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Joseph Luns

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Joseph Antoine Marie Hubert Luns (Rotterdam, August 28 1911 - Brussels, July 18 2002) was a Dutch politician and secretary-general of NATO.

Joseph Luns was foreign minister of the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s. He refused to surrender western New Guinea to the Indonesian authorities until forced to do so by the Kennedy administration of the United States. He was one of the co-founders and signatories of the EU's Treaty of Rome. He blocked attempts by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer to create a "Political Union" because it would have made the fledgling EU a Franco-German codominion in his eyes. Later he became secretary-general of NATO. As such he came in conflict with the rather left-wing government of his own country, e.g. by insisting that the Netherlands install cruise missiles.

 


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