"I was told that I look like Churchill and speak English like Charles Boyer," Paul-Henri Spaak once said. "Of course, I would rather speak English like Churchill and look like Charles Boyer." With 230 lbs. on his six-foot frame, Spaak could hardly pass for Boyer. And for all his oratorical gifts, he would never be confused with Sir Winston. Yet for 34 years, he was a power in Europe. He was Foreign Minister of Belgium six times, and twice the nation's Premier. Spaak in fact, was bigger than the tiny country in which he was born. For the past 20 years, he was best known as "Mr. Europe."
Spaak spent his life fighting nationalism, which to him was an evil that had divided Europe for centuries. When he resigned from the Belgian Parliament last week, Europe lost its greatest practicing internationalist.
Red Flag & Tennis. Born near Brussels in 1899, Spaak was the son of a writer and director of the Brussels opera; his mother was the first woman to become a Belgian senator. He was always something of a political contradiction. Entering Parliament in 1932 as a radical Socialist, he thought nothing of spending a day waving a red flag at a Socialist demonstration, and then retiring to the tennis court or the plush comfort of Brussels' exclusive Leopold Club.
As a Socialist, he was a pacifist. But he was also tough. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, the German ambassador called on Foreign Minister Spaak to read a statement from Hitler. The German never got a chance to speak. "My turn first, Mr. Ambassador," said Spaak, before he threw the German out. Escaping from the Wehrmacht, Spaak spent the war in London as Foreign Minister of the Belgian government-in-exile.
"I am convinced that the future belongs to the great human communities," he once said. "Europe is one of these communities." To try to make it so, Spaak made his weight felt in every major international endeavor since World War II. He helped write the United Nations Charter in 1945 and was the first president of the U.N. General Assembly. He presided over the Council of Europe, headed the final negotiations that led to the European Common Market. And, for all his pacifism, he was secretary-general of NATO from 1957 to 1961.
"Fear of You." NATO, in fact, became his passion. So great was his distrust of Russia's postwar ambitions that in 1948 he bluntly told Andrei Vishinsky that Belgium's foreign policy was based on fear: "Fear of you, fear of your government, fear of your policy." NATO, he decided, was Western Europe's only chance. Spaak saw the Atlantic Alliance as much more than military: "NATO must also be the political center of the West. It serves no purpose to make a purely military alliance if we have not learned to live together in peace."
Spaak's dream of a true European community has not come true. But Mr. Europe has not given up hope yet. He plans to leave Belgium and install himself on the Côte d'Azur, where he can pamper his painful gout and at the same time finish his memoirs. "Luxury, today, is solitude and silence," he said last week. To which the Brussels news paper La Libre Belgique had a typically Spaakian reply. "Solitude, maybe," said the paper. "But silence? We doubt it."