Pascal Lamy

A former Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, French political consultant Pascal Lamy has spent a career staunchly defending an open world.

From 1985 to 1994, Lamy served as chief of staff to the President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, the mastermind of the European single market. Since then, he has held a number of significant public and academic positions.

In 1999, for instance, he led a team charged with the recovery of the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, up to its privatisation in 1999, before returning to the European Commission as a Trade Commissioner. After his return to Brussels, Pascal Lamy spent a sabbatical period as President of “Notre Europe”, a think tank working on European integration and as an advisor to Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the President of the European Socialist Party.

In 2005, he was elected to lead the World Trade Organisation, where he served two consecutive terms as Director-General. A life-long member of the French Socialist Party and a staunch defender of European integration and globalisation, Lamy has spelled out the necessity of those commitments. In the 2019 book Strange New World, for instance,  co-authored with defence analyst Nicole Gnesott, Pascal defends the power of a regulated, harnessed globalisation to make the world safer and more prosperous.

In addition, Lamy is vice-president of the Paris Peace Forum, a non-profit organisation committed to solving global challenges. Pascal Lamy has received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from eight universities and he is the recipient of numerous global awards.