Jacques Delors, who has died aged 98, will be remembered as one of the most talented, visionary – and divisive – figures of post-World War II Europe.
A thinker on a grand scale, Delors dedicated ten years in Brussels between 1985 and 1995 and his subsequent public life to an overarching goal: the creation of a united Europe capable of competing on the world stage alongside other powers such as China , India, Japan and Russia. But the numerous crises that the EU found itself in in the first two decades of the 21st century threatened to stop or even reverse parts of this project.
The building blocks of his enterprise were two: the single European market for capital, labor, goods and services; and economic and monetary union. Delors also led the expansion of the EU from a 10-member to what was then a 15-member club of predominantly Western European democracies.
Now the EU is a different creature – a continental bloc of 27 member states that has been struggling for more than a decade with emergency financial bailouts of countries, the mass arrival of refugees, climate change, Brexit, the war in Ukraine and other challenges were hardly in sight during Delors' heyday. Almost three decades after he left office, today's Europe still bears his indelible mark.
Delors' contribution to the European cause rivals that of Jean Monnet, Walter Hallstein and Robert Schuman, the founding fathers of the European Economic Community, created in 1958. As an elder statesman, he was the European equivalent of Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, and Lee Kuan Yew, the late Prime Minister of Singapore.
But the Delors decade coincided with a polarization of public opinion about European integration. Undoubtedly, the recession of the early 1990s and the forces of nationalism unleashed at the end of the Cold War were partly to blame. But Delors acknowledged that he may have overreached himself in his final years as president of the European Commission.
His combination of intellectual rigor, wry humor and combative politics irritated some Europeans, particularly in the United Kingdom, who loathed or took a more distant view of his plans for closer integration. In his native France, his support for a federation of European states under Franco-German leadership sparked strong criticism. In Germany, his name became synonymous with Brussels' meddling, although he admired his early support for reunification in 1990.
Delors pictured in Paris in April 1970 © AFP via Getty ImagesDelors did not fit easily into political categories. A moderate leftist in his youth, he did not join the French Socialist Party until 1974, when he was almost 50 years old. He was a Christian trade unionist who served under the Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas. His Roman Catholicism made him an unusual figure on the French left with its anticlerical and secularist traditions.
Delors met and married his wife Marie Lephaille in 1948. The older of her two children is Martine Aubry, who followed her father into politics and led the French Socialist Party from 2008 to 2012. The younger was Jean-Paul Delors, a journalist who died of leukemia in 1982 at the age of 29.
Delors was born on July 20, 1925 in Paris and began his career in 1945 at the Banque de France, the central bank, where he remained until 1962. After seven years on the state planning committee, he worked as an advisor to Chaban-Delmas from 1969 to 1972. In 1979 he was elected to the European Parliament, a position he held for two years before François Mitterrand, the first socialist president of France's Fifth Republic, appointed him to Paris as finance minister.
In this role, Delors steered Mitterrand's turnaround from risky, left-wing economic experiments to sober, market-oriented policies during the turbulent three years from 1981 to 1984. He stabilized the French economy and gained a reputation for his sound financial knowledge and management skills. However, over the course of his career, his Christian faith and left-leaning views drove him to seek a balance between fiscal responsibility, market liberalization, protection of workers' rights, and social welfare.
He summarized his economic philosophy as Commission President: “The European economic model must be based on three principles: competition that stimulates, cooperation that strengthens and solidarity that unites.”
Delors with his wife Marie © Christine Grunnet/PortalDelors maintained a tremendous pace of work and demanded no less from his fellow commissioners. A secret of his success was his intensive preparation for the summits at which the big decisions about the future of Europe were made. Only Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who became his great political rival in the 1980s, could match his mastery of details.
Delors came to Brussels in 1985 after being selected for the Commission presidency by Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was full of ideas about a single European currency and a common European defense and soon realized that he would have to move more slowly than he would have liked. During his first four-year term he focused largely on the project of creating a barrier-free internal market by 1992.
