Jan Huijgen

Last week it was the hundred year after the birthday of Sicco Mansholt, the founder of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. I was at this celebration in the province of Groningen. A lot of people attend this meeting and the remembrance of his life and work was very inspiring.
We received a journal at that meeting – EuroChoices – and this number was about the 50 year of Common Agricultural Policy – from Mansholt to Fischer Boel. Several articles analysed the development of the Agricultural policy with all the reform proposals in the time. Now the Health check is announced and just after our EEConference this will be officially published.

In one of the articles the Guest editorial David R.Stead of the University of Dublin, analysed the role of the conference at Stresa for the CAP. His emphasis is on the role of Mansholt in formulating the ambition of the policy agenda and what het called ‘the unusually positive atmosphere …in a European spirit’. ‘the delegates were generally eager to avoid nationalistic defensiveness and negativity and instead search for common ground’.

In the literature an article of M.Tracy (1994) is picked up called ‘The spirit of Stresa’.

I think this is an important point. People can make the difference and that difference is dependent on ‘the spirit’ of people. Is there a positive spirit, than a lot of energy can be created and a movement with a common agenda can be put on place. When it is negative, the opposite is happening.

It is therefore important to find the Very Inspiring Persons (VIP’s) for yourself. For me I have for this time 4 VIP’s in mind. Mansholt and de former secretary general of the United Nations – Dag Hammerskjold – are two of them. The others you can read in the book Cityside Oasis, which will be published on the EEconference.

What I experienced in this persons is the visionary and inner growth and strength which is very powerfull on the places where these two men were placed. They made the difference in the policy agenda, one in agriculture, the other in the peace keeping process of the World.

We are now in the preparation of the EEconference busy with all kind of organisational and programmatic issues. But the most important thing will be the ‘spirit of Bunschoten’ which vitalize the European Versatile Countryside movement. Can we learned the lesson of Stresa, do we indeed have a new common goal which is attractive beyond all the differences we experience as European?

For me this point will be with me during the coming weeks up to the Conference and how to explicate this dimension of spirit on the Conference itself.

I hope that more people become involved in this concern and intriguing facet of human life.

Jan Huijgen