Paul-Henri Charles Spaak (French: [pɔl ɑ̃ʁi ʃaʁl spak]; 25 January 1899 – 31 July 1972) was an influential Belgian Socialist politician, diplomat and statesman who thrice served as the prime minister of Belgium and later as the second secretary general of NATO.

Along with Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer, he was a leader in the formation of the institutions that evolved into the European Union.

In 1955, he was appointed to the so-called Spaak Committee studying the possibility of a common market within Europe and played an influential role in preparing the 1957 Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community (EEC).

His mother, Marie Janson, was a socialist, and the first woman to enter the Belgian Senate, and his father, Paul Spaak, was a poet and playwright.

Other noted members of his family included his uncle, Paul-Émile Janson, who served as Prime Minister of Belgium from 1937 to 1938, and his niece, Catherine Spaak, a movie star, singer and television presenter.

After his wife's death on 14 August 1964, he married 56-year-old Antwerp-born divorcee and longtime friend Simonne Rikkers Hottlet Dear on 23 April 1965.

His son Fernand served in 1981 as chief of staff for Gaston Thorn, president of the European Commission, until he became the victim of his wife's murder–suicide on 18 July 1981.

[5] After receiving his law degree, Spaak practised law in Brussels, where he "excelled in defending Communists charged with conspiring against the security of the realm", and others including Fernando de Rosa, an anarchist Italian student who attempted to kill Crown Prince Umberto of Italy during a state visit by the prince to Brussels.

In 1938, he allowed Herman Van Breda to smuggle the legacy of Edmund Husserl out of Nazi Germany to Belgium through the Belgian Embassy in Berlin.

An Act of June 1938 "increased the functions of the National Society for Cheap Houses and Dwellings and empowered it, under State guarantee, to contract a loan of 350 million francs," while a Royal Decree of July 1938 laid down the rules for applying the provisions of a Holidays with Pay Act passed in 1936 to agricultural, horticultural and forestry undertakings.

The Act also removed a previous requirement in which a wage earner had to work for at least a year with the same employer in order to earn an annual holiday.

[6] When he was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1936 to 1940, Spaak adhered to the political independence of Belgium and carried on the long-standing Belgian policy of neutrality, with no formal military cooperation with France or the United Kingdom and no open hostility to the Germans.

In disarray and with almost all of the country occupied, the Belgian Army — by the command of King Leopold III — surrendered on May 18, leading to a constitutional conflict with part of the government (including Spaak), which wanted to continue military operations together with France.

Travelling in difficult circumstances with Pierlot through Spain and Portugal, partially even in the false bottom of a truck, they arrived in London in October 1940.

[12] An Act providing for the establishment of works councils was promulgated in September 1948,[13] while a school building fund was set up that same year "to supply the material needs of secondary education.

Although his political base was in the Socialist Party, he disagreed with its policies on several critical points, including Atlanticism, recognition of Franco's Spain, and the language issue inside Belgium.

During the third session of the UN General Assembly in 1948 in Paris, Spaak apostrophized the delegation of the Soviet Union with the famous words: "peur de vous" (fear of you).

It was a crowning achievement of decades of patient work, and his role in the creation of the EEC earned Spaak a place among the founding fathers of the European Union.

He publicly attacked de Gaulle, blaming him for unjustly and unwisely blocking NATO's progress and stalling efforts toward European and Atlantic integration.

De Gaulle was uncompromising on issues related to national sovereignty, mistrusted the United States and considered Britain to be an American puppet; he insisted on developing French nuclear capabilities.

[30] When, in 1962, France, under de Gaulle, attempted to block both British entry to the European Communities and undermine their supranational foundation with the Fouchet Plan, Spaak working with Joseph Luns of the Netherlands rebuffed the idea.

The obverse side shows a portrait with the names Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak and Konrad Adenauer, the three unifiers of Europe.