Internationalist who witnessed birth of the EU By Christoph Bertram Published: August 4 2005 03:00 | Last updated: August 4 2005 03:00 François Duchêne, who has died at the age of 78, played a crucial role in launching what was to become, half a century later, the European Union. He will also be remembered by his colleagues at the International Institute for Strategic Studies which he ran from 1969 to 1974 and by the teachers and students at Sussex University, where he became a professor and director of the Centre for European Research. Being present at the creation of Europe's extraordinary experiment in integration was probably the most formative moment in his career. As a young journalist on what was then the Manchester Guardian, Duchêne caught the eye of Jean Monnet, the "Father of Europe", who invited him in 1952 to help set up the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union. It was here that Duchêne became part of a coterie of enthusiastic Europeans, all convinced of the need for a new and different European future. He was later to honour Monnet by writing the definitive biography of this remarkable personality: Jean Monnet -The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York and London, 1994). The European experiment meant more for Duchêne than just reconciling the old continent with itself. For him it was also a model for a globalised, interdependent world, and he hoped that others would follow in Monnet's footsteps. "The European Union", he wrote, "is the rarest of all phenomena in history, a studied change of regime. It is the reverse of conquest and quite distinct from both incremental adjustment, which is the political norm, and from revolution, which is the social equivalent of an earthquake." It was with the vision of such a new international order that he took over as director, in 1969, of the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, a name to which he quickly added International, as the IISS is still known today. But the cold war with its ability to freeze history into a barren place of threats and missiles had no place for "a studied change of regime", and Duchêne returned to work on and for Europe as a professor at Sussex University. He never doubted that the age of interdependence would require much of what the EU had shown to be possible and rightly felt confirmed in this conviction when the cold war ended. Internationalism was with him from the cradle.The son of a French mother and a Swiss father, he was educated at St. Paul's School and at the London School of Economics but he grew up bilingual. He lived in the palatial surroundings of the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly where his father was manager. It took some adjustment later. When as a young man in the Guardian canteen he found a menu which read "Soup, Fish, Meat, Pudding" he asked the waitress: "What's the fish?" She replied: "Fried, dear." Yet he never wanted to settle anywhere than in England. Straddling, as he did, two cultures and two languages, he had a special sense for the richness and subtleties of the English language, and English poetry became a life-long passion. His tribute to W.H. Auden - The Case of the HelmetedAirman - was published in 1972. He was a lovely man to be with: endowed of a cheerful, never biting sense of humour and erudite yet never condescending. He was married to Anne Purves, a fellow journalist he met at the Guardian, who died in 1997. He is survived by their daughter, the actress Kate Duchêne. Christoph Bertram who succeeded François Duchêne at the IISS now heads the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d645c41a-0484-11da-a775-00000e2511c8.html
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12hrpcdth/M=362329.6886306.7839369.3040540/D=groups/S=1705239633:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1123576777/A=2894321/R=0/SIG=11dvsfulr/*http://youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=1992 ">Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back!</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *** sustineti [romania_eu_list] prin 1% din impozitul pe 2005 - detalii la http://www.europe.org.ro/euroatlantic_club/unulasuta.php *** Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/romania_eu_list/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
