Notes on the Desecuritisation of the Rhineland Frontier

During the first half of the twentieth century, the river Rhine constituted the key source of insecurity between France and Germany. Contemporary observers have claimed that the river lost this role in the 1950s due to the dynamics of Franco-German rapprochement and the emergence of the European Coal and Steel Community. This article tries to complicate this story in three steps. First, it shifts attention from early European integration to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its role in the desecuritisation of the Rhine. Subsequently, it discusses the river’s loss of strategic significance in West Germany due to the particularities of post-war statehood and the country’s idiosyncratic geopolitics. Finally, the article argues that it was only the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent capacity between 1966 and 1972 that ultimately took the boundary from France’s geopolitical map.