Max van der Stoel: A life in the service of mankind

Abstract

In the steady flow of sorrowful responses to the news of the death of Max van der Stoel earlier this year, four words regularly occupied an important position: idealism, dedication, integrity and modesty. These same words describe precisely my personal experience and observations of Max during his full life in Dutch politics, as a diplomat, in senior international positions and as a Minister of State. As a result of our highly divergent careers and probably also due to our considerable age difference, in our day-to-day life, our paths crossed considerably less often than would perhaps be expected. On those occasions when it did happen, however, we generally required few words to confirm the high degree of consensus and like-mindedness between us. In the early nineteen sixties — a period when Max was already a member of the Dutch Upper Chamber and for some time had been associated with the research institute for the Dutch Labour Party (the Wiardi Beckman Stichting) based in Amsterdam’s Tesselschadestraat — I occasionally saw him walking down the road, sometimes together with Joop den Uyl, eating his lunchtime sandwich or an apple, from a plastic sandwich bag. I had recently started work nearby in the Vondelstraat, as a young policy worker of the construction union of the Dutch Trade Union Congress (NVV), and would often spend my lunchtime in the same way. In other words, as young men, we were both employed with a branch of what at the time was still known as ‘the Red Family’; the branches in question, however, were separated by a considerable gulf. Furthermore, Max was already clearly in the process of establishing a position for himself; I, on the other hand, was fresh to the job. It would be more than ten more years before my career elevated me to chairmanship of the NVV, later the FNV, and as a natural extension thereof, also of the European trade union movement. During that same period, Max occupied a number of important Cabinet positions — twice Minister and once Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs — and, as a member of the Dutch Lower and Upper Chamber established a wealth of parliamentary experience. When I first entered the Dutch Lower Chamber as an elected people’s representative, in 1986, Max had moved away from The Hague several years previously, to take up the position of Dutch ambassador to the United Nations. It was however specifically in his capacity as UN ambassador that I came to know Max more intimately. As chairman of the FNV, I was invited to join an international commission whose role was to issue proposals for the drawing up of a code of conduct for multinational companies. My work took me to New York