Champion of European federalism

Willy De Clercq (1927-2011).

Willy De Clercq saw two principal dynamics in modern European politics. “For years now, power has been shifting both upwards and downwards,” he said in 2004 – and, arguably, few contributed as much as he to both dynamics.

He spent the first, longer half of his political life accentuating devolution in Belgium, and the second half as a strong advocate of European policymaking, as a European commissioner (1985-89) and as a member of the European Parliament (1979-81 and 1989-2004). This was no contradiction in his eyes, for, he argued, “the more you centralise upwards, the more you have to decentralise downwards, because otherwise the gulf between the bureaucracy, the government and the people becomes unbridgeable”.

It was an attitude partly shaped by the Belgium into which he was born, in 1927. De Clercq entered politics in 1952, becoming a city councillor in Ghent at the age of 25, and found himself facing a trio of prejudices about Flemish liberals – that they were anti-church, insufficiently pro-Flemish, and representatives of the rich. Delivery from this ghetto was partly thanks to the School Pact of 1959 over religion and parental choice in school (which, he said, “brought a century-old educational battle to an end”) and partly thanks to changes he helped to make within the party.

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When he joined, the Liberals were, in his own description, 80% Francophone. “I became the ‘flamingant’, or Flemish radical, of the party”, he said in an extensive interview in 2004 (“The limits of Europe” by Frits Bolkestein and Derk Jan Eppink). “My goal was merely to redress the balance somewhat in favour of my generation.” Over time, a Flemish wing of the party emerged and then, precipitated by the student unrest of 1968, a separate, Flemish party, the PVV (Party for Freedom and Progress).

Liberals remained the third political family in Belgium, and that was enough for De Clercq to hold government office frequently. A lawyer by training (gained partly in the US), De Clercq was budget minister (1960-61 and 1966-68) and finance minister (1973-77 and 1981-85), at the forefront of liberal efforts to restrain tax rises and the growth of bureaucracy. He also played a role in trying to stop the unravelling of an early attempt at European monetary union – the ‘currency snake’ established in 1972 by the European Economic Community. Shaken by the oil crisis, the UK, Italy and France left the snake, leaving De Clercq leading efforts to prevent the snake looking, as The Economist put it, “embarrassingly German”.

In all, he served in five governments, and led the PVV into three of them. He was one of the great figures of Belgian post-war liberalism and shaped the next generation of Flemish liberals – Guy Verhofstadt, Karel De Gucht and Patrick De Wael – who led the tributes on Friday (28 October) when his death was announced.

Verhofstadt described De Clercq as his “political mentor”. De Gucht recalled how De Clercq had given him the opportunity, at the age of 26, to become an MEP, and said he felt “a great personal gratitude”.

De Clercq was well known on the European scene from the 1970s. In 1977, he was talked of as a good bet to become managing director of the International Monetary Fund, though he missed out. In 1981, when Luxembourg’s Gaston Thorn became the European Commission’s president, De Clercq became the leader of the European Liberal Democrats. His appointment in 1985 to the European Commission came as a result of Belgium’s linguistic tensions: to placate Flemish-speakers, Belgium’s francophone candidate for the European Commission, Etienne Davignon, agreed to stand aside if not selected as the Commission’s president.

De Clercq was given the post of commissioner for external affairs and trade – a position that, at the time, primarily meant trade. Hugo Paemen, the EEC’s chief negotiator during the Uruguay Round of world trade talks under De Clercq, recalls that De Clercq had a knack of being able “to reduce problems to their essentials”, and his “undiplomatic and direct approach” won him the appreciation of counterparts such as Clayton Yeutter, the then US trade representative.

“They got along very well. The two were interested in the general lines, leaving the details to technocrats,” said Paemen, who added that the good chemistry between De Clercq and Yeutter was crucial to easing transatlantic trade disputes, including disputes over subsidies to plane-makers and European restrictions on US grain exports.

In Belgium, he secured greater autonomy for Flemings and then bridged political divides through a combination of political and personal skill. At an EU level, he found it more difficult to promote federalism and to bridge divisions.

“He was the continuation of the first great generation of European politicians such as [Alcide] de Gasperi,” said Paemen, invoking Italy’s post-war Christian Democrat leader. For De Clercq’s generation, formed by the war, the European community was, as he put it, “a concept based far more on the will of statesmen than on the will of the people”, a big political tent erected so that Europe’s former combatants could gradually find a way to live and work together again.

The will of statesmen and the people needed to be reconciled. But, for many, his suggestions on how to communicate ‘Europe’ to the public were marked too much by a top-down approach. In the wake of France’s near-rejection of the Maastricht treaty in 1992, the then Commission president Jacques Delors asked De Clercq to head a team of wise men tasked with suggesting how to reduce public disaffection with the European Union. The report concluded that Europe was a “brand product” that should be marketed so that it “implicitly [evokes] the maternal, nurturing care of ‘Europa’ for all her children”. Suggestions that “newscasters and reporters must themselves be targeted…so that they subsequently become enthusiastic supporters of the cause” were enough to prompt a walk-out by journalists.

By then, De Clercq was a leading member of the European Parliament, heading the committee on external economic relations. He became a robust advocate for the Parliament, saying that it was underused as a means of connecting the people with the EU, and advocating the granting of greater powers to MEPs.

“We Europeans are not a homogenous bloc but lots of smaller blocs,” said De Clercq, and trying to find a means of ensuring the blocs could live and work together was his constant political challenge. He predicted in 2004 that Belgium was heading toward a confederation, and wanted a federal Europe to emerge. By the time he died, both were coming closer to reality.

De Clercq’s funeral will be held on Saturday (5 November) in Lochristi, in East Flanders.