467 



Space-Age Europe 1 8 1 



launched satellites on homemade boosters, and dozens have partici- 

 pated in cooperative satellite programs for commercial, scientilic, and 

 technological motives. Where once international cooperation and 

 "space for peace" were universally touted, at least in rhetoric, now 

 vigorous competition obtains, not only between the United States and 

 the USSR but between the United States and its industrial allies as well. 

 Where once government arsenals monopolized spaceflight, now a 

 spectrum of institutions — public, semipublic, and private, military and 

 civilian, national, bilateral, and multinational — adapt to the demands 

 of space development, operations, and marketing. In the 1980s, the 

 surprising conclusion is that the space age, defined not only by revolu- 

 tionary technologies but also by mobilization of national resoinces for 

 the force-feeding of technological change, will be shaped in years to 

 come as much by developments in the "second tier" of European and 

 Asian states as in the Big Two. For the political history of space 

 technology has validated neither the early hopes of a "humanity united 

 in space" nor the fears of a yawning "technology gap" stemming from 

 economies of scale in the United States and the USSR to the detriment 

 of all others. This article examines, from the point of view of the 

 "others," how both these expected outcomes of the space age were 

 forestalled and why the Gaullist model, rather than the American or 

 Soviet, has come to shape the international politics of technology in the 

 space age.^ 



The wartime hero de Gaulle rose to power just eight months after 

 Sputnik 1. His mission, brooded over for twelve years, was to save 

 France. This meant military independence, without which no state was 

 truly sovereign; economic independence, without which no state was 

 master of its own house; and technological revolution, without which 

 no modern society could maintain the first two conditions. Sensing that 

 the colonial mission drained French resources and earned opprobrium 

 rather than prestige, de Gaulle liquidated imperial France. Bristling 

 under the Anglo-American "special relationship," he withdrew from 

 NATO command, blocked Britain's entry into the Gommon Market, 

 and thus proscribed an Atlanticist France. Gontemptuous of integra- 

 tion and fearful of German power, he capped progress toward a 

 European France. Needless to say, de Gaulle also abhorred the Left's 

 vision of a Socialist France. Instead, de Gaulle launched a revolution 



-Some of the ideas herein were raised in two short papers I was asked to f,'ive during the 

 early stages of my researcli on the political history of the space age: "Space- Age F.uro[)e 

 1957-1980," NASA- Yale Conference on the History of Space Activity (February 19H1 ), 

 and "I he Struggle for Space," W'lLscm Qitnrterly 4 (Autumn 1980): 6(i. 71-82. 



