Gaston Thorn

Gaston Thorn: The Broker Between Two Giants

In 1943, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in occupied Luxembourg organised protests against compulsory military drills and the forced conscription of his countrymen into the German army. He spent months in a Nazi correction camp for it. Nearly forty years later the same man took the presidency of the European Commission, wedged between Roy Jenkins's ambition and Jacques Delors's, in the years when the European Community was widely thought to be failing. Gaston Thorn's whole career was spent making very small leverage go a long way.

A Liberal Family

He was born on 3 September 1928 in Luxembourg City. His father, Edouard Thorn, was a railway engineer working for the French railways — the family spent Gaston's early childhood in Strasbourg and returned to Luxembourg at the outbreak of the war — and a committed Liberal who was himself arrested for resisting Hitler's Germanisation of the Grand Duchy. The son's resistance activity, and his imprisonment, were a family inheritance as much as a personal choice.

After the war he began studying medicine at Montpellier, switched to law, and continued at Lausanne and Paris. He was called to the Luxembourg bar and began practising in 1955. He was already conspicuous in student politics, rising to the presidency of the World Conference of Students. In 1957 he married the journalist Liliane Petit; they had one son.

The Democratic Party

He entered politics in 1959 for the liberal Democratic Party, winning a seat in the Luxembourg parliament and simultaneously in the European Parliament, where he served ten years to 1969 and chaired the committee on African affairs — earning him the nickname "Gaston the African." He became party chairman in the early sixties and was an alderman of Luxembourg City from 1961 to 1963.

In 1969 Pierre Werner brought him into government as Minister of Foreign Affairs, along with the civil service and sport. He would hold the foreign affairs portfolio, in one configuration or another, until 1980.

Prime Minister

On 26 May 1974 Thorn won a general election with the highest personal vote ever recorded in Luxembourg. It was a genuine rupture: the Liberals broke seventy-five years of Christian Social dominance and ended Pierre Werner's fifteen years in office. Thorn formed a socialist-liberal coalition and served as prime minister until 1979, keeping the foreign ministry and adding economics in 1977. He presented himself, effectively, as a modern and pragmatic alternative to the old order, and he used the media well.

Foreign policy under him was cautious — Luxembourg kept a deliberately neutral line on the Arab-Israeli conflict — and Atlanticist. His formulation of the era's central awkwardness was neat: the need, as he put it, to "break out of the dilemma that one is regarded as a bad European if one is for the Alliance, and as an unreliable member of the Alliance if one is for European unity."

Across ten years he chaired the EEC Council of Ministers four times, accumulating an unrivalled working knowledge of the Community's machinery. In 1975 he was elected president of the thirtieth session of the United Nations General Assembly, where he was noted for reaching compromises by discussion and conciliation rather than confrontation.

When the Christian Socials recovered in June 1979 he stayed in government as deputy prime minister and foreign minister, adding foreign trade, economic affairs and justice.

Brussels

At the Venice European Council in June 1980 he was nominated to succeed Roy Jenkins at the head of the Commission with almost complete unanimity. France alone objected, on the grounds that Thorn was too much of a federalist and too committed to supranational power for the Community. He served from 1981 to early 1985.

The Thorn Commission inherited the worst period of the Community's middle life: the British budget rebate war, stagnation, rising national self-interest and severe economic conditions across the member states. His stated aim was greater economic, monetary and political union, and his experience of running a coalition proved directly useful in reconciling the divergent interests around the table.

The concrete results were modest and real. He got agreement on a Common Fisheries Policy — a dispute that had defeated others — and laid the groundwork for the accession of Spain and Portugal, which took effect the year after he left. He is generally credited with holding the Community together at a point when nationalism and economic distress were pulling it apart, and with preparing ground that Delors then built on.

After

In 1985 he became president of the Banque Internationale à Luxembourg, a post he held until 1999, and from 1987 chaired and directed the broadcaster RTL, later heading the media group CLT. He was president of the Liberal International and of the International European Movement, and a member of the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg conference and the Jean Monnet Committee. His decorations included the Grand Cross of the Order of Adolphe of Nassau, the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur and the Pian Order, with honorary British knighthoods in the Royal Victorian Order and the Order of St Michael and St George. He died on 26 August 2007.

Why Gaston Is Called a Genius

The claim is for a political skill rather than an intellect, and it is a specific and undervalued one: the ability to extract agreement from parties with no interest in agreeing, while representing a country with almost no weight of its own. Luxembourg gave Thorn no divisions and no economic leverage. What it gave him was the credibility of the disinterested broker, and he built an entire career on the trade — four turns chairing the EEC Council of Ministers, a UN General Assembly presidency conducted by conciliation rather than confrontation, a socialist-liberal coalition at home, and a Commission that had to keep ten quarrelling governments in one room. Contemporaries described him as a man who dealt with essential issues without becoming entangled in details, which in a body as procedurally dense as the Community was a real and rare capacity.

The counter-case is substantial. Thorn produced no doctrine, no signature treaty and no idea attached to his name; the transformative Commission presidency of that era belongs to Delors, who followed him. His own tenure is usually described in terms of survival, and its two achievements — a fisheries policy and preparatory work on Iberian enlargement — are small beside the single market. No full biography of him has been written. He was an outstanding negotiator and a competent administrator who took the chair in a bad decade and handed it on in better shape than he found it. That is a serious professional accomplishment, and it is not genius.

Legacy

He is the archetype of a distinctively Luxembourgish contribution to European politics: the small-state politician who becomes indispensable precisely because he threatens nobody. The Community he steered through the early eighties was widely written off; the one he handed to Delors in 1985 had a fisheries agreement, a settled path to Spanish and Portuguese membership, and enough cohesion left to attempt the single market. Thorn's career suggests that the useful measure of such a figure is not what he built but what failed to collapse on his watch.

Achievements

• Prime Minister of Luxembourg (1974–1979)
• President of the European Commission (1981–1985)
• ambassador
• Member of the European Parliament (1979–1979)
• Grand Cross of the Order of the Oak Crown
• Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun of Peru‎
• Grand Cross of the Military Order of Christ
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Falcon — 1969
• Educated at University of Montpellier and University of Lausanne