Europe
Advocate of the European Union's single market and currency, whose vision of a centralized, federalist bloc was less popular
Thu, Dec 28, 2023, 00:47 GMT
Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission in its most imperial and confident years, unwittingly became for British Eurosceptics the Gallic symbol of everything they feared and despised about the great European project. This puzzled him but did not worry him, particularly given that after his departure the structure and objectives of the European Union remained largely as he had envisioned them during his decade in Brussels from 1985. He was appointed president for a record three terms and is considered the most important architect and leader of the European project since its birth after World War II.
The irony was that the great achievement of Delors, who has died aged 98, was the creation of a single regulated market for trade, goods and services across the European Union – an idea that delighted Margaret Thatcher, his nemesis agreed. However, he wanted to go much further than they and some other European leaders, recognizing the attendant need for a single currency and a stronger, centralized federalist system of government in a global economy with competing power blocs: “National sovereignty doesn't mean much anymore. “…voluntary cooperation never works,” he said. “In order to meet the American and Japanese challenges, we have to be supranational” – and that before China’s rise to economic power.
Delors, with his lower middle class background, fierce work ethic, strong religious faith, coupled with an economist's belief in fiscal restraint and anti-inflationary caution, could have been a natural ally of conservative prime ministers. Thatcher supported his appointment as a commissioner in 1984 and his subsequent reappointment. But his very Frenchness – his thick accent, his curt and somewhat acrimonious demeanor, and his Gallic faith in centralized government – worked against him as popular sentiment on both sides of the Channel turned in response to the economic downturn and the Job insecurity began to turn and unemployment rose. Certainly national governments ensured that no Commission President would ever be so powerful again.
In 1984, at the end of his term as Minister of Economy, Jacques Delors leaves the Hotel Matignon, the residence of the French Prime Minister. Photo: William Stevens/AP
What was remarkable was that Delors did not come from the privileged French elite of Enarques, graduates of the École Nationale d'Administration whose expectation is to run things, or from a powerful partisan power base, but had fought his way to the top through skill, commitment and hard work. Jacques was born in the 11th workers' arrondissement, the only child of Jeanne (née Rigal) and Louis Delors, a severely wounded World War I veteran who had left the rural Corrèze region of south-central France to become a messenger at the Banque de France in Paris the French capital.
His background – half respected urban poor, half self-employed rural farmer – did not make him a socialist, but rather encouraged him to become a member of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (the Young Christian Workers) movement (and a capable member of its basketball team). Delors' devout Catholic faith shaped his politics, and although he became a member of the French Socialist Party in the 1970s, he later said: “I was never fascinated by communism and Marxism – I am undoubtedly the only man on the French left who… “ has never been like this. I believed that society could be improved, but not changed.” It was his Catholicism that strengthened his support for collective social responsibility and cooperation.
His education was interrupted by the Second World War, and afterward he was discouraged from studying because his father insisted on following him to the Banque de France. Otherwise he might have become a fashion designer, film director or sports journalist. Instead, he worked as a securities manager, studied economics in evening classes and, in 1948, married another employee, Marie Lephaille, who was of Basque origins. The bank wanted to promote him, but in 1953 he took a job as an economist with the Christian Union, which valued his ability to clearly explain economic concepts. Years later, when François Mitterand asked him how he acquired this ability, Delors replied: “If I have stated this clearly, it is because I had little education. Since I’m not smart, I have to go to great lengths to understand something.”
G7 leaders at a summit in London in 1991. French President François Mitterand sits to the right of Queen Elizabeth, and Jacques Delors stands to his right. Photo: Martin Keene/PA
In the late 1960s, this skill and seriousness led him into politics, as an adviser to the Gaullist government and then into the Socialist Party, where he tempered its secularism. Under Mitterrand, he became the government's economics minister from 1981 to 1984 and gained a reputation for saving France from financial collapse by reining in the Socialists' wildly unrealistic spending policies, curbing inflation and cutting the spiraling budget deficit, despite Mitterrand's cynical statements and outspoken statements Resistance from most of his ministerial colleagues.
He impressed European finance ministers and eventually even the skeptical Mitterrand, but was not enough to be appointed prime minister: “Delors,” said the president, “smells of a sacristy.” Instead, he was chosen as a vacancy for the chairmanship of the Commission was proposed as an acceptable French face of economic realism for leaders such as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Thatcher.
The Commission, once described as a civil service with attitude (not only managing Community policies but also proposing and implementing rules and regulations), was in a state of complacent near-slackness when Delors arrived in January 1985. Within two weeks of consultations with the announcement that he would create a European internal market over the next seven years that would eliminate trade barriers and discrimination against foreign competitors, he caused a stir among national governments. The standstill in decision-making in Brussels was counteracted by limiting the veto rights of the states. In building the internal market he had the enthusiastic support of the Tory Internal Market, Taxation and Customs Commissioner, Lord (Arthur) Cockfield.
