A look back at Étienne Davignon’s links to Japan

Étienne Davignon, a former Belgian diplomat, EU Commissioner and industrialist died on 18 May, aged 93. In 1984, as Commission Vice President, he attended the first Commission-Japanese Government ministerial meeting, having helped negotiate an agreement on wide-ranging Japan-EEC cooperation in 1983.  He was a prominent member of the Trilateral Commission, an NGO created to foster cooperation between North America, Western Europe and Japan. 
When the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation was created in 1987, he became the co-Chair of its Supervisory Board together with Shoichi Akazawa the then JETRO President. Mr Davignon remained the Centre’s co-Chair until 2000.

In 1994, given concerns from European industry leaders and the European Commission about the lack of a structured dialogue between Europe and Japan he worked with NEC’s Chairman Sekimoto to establish a round table to “constitute a key instrument for open discussion between Japanese and European industrialists on problems where a convergence of interests or a need for in-depth examination is likely to emerge”. It would “make recommendations to Japanese and European public authorities on the selected topics; address, in addition to more general subjects, bilateral sectoral issues” and facilitate the “development of joint projects”. In 1998, the EU-Japan Industrialists’ Round Table merged with the EU-Japan Business Forum to create the EU-Japan Business Round Table (or “BRT”) which Mr Davignon co-chaired until 2005.

Mr Davignon received several orders of merit including the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, 2nd Class in 2006 for his contribution to strengthening economic ties between Japan and the European Union (the citation mentioned his former roles as EU Co-Chair of the BRT and Vice-Presidency of the Commission) and was granted the Belgian title of Count in 2017.