“We went off like a watering can.” Not often a minister will have admitted his own decline in this way and so openly. But Hans van den Broek (CDA), who died on Saturday at the age of 88, did it in 1991 after a deliberation in Brussels with his European Foreign Colleagues. He had just undergone an unprecedented humiliation there. An ambitious Dutch design for another administrative design of the then only twelve countries of European Union was swept off the table a few hours before. Only Belgium had supported rotating EU chairman of the Netherlands. The fiasco would go down in history as ‘Black Monday’.
Hans van den Broek, the second -long -sitting Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs in history, could not even be charged the ECHEC personally. Perhaps that is precisely why his frustration. The preparatory work for the radical change of the European game rules, intended to translate the further integration such as the arrival of the euro into European decision -making procedures, were mainly done by his State Secretary for European Affairs Piet Dankert (PvdA) and the ever -conscient ‘ Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers (CDA).
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Balkan crisis
At that time, Van den Broek himself was a member of the ‘European Troika’ almost day and night with the increasingly fierce civil war in Yugoslavia on the eastern border of Europe. Incidentally, Van den Broek also had to experience in that Balkan crisis that the players other than he were who determined the game. Germany and France set out their own course outside the European three -foam and therefore the Dutch minister.
They had been disturbed by Van den Broeks little diplomatic treatment of the protagonists in the Balkan conflict: horse thieves and robbers. The irritation at Van den Broek about his place along the sidelines charged the relationship with his German fellow colleague Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
As a minister in the first Lubbers cabinet, Van den Broek was fully confronted with the loaded cruise missile debate
Initially, Van den Broek, as minister in the first Lubbers cabinet, had to deal with the loaded cruise missile debate. According to the Up-and-Top Atlantic (“The Belly speaker of Washington”, the Belgian politician Willy Claes once called him) in this case too much outside of him was operated on and based on purely domestic political considerations. It is up to him to explain the often inimitable discussion with his countless ‘solution variants’ to the foreign colleagues. He did it with visible reluctance.
Battle with Prime Minister Lubbers
Van den Broek was a straightforward thinker and loyalty executor of the Atlantic doctrine-to summarize with the words ‘We-Volgen-de-Americans’-as it was adhered to by the official Top of Foreign Affairs in the Cold War. The super -fast and spectacular collapse of the communist regimes in the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s were no reason for him to philosophize with his legs on the table about the ‘new world order’. The week after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Van den Broek argued in the Council of Ministers for ‘constructive vigilance’. He swore with Ankers.
Van den Broek also troubled his straightforwardness in 1986 when awarding the Erasmus Prize to the Czechoslovak human rights activist Václav Havel. He had great difficulty with the lecture because he feared that the royal family would be involved in a political case. Prince Bernhard was Regent of the foundation that awarded the prize. Van Broek personally ensured that the thanking speech of the later President Havel was not too political-controversial.
At the same time, he fought with Prime Minister Lubbers. Feeling not heard was a constant in the ten -year career of Hans van den Broek, who started in 1982 as Minister of Foreign Affairs. To his annoyance, which he does not hide, he saw that European and foreign politics more and more chefsache became. His persistent competence peels with Lubbers ran high so that Lubbers even considered stopping as Prime Minister in 1992.
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Palestinian case
Another solution was found: Van den Broek left the third Lubbers cabinet in 1993 to succeed his party colleague Frans Andriessen as European Commissioner. There, with the portfolio of external relations, he again had a lot to do with the swirling Balkans. “The man who came to Brussels as an Atlanticus, with verve, promoted the importance of an independent place of the European Union in the world order,” Write Anjo Harryvan and Jan van der Harst in a collection of Dutch Euro Commissioners published in 2010. Files were holding in Brussels. “Unlike his predecessor Andriessen, spectacle and improvisation power simply did not give him,” said both authors.
The lawyer Hans van den Broek and former director at Enka (part of Akzo) was not destined for abroad as a politician. He was in front of the Catholic People’s Party (KVP), one of the precursors of the CDA, in the Rheden municipal council and came to the Lower House in 1976. There, the man who had been a blue Monday lawyer in Rotterdam focused on justice matters. The KVP top was tipped over Van den Broek by the influential former party leader Norbert Schmelzer. As a commissioner at Akzo van den Broek, he had experienced it when he was involved as an executive secretary in the negotiations to release the kidnapped factory director Tiede Herrema in Ireland in Ireland.
Van den Broek was appointed as Minister of State in 2005. Like other politicians who had always stood right behind Israel in their active period, he was concerned about the Palestinian cause and was critical of the “illegal settlement policy” of Israel. “It’s about justice,” he said in 2005 in an interview with it Reformational newspaper.