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A member of the commission during its entire 14 years, Mansholt grew up among the dour farmer folk of the northern Dutch province of Groningen, and during World War II became a central figure in the Resistance. Tapped after the war to become Minister of Agriculture, he tired of domestic politics in the 1950s, and in 1958 was sent to Brussels as The Netherlands' member of the European Commission. There he refined "the Mansholt Plan" to phase out Europe's tiny farms and replace them with larger, more efficient units; a modified version of his proposal was passed the day after he took over as president. Within the staid EEC bureaucracy, he also developed a well-founded reputation for bumptious indiscretion. As a zealous supranationalist who advocated closer European union, he fought a number of ideological battles with France's Gaullist representatives in the early '60s. For years it had been assumed that the hostility of the French had cost Mansholt whatever chances he had of becoming president.
This time, though, he had the backing of the French, who may well have seen his election as one way of getting the commission's key agriculture portfolio for themselves. At any rate, Mansholt is certain to bring new life to meetings of the commissioners, who are appointed by their respective governments and are given more to haggling over detail than defining any vision of what the future political shape of Europe should be. Mansholt's predecessors —with the exception of Germany's Walter Hallstein, who served from 1958 to 1967—have set a pattern of weak and even meek presidents. That era is clearly over.