Herman van rompuy biography examples
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Interview with Mr. Herman Van Rompuy
The EU Today and Its Future
With the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) after World War II, the unification of europe evolved from the europeisk Economic Community (EEC) into the europeisk Union (EU). The number of EU member countries has expanded to 28, and the EU has overcome various difficulties over its long history. However, recently there has been a growing pessimistic view of the EU through the Euro crisis, with anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments. In this environment, we’ve invited Mr. Herman Van Rompuy, former President of the europeisk Council and former Prime Minister of Belgium to talk about the EU today and its future.
Mr. Herman Van Rompuy
Herman Van Rompuy was elected as the first full-time President of the europeisk Council in November 2009. In 2012, he was re-elected for a second term starting on 1 June 2012 and running until 30 November 2014. At the time of his first election, Her
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Honorary Doctors
Belgian politician Herman Van Rompuy was born on 31 October, 1947, in Etterbeck.
In 1965 he graduated from the Jesuit College of St Jan Berhmans in Brussels and then studied philosophy and economics at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1968 and a master's in economics in 1971.
In 1972-75 he worked at the Central Bank of Belgium. In 1975-78, he was an adviser to Prime Minister Leo Tindemans, then headed the Centre for Political, Economic and Social Studies (1980- 1988). Those years he worked as a teacher at several educational institutions.
Author of six books on politics and economics.
Van Rompuy's political career is linked to the Christian Democrats and Flemish Party, of which he was a member since 1975. Chairman of the party from 1988 to 1993.
Member of the Senate from 1988 to 1995. In 1995, he was elected to the Belgian House of Representatives. President of the House of Representatives in 2007-2008.
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Haiku has been called the original Twitter, treating the vicissitudes of life in seventeen syllables: “Wrapped in my work; / all the while the wheat is growing / ever taller.” The author of that poem is Herman Van Rompuy, the former Belgian Prime Minister, who now leads the European Council, which comprises the heads of each of the twenty-eight member states of the European Union. (He is a bit like the President of the Presidents of the E.U.) In 2010, Van Rompuy published “Haiku,” a book of poems. Recently, he released a second collection, “Haiku 2,” which features hooting owls, bobbing daffodils, and a “solitary oak, / rammed into the field, single, / no likes around.” It makes you wonder if the executive branch doesn’t get a little lonely. “Dealing with the world of man increases one’s longing for Paradise,” Van Rompuy writes, in the book’s foreword. Now we understand / why George W. Bush painted / himself in the bath.
Before Paradise, Brussels: one recent afternoon, Van Rompuy w