Questions for Mansholt's Biographer

INTRODUCTION Questions for Mansholt’s biographer For the Dutch, Mansholt is not just a name but a symbol – a symbol of agriculture, Europe, socialism and environmental awareness. Behind the symbol stands the man Sicco Leendert Mansholt, who died in 1995 at the age of 86. Many people remember Mansholt as the European administrator whose plans for agriculture destroyed millions of small farms, forcing European farmers to increase the scale of their operations and ruining the landscape. Others see him as the creator of the disastrous common agricultural policy emanating from Brussels that costs Europe- an citizens a fortune in return for a steadily growing butter mountain and wine lake. Some point out that Mansholt changed his ways in later life and became a supporter of small-scale organic farming. Others mention the little-known fact that he once had an affair with Petra Kelly, one of the founders of the German Green Party. Many Dutch pensioners remember Mansholt as one of the big names of the post-war reconstruction era in the Netherlands: as minister of Agriculture, Fishery and Food Distribution in the first Dutch cabinet after the end of the war, he was responsible for ensuring that people had enough to eat in that time of shortages and disruption. A few of them still retain a mental image of him as a tall, self-assured man with a round bald head, formulating his ideas carefully and slowly in a slight Gro- ningen accent. He is still regarded in his own party, the Partij van de Arbeid (Dutch Labour Party), as one of their great figures. Residents of the Wieringermeer district in the province of Noord-Holland know him as one of the pioneers of the Wieringermeer polder, created in the 1930s. In Groningen finally, the Dutch province in which he was born, Mans- holt is a hero who did not have a statue to commemorate him until recently, though his likeness does appear on a number of postage stamps. In fact, a statue of Mansholt made by the local artist Marten Grupstra was unveiled by Gerda Verburg, the minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, and Mansholt’s daughter Theda Aghina in Blauwestad, a new town in the east of Groningen, on Saturday 13 September 2008 – the centenary of his birth. This event was part of a year of celebrations organized to mark “100 years of Sicco Mansholt”. I have been informed that the appearance of the Dutch version of this 13 Mansholt, a biography biography was the key factor that sparked the decision to create this statue. What kind of a story can a biographer weave around these isolated facts? I would like to start off with a number of introductory remarks in this connection, with reference to the following eight questions. 1. Is the person in question worth a book? This is a question that eve- ry biographer should start by asking. In the case of Sicco Mansholt, the answer must be “yes”. He was minister of Agriculture, Fishery and Food Distribution in six successive Dutch cabinets, from June 1945 to De- cember 1957, Vice-President of the European Commission and Com- missioner for Agriculture from January 1958 to March 1972 and then President of the Commission till December 1972. He is recognized as the initiator of the European common agricultural policy, and one of the founding fathers of the European Union. Mansholt’s Dutch legacy alone is probably enough to justify a biography. He was an active member of the Resistance during the Second World War. He organized food distribution for illegal workers and was involved in the dropping of supplies and the clandestine transport of weapons. But it is his European legacy above all that deserves to be commemorated. After having set his stamp on agricultural developments in his native country for twelve and a half years, he continued to do the same in the six Member States of the EEC – France, Italy, Western Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – for the next fifteen. He assisted at the birth of the European Union. Economic inte- gration demanded continual political struggle. Mansholt left his own distinctive marks in this struggle at Brussels between 1958 and 1973. Certain other aspects of Mansholt’s life are also grist to the biographer’s mill. I will mention three examples here. Firstly, Mansholt was a farmer and a socialist – an unusual combination. How did he manage to combine these two facets of his personality? Secondly, he went to the Dutch East Indies in 1934 to start a life as a tea planter but returned to the Netherlands two years later, disillusioned with colonial capitalism. At the end of the ‘forties, however, as a Dutch government minister he shared the collective responsibility for his country’s repressive colonial war against Indonesia. Thirty years later, he regarded this as the blackest page of his whole political career. What had happened in the intervening years? And finally, at the end of his political career, Mansholt under- went a remarkable change of course, from strong proponent of socialist planning to a believer in environmental protection and a prophet of zero growth. Why? 14 Introduction 2. What sparked my interest in Mansholt? In 1991, I wrote the chapter on agriculture in a book on the Dutch cabinet headed by Willem Drees of the PvdA and J.R.H. (Josef) van Schaik of the KVP, which lasted from 1948 to 1951. This book was a publication of the Centre for Dutch Parliamentary History (Dutch abbreviation CPG) in Nijmegen. Ex-minister Mansholt was one of the people who read the book. In a brief comment on this contribution, he expressed his admiration for the members of the Tweede Kamer (the House of Representatives of the Dutch parliament) from that post-war period who, he wrote, were still “firmly rooted in society… They were true representatives of the people; compared with them, most present-day parliamentarians are a mere shadow of the past …”1 This chapter devoted considerable space to a portrait of Mansholt as a minister in the above-mentioned cabinet. After this first taste of “Mansholt the man,” I started to collect more material about him, and in late 1992 I asked him whether I could come and talk to him about the possibility of writing a political biography of him that would take the form of a doctoral thesis. He replied promptly, writing: You would of course be very welcome to come and discuss the possibility of writing a political biography of me. I must however make it clear right from the start that the amount of time and effort I myself could devote to this project would be limited. I have often been asked to write an autobiog- raphy, but I have always refused. I have not kept any records that could be used as a basis for such a work, and I have so far never spent much time looking back at the past. All my attention is still concentrated on problems of the future and I hope that my health will allow me to continue to do so. He drew my attention to the book La crise (The crisis), a published collection of interviews with the French journalist Janine Delaunay that explored his life and his vision of the future. The crisis referred to in the title was the ecological crisis due to unbridled economic growth and population expansion predicted in the report of the Club of Rome in the early ‘seventies. It has been translated not only into Dutch but also into German, Spanish and even Japanese, and certain passages are available in English on the website www.ena.lu – a very useful source of information about the history of the European Community. Mansholt himself added much useful information not present in the original French version to the Dutch and German versions of La crise, entitled De crisis and Die Krise respectively. It is for this reason that De Crisis has been used as the source of quotations for the present biography, since it contains much relevant information not to be found in La Crise. 1 Letter from Mansholt to the author, 20 Sept. 1991. 15 Mansholt, a biography Mansholt also had dozens of scrap-books at home with cuttings that his wife had collected, stacks of material that he made use of in speeches and a few cardboard boxes full of papers that he had taken with him from Brussels (“unsorted, tied together in bundles”). After 1973, he had devoted much of his energy to plans for agricultural reform and “argu- ments for an economics of sufficiency”. He concluded with the state- ment: “I am writing you all this to give you an impression of the chaos you will encounter among my papers, so that you can prepare yourself to deal with the problems that will face you if you embark on the planned political biography.”2 I visited him at home in Wapserveen in the Dutch province of Drenthe on 16 March 1993. Mansholt and his wife lived in a huge old farm- house, tastefully converted for residential purposes and no longer used as a farm. My first impression on meeting him was that here was an old farmer, worn out by half a century’s intensive labour on the land. He was tall, and he had charisma, but he found walking – and sometimes even talking – difficult. Mansholt was 84 years old at the time, and he told me that he had had a stroke eight years before and a more recent relapse in his condition.

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