28/4/2006
Pascal Lamy: Determination at work by Anthony Pouliquen

Last week Pascal Lamy, the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, announced the April deadline for the members to secure a groundbreaking deal for free trade had obviously been missed. However, to him there was no need to “cry over the missed deadline”, a determined attitude which pervades his whole career at the top of French and European business and politics.

A fervent socialist and liberal, he was appointed in 2005 for a four-year term as the fifth Director-General of the WTO, after two other candidates, one from Brazil and one from Mauritius, had dropped out. He faced the uphill task of persuading WTO members to reach agreements on a range of thorny issues in time for the planned WTO ministerial summit in Hong Kong last December, but did no better than his predecessors (Supachai Panitchpakdi at Cancún in 2003 and Mike Moore at Seattle in 1999) when trying to break the Doha negotiations deadlock.

Now his main challenge is to achieve the new late July deadline for the Doha round. "What we need is more determination and clearer sense of purpose," he said last week, two principles which have so far led his way to the top.

Born on 8 April 1947 in Levallois-Perret near Paris, he is a bright graduate of France's leading business school, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), the Paris Institute of Political Studies ("Sciences Po") and the ENA civil service college (Ecole Nationale d'Administration). High academic achievement (he came second in his year when specialising in economics at the ENA) and determination brought him right into the French civil service.

He then became an adviser to Jacques Delors as Economics and Finance Minister and Pierre Mauroy as Prime Minister in the French 1980s Socialist government of late President Mitterrand.

When Delors became President of the European Commission in 1984, he took Lamy with him to serve as chief of staff, which he did until the end of Delors's term in 1994, representing him in the G7, participating in the steering committee of the French Socialist Party and acquiring economic leadership skills which would help him with his further career moves. At about the same time he ended his commitments with the Board of Directors of the EastWest Institute, an independent, non-profit organisation formerly set twenty years ago to reduce the hostile effects of the Cold War, and which is now aimed at reducing tensions from Eurasia to the trans-Atlantic region using private and public sector leaders.

Later Lamy entered the Crédit Lyonnais banking company, where he achieved second in command in just five years (from 1994 to 1999), helping to restructure and privatise the bank. He eventually reached the seat of Director-General in 1999, but left in the same year to find himself at the centre of European economic negotiations as the new EU Trade Commissioner of the 1999-2004 commission presided by Romano Prodi.

As soon as he took up office as Member of the Commission, he left positions on the boards of half a dozen French, European and transatlantic committees and focused on defending EU farm subsidies against criticism from developing nations.

After his mandate in Brussels, and during a short-lived “sabbatical” period, Pascal Lamy became the President of Notre Europe in December 2004. Notre Europe is a research and policy planning group set up by Jacques Delors in 1996 and which defines itself as a “think tank on European integration”. Besides his duties as one of the highest leaders in international economics, he is also a member of the French board of the European Movement (a cross-party organisation advocating increased pan-European co-operation and founded by Churchill in 1948), and a member of the board and treasurer of a think tank gathering the most powerful members of the French media and powers-that-be, Le Siècle.

A fervent advocate of multilateralism and “controlled globalisation”, he has so far received honours coming from France, Germany, Luxemburg, Gabon, Belgium, Mexico and Chili.