Jacques Delors meets British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in October 1984, when he was elected President of the European Commission. Photo: AP
More clearly than leaders like Thatcher, who saw it as merely a liberalization of markets, Delors recognized the impact on states' social and employment policies and ultimately on currencies: alarm bells rang when he announced that within a decade, 80% of economic legislation , including tax and social policy, would come from the Commission. The single market was certainly initially a means of halting Europe's relative economic decline in the world, but it would also have brought wider international benefits. He told the European Parliament that member states must learn to “speak with one voice and act together,” adding: “Are we Europeans capable of this?” Whether it is currency instability, prohibitive interest rates, hidden protectionism or a decline in aid for the poorest countries – no, Europe didn’t know how to move forward.”
Under Delors, the commission became more forceful and outspoken, but was also more tightly governed by the president's cabinet clique, made up mostly of French staff. Like him, but unlike many others on the commission, they had a Stakhanovite work ethic and an arrogance in enforcing the president's will in all departments.
Delors considered himself an internationalist with a taste for jazz and American films, but he had traveled little and had difficulty assessing national weaknesses and political differences. His strong French accent when speaking English and his stern and serious demeanor seemed to the British tabloids to be typical of the arrogant European bureaucrat who was increasingly adopting the skeptical tone of the Thatcher government. He was smart but also open-hearted, not always choosing his words carefully and not always respecting sensibilities.
In 1988 he told the TUC Congress that the Commission would require governments to introduce pro-worker legislation, including a right to training and improved worker protection. This led the British left and trade unions almost overnight to embrace Europe as a bulwark against Thatcherism, but of course it angered the Prime Minister, who retaliated with a speech in Bruges. “We have failed to roll back national borders in Britain, only to see them reinstated at European level with a European superstate exerting new dominance from Brussels,” she said.
Thatcher's “No!” No! No!” Criticism of Delors' federalism in the House of Commons in 1990 was echoed in the Sun headline: “Up Yours Delors!”
Thus a new Tory style emerged, gradually replacing the party's previous pro-Europeanism, although two years later Thatcher's “No!” NO! NO!” to Delors and federalism in the House of Commons was what brought about their downfall. More democratically: “Up Yours Delors!” was the headline in the Sun, reflecting the Commission President's growing identification with the evils of Europe.
When the single market was introduced in the early 1990s, Delors' plans for the next stage – the single currency and political union – caused consternation among voters in countries other than Britain. His perceived stubbornness was shown when he tried to derail an agricultural subsidy deal with the US and stall a global trade deal because he believed it would undermine French agriculture. The Commission's pre-emptive announcements on a range of issues led to a wider perception of its indifference to national preferences and democratic decisions.
This reached its climax with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which in over 250 confused and congested pages set out the creation of the European Union, explained new forms of governance within it and laid out detailed steps for the introduction of the euro through the creation of the European Monetary System. Its adoption by member states, in legislation and referendums, was difficult: it almost toppled John Major's government in the United Kingdom, was initially rejected by the Danes and only supported by a narrow majority by the French. The treaty became a symbol of an out-of-touch bureaucracy and a Commission President, both unable to engage with European voters or explain to them why the changes were necessary or what benefits they would bring.
Delors' angry statements, such as in a speech in Quimper, Brittany, in which he claimed that “there is no place in a democracy for people who say no,” only fueled the mainly right-wing campaigns against the treaty and sparked resentment about the creeping development of Europe due to interference in national democratic processes.
Nevertheless, the treaty was eventually passed. Delors had led Europe in a new, more unified and federal direction, with the new states of Eastern Europe lining up to join. However, the treaty also heralded increasing difficulties, particularly as the single currency initially faltered in the following decade.
Delors, at that point the longest-serving president in the Commission's history, seemed to realize that his time was now over. “I have become a symbol of an idea of Europe that is disappearing,” he said in December 1993. “I am so discouraged that I can no longer be useful.” I can no longer leave my mark on Europe. It is finished [and] To be honest, I’m no longer the man for this job.”
It was assumed that after resigning from the presidency in 1995, Delors would resume a political career in France, perhaps as a Socialist presidential candidate. But it wasn't meant to be. The French elected the Gaullist Jacques Chirac as Mitterand's successor, and by this time Delors was already almost 70 years old and suffering from sciatica. In the EU, government leaders had enough of an overbearing, over-ambitious commission and replaced Delors with the ineffective former prime minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Santer – a man who had no ambition to impose his will on his colleagues or on the governments of nations larger than his own.
Delors' ambitions for Europe were undermined: even as he retired, ethnic violence broke out in the Balkan countries that the EU was unable to prevent or stop. In his quiet retirement, he still lived modestly in a small Paris apartment, appearing not to talk about world events but to comment on the Tour de France.
He and his wife had two children. Her son Jean-Paul, a journalist, died of leukemia in 1982 at the age of 29. Marie died in 2020. Her daughter Martine Aubry became a minister in the French government, mayor of Lille and leader of the French Socialist Party (2008–12). .
• Jacques Lucien Jean Delors, politician and civil servant, born July 20, 1925; died December 27, 2023
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