This idea first appeared in the Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany. But the single market was more than just an antidote to Europe's slow growth and inability to create enough jobs. Delors was clear that the 1992 program and its legislative counterpart, the Single European Act of 1986, which came into force in 1987, were extremely political.
The 1986 law provided for not only the free movement of capital, goods and services, but also the free movement of people. Delors later described it as his greatest achievement: a lean treaty with lots of power and no fat that laid the foundation for a united Europe. His experience with the follow-up Maastricht Treaty on European Union, agreed in 1991 but signed in 1992, was less positive.
Delors holds a 100 franc coin in his hand in August 1982 © AFP via Getty ImagesThe origins of Maastricht lie in a vision of a European economic and monetary union first put forward in 1970 by Pierre Werner, then Prime Minister of Luxembourg. It was derailed by the oil crisis of the 1970s and the international monetary turmoil that followed.
Delors believed that the project was an indispensable complement to the internal market and a tool for breaking the Bundesbank's monetary hegemony. He was clear that the West Germans would not give up the Deutsche Mark unless they were given a guarantee that Europe's new central bank would be modeled on a similar model, independent of political pressure and strong enough to protect the value of theirs to protect currency. “Not all Germans believe in God, but they all believe in the Bundesbank,” he joked.
Delors pushed the project forward despite opposition from EU central bankers, led by the Bundesbank, and Thatcher. An implacable opponent, she condemned his plans for a federal Europe in a memorable speech in 1988. Two weeks earlier, Delors had addressed the British Trade Union Congress and angered Thatcher by calling for an expansion of European workers' rights in areas such as collective bargaining, lifelong education and representation on company boards.
There was great distrust in the UK towards Delors and his proposed monetary union. In November 1990, The Sun, the country's best-selling tabloid, ran the headline “Up Yours Delors” on the front page of an article chauvinistically warning him to “listen out” and not try to abolish the pound. Apart from this outbreak, Delors managed, contrary to expectations, to set a timetable for the implementation of monetary union in three stages by the end of the century.
But his efforts to “bind” Germany to a single currency – the euro – by 1999 had their price. He underestimated the country's interest in a European political union, a project intended to compensate for the loss of the German mark and ensure that non-inflationary economic policies are permanently maintained throughout the currency area. These problems once again preoccupied European leaders. Like many others, Delors was slow to understand that the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 made it necessary to rethink Europe's political architecture.
Delors in London in December 1989 with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher © Johnny Eggitt/AFP via Getty ImagesAfter many tough negotiations, the Maastricht Treaty was concluded in December 1991. Despite its promise of a “European Union,” the treaty was a compromise that got to the heart of the ambiguities of postwar European history. Far from creating a European superstate, the bogeyman of British Eurosceptics, Maastricht balanced the continued power of the nation-state against public resistance to faster political integration.
For Delors, Maastricht was a missed opportunity. The irony was that he became associated with a contract that he in many ways despised, although this may have been a legacy of his high profile in the 1980s, when he earned the moniker “Mr Europe” and rashly bragged about it in 10 years “80 percent of our economic legislation…” . . will be [European] Community origin”.
Many politicians would have collapsed under the onslaught that characterized the Maastricht ratification process. The Danish “No” in a 1992 referendum; the currency crises that led to the virtual collapse of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1993; and a recession that has pushed the number of unemployed in Europe to nearly 20 million: all of this combined threatens to undermine Delors' ambitions.
Delors was critical of the deep-seated distrust of free markets that runs across much of France's political spectrum. At the height of the GATT world trade talks in 1992-93, he warned his compatriots that protectionist-led resistance to an agreement risked creating a new “Maginot mentality” in France, a reference to the ill-fated attempt to build a defensive wall against it to establish German military aggression in the 1930s.
Delors' departure from Brussels in 1995 marked the end of a political era, particularly after he decided, after much deliberation, not to enter the race for the French presidency, which was ultimately won by Jacques Chirac. Mitterrand and Kohl, Delors' two partners in the big step forward in