Viscount Davignon (born 1932) was an important architect of European integration and unity as a member and later vice-president of the Commission of the European Communities.

Viscount Etienne Davignon was born in Budapest (Hungary) on October 4, 1932, to a Belgian family of professional diplomats. His father had been a distinguished Belgian ambassador and his grandfather had been minister for foreign affairs (as a reward for his good services, he had been raised to the rank of nobility in 1916 by the King of Belgium).

Davignon studied law at the Catholic University of Louvain and thereafter joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1959 where he soon got involved in Belgium's most delicate post-war diplomatic action: negotiating a satisfactory way out of the turmoil in Africa surrounding the granting of independence to what had been the Belgian Congo. In 1961 he was nominated to serve in the office of the Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak...