Former Milwaukee Mayor and U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg Tom Barrett visited Concordia University Wisconsin Oct. 16 to discuss his experiences representing the United States in one of Europe’s most innovative nations.
Barrett, who served as Milwaukee’s mayor for 18 years and previously represented Wisconsin in the U.S. Congress, shared stories and lessons from his three-year diplomatic post, describing Luxembourg as “a small country with a big footprint.”
From Farmland to Space
Barrett traced Luxembourg’s transformation from an agricultural society to a modern powerhouse of finance and space technology. “They threw the dice in the 1960s, thinking, agriculture has gone away, steel is going away. What do we bet on next? And the next bet was the finance industry. But then, going back again to the late 1980s, that’s when they made the decision as a government that they wanted to get into the space industry.”
He explained how Luxembourg became home to SES, “the largest satellite company in the world,” and how it established a national space agency to support private innovation and mineral rights in outer space. “They made the decision then after that also to create a space agency within the government. And they along with the United States passed legislation that dealt with ownership of minerals in space to really set the benchmark so that you had incentives for people, private companies, and others to do the exploration.”
Barrett said Luxembourg’s willingness to take calculated risks has paid off. “They’re professional gamblers when it comes to the country,” he said. “It’s an amazingly wealthy country. Per capita, number one, number two, number three, depending on how people do it, but it is way up there.”
From Farmland to Space
Barrett emphasized the strong bond between Luxembourg and the U.S. “They love the United States. They want to be with us on just about anything they can, particularly when it relates to finance or space exploration, because they trusted us. They trusted us immensely.”
He also highlighted Luxembourg’s participation in international agreements such as the Artemis Accords, which outline principles for cooperative space exploration. “It was led by the United States and the State Department and NASA,” Barrett said. “But one of the original signers to this was Luxembourg because again they want to be, as I would describe it sometimes, the big kid on the block.”
A Culture of Peace and Perspective
Reflecting on the country’s modern stability, Barrett said, “Because of NATO, because of our investment there, because of what happened, Luxembourg has endured its longest period of peace in over 300 years. Eighty years without a war.”
He also noted that the memory of past occupation still shapes Luxembourg’s worldview. “They have much more of a sensitivity, for example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, because as people would say to me, you as an American don’t understand what it’s like to have another country occupy you. We understand that.”
Multilingual, Modern, and Financially Disciplined
He described Luxembourg as “the most multilingual place I’ve ever been in my life,” saying that “over half of the people who live in Luxembourg can speak four or more languages. And as an American, it’s very humbling. Because on a daily basis, they would speak French, German, Luxembourgish, English, large Portuguese population, Spanish presence, just unbelievable. And so they’re very, very linguistically gifted.”
“If you look at France, for example, right now, where there’s turmoil in government for the last 13 months, a big part of it is their budget goals, where I think their debt is going to be 122% of their gross domestic product. In Luxembourg, their debt is going to be 30% of their gross domestic product.”
As he concluded, Barrett connected his European service and Luxembourg’s memories of World War II to his upcoming travels in Asia, where he plans to visit Vietnam.
“I’ve been watching this Ken Burns documentary, which is 18 hours long, and it’s not a fun thing to watch about French involvement in Vietnam, American involvement in Vietnam, and all the challenges that occurred there 50 years ago,” he said. “I can’t help but think about that experience, very controversial at the time, and still in some quarters controversial. I juxtapose that with this amazing, amazing perception that my wife and I had seen in Luxembourg, that we were beloved because we [the United States] saved the country.”
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