Ruud Lubbers, Dutch statesman devoted to the European project

A few months before his death, Ruud Lubbers co-authored an article in ESB, an economics journal, titled, “Refugees are playing an ever more important role in Europe’s future”.

A mixture of heartfelt plea and reasoned economic argument for the Netherlands to accept more refugees, the article typified the intellectual courage and down-to-earth tenacity that defined his long career in politics and public life.

Lubbers, who died on February 14 at the age of 78, was the youngest and longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history, a skilful politician devoted to his nation’s economic revival and to the wider cause of European integration.

“He could be very ordinary and unassuming one moment, and be the man of the hour on the world stage the next,” wrote Bastiaan Zoeteman, an academic at Tilburg University, where Lubbers worked from 1995 to 2001 as a part-time professor of globalisation.

Along with France’s François Mitterrand, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Italy’s Giulio Andreotti and the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, Lubbers belonged to a generation of EU leaders who redesigned Europe’s political and economic structures in the 1980s and 1990s, as the cold war drew to a close. This era gave birth to the EU’s single market, the bloc’s enlargement to the east, and the European monetary union, a project agreed at a summit whose discussions Lubbers expertly chaired in December 1991 in the Dutch city of Maastricht.

In 2007, less than a decade after the euro’s launch, a rueful Lubbers confessed to doubts about the road to European political unity outlined at Maastricht. “I thought that the euro would be so successful that it would lead to political union and that it would be attractive for other states to join. This was a mistake,” he told David Marsh, chairman of the think-tank Omfif.

Lubbers was born into a wealthy industrialist’s family on May 7 1939, a year before the Luftwaffe destroyed his native city of Rotterdam in an air raid. After attending a Jesuit boarding school and studying economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Lubbers worked for the family engineering business and was active in Catholic and Christian Democratic party politics. Appointed economics minister in 1973, he replaced Dries van Agt as prime minister in 1982, presiding over three successive coalition governments until his resignation in August 1994.

Lubbers took office with the Dutch model of free-trade capitalism and a generous welfare state in crisis. “Holland is sick,” he declared. His ruthlessness in cutting public spending, especially on unemployment and disability benefits, and his focus on business deregulation earned him comparisons with Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan. “I liked Mr Lubbers, a young, practical businessman,” Mrs Thatcher recalled in her memoirs.

In truth, their differences were as great as their similarities. His motto, “more market, less government”, sounded like a Thatcher slogan. But unlike the UK premier, Lubbers invested much effort in persuading Dutch trade unions to accept his reforms. Unlike Thatcher, he was a resolute believer in European unity.

In 1995, after standing down as prime minister, Lubbers hoped to replace Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, but Kohl squashed his ambitions. The chancellor had not forgotten Lubbers’ initial misgivings about German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Lubbers was also a candidate to be Nato’s secretary-general, but the Clinton administration preferred Spain’s Javier Solana.

In 2001 Lubbers landed the big international job he craved when he was named UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Three years later an American UNHCR employee accused him of sexual harassment. Lubbers rejected the charges, but an internal UN report concluded that the allegation was substantiated and formed part of “a pattern of sexual harassment by Lubbers”. He resigned in February 2005.

Later that year, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, disputed the evidence against Lubbers, but maintained his resignation had been in the UNHCR’s best interests. The episode left Lubbers with bitter memories. Next to politics, environmentalism and amateur hockey, humanitarian aid and refugee work were his main interests.

His death was the occasion for warm tributes from the Dutch political classes and royal family, who emphasised his achievements as a statesman. “He knew how to find a solution for every problem,” said Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

Tony Barber