Sicco Mansholt

Sicco Leendert Mansholt (born September 13, 1908 in Ulrum , † June 29, 1995 in Wapserveen, today to Westerveld ) was a Dutch politician . He was President of the European Commission .

Sicco Mansholt (1946)

Life

Sicco Mansholt came from a large farming family from Groningen who were socially democratic . Mansholt attended the “Tropical Agricultural School” in Deventer , where he trained as a tobacco grower. He then studied agricultural science and worked from 1929 to 1931 as an assistant at an agricultural institute.

In 1934 he moved to Java to work as a civil servant on a tea plantation. As the colonial system depressed him, he returned to the Netherlands in 1936. He wanted to be a farmer and settled in 1937 on the since 1934 taken in culture Wieringermeer - Polder , where he ran a farm.

He became a member of the Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij (SDAP), became secretary of the local SDAP chapter and also held various other public functions, including that of the mayor of Wieringermeer. During the Second World War he was active in the resistance against National Socialism . Mansholt not only hid people in hiding in the Wieringermeer polder, he also organized the secret food supply for the western provinces of the Netherlands. After the end of the German occupation, Mansholt briefly held the mayor's office in Wieringermeer.

Immediately after the war, in June 1945, Prime Minister Willem Schermerhorn from the PvdA brought him into his cabinet as Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Supply, where he was the youngest minister at the age of 36.

He was a member of six governments:

• Schermerhorn-Drees cabinet (1945)
• Cabinet Beel 1 (1946)
• Drees-Van Schaik cabinet (1948)
• Cabinet Drees 1 (1951)
• Cabinet Drees 2 (1952)
• Cabinet Drees 3 (1956)

Under Mansholt, the Ministry of Agriculture in the Netherlands was given a position of power that it had in no other European country. He put Dutch agriculture on a modernization, refinement and export course, which it continues to this day. In addition, Mansholt was considered one of the most important politicians of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands. In 1950 he presented the " Mansholt Plan " to the European governments , an agricultural policy equivalent to the Schuman Plan , which, however, was rejected by most governments and never implemented.

Sicco Mansholt (1967)

In 1958 he became one of the commissioners of the newly formed European Commission and, in this position too, dealt primarily with agricultural policy. He transferred his concepts applied in the Netherlands to pan-European agriculture. A plan presented in 1960 to integrate European agriculture on a large scale and to set uniform prices for its products, however, met with widespread opposition due to fears that an agricultural cartel would emerge. However, these ideas were partly taken up in the negotiations for further integration of the EEC at the beginning of 1962. At the end of 1968 he presented a plan (Mansholt Plan) that aimed to rationalize European agriculture and bring it up to the world market by reducing the number and increasing the area of ​​farms.

Mansholt was Vice President of the EEC Commission since 1958. After the transition of the EEC to the EC Mansholt was Vice President of the EC Commission and was President of the European Commission for seven months in 1972 and 1973 . During this time he was heavily influenced by the Club of Rome and he had an extramarital relationship with Petra Kelly . In 1974 he became deputy party chairman in the Federation of Social Democratic Parties of the European Community .

Web links

Commons : Sicco Mansholt  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Sicco L. Mansholt in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Sicco Mansholt in portrait (European Commission)
• Literature by and about Sicco Mansholt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Files on Sicco Mansholt's work in the Commission of the European Communities and on the “Mansholt Plan” can be found in the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence

literature

• Johan van Merriënboer: Mansholt: A biography , Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011, ISBN 978-90-5201-757-0
• Frank Westermann: Das Getreideparadies , Berlin: CHLinks, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-550-8

Individual evidence

1. ^ European Commission: Sicco Mansholt - farmer, resistance fighter and a true European . In: European Union website . (PDF, 152 kB)
2. ↑ The old man and the girl . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1992 ( online ).