9. ^ Christian Bremen: The Eisenhower administration and the second Berlin crisis, 1958–1961. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1998, p. 515.
  10. ^ Peter Mangold: The Almost Impossible Ally. Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle. IB Tauris, London 2006, p. 135.
  11. ↑ Heiner Timmermann (Ed.): 1961 - Building the Wall and Foreign Policy. LIT, Stuttgart 2002, p. 185.
  12. ↑ Peter Catterall: The Macmillan Diaries. Prime Minister and After, 1957-1966. Macmillan, London 2003, p. 300.
  13. ^ Peter Mangold: The Almost Impossible Ally. Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle. IB Tauris, London 2006, p. 136.
  14. ^ Loss of Spy Plane Sabotaged 1960 Summit. May 16, 2005, accessed May 7, 2016 .
  15. ^ Christian Bremen: The Eisenhower administration and the second Berlin crisis, 1958–1961. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1998, p. 517.
  16. ^ Melvyn P. Leffler: For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War . Hill and Wang, New York 2007, p. 184.
  17. ^ Manfred Görtemaker : History of the Federal Republic of Germany . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 379.
  18. ^ Daniel Gossel: British, German and Europe. The German Question in British Foreign Policy 1945–1962. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, p. 215.
  19. ^ Peter Mangold: The Almost Impossible Ally. Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle. IB Tauris, London 2006, p. 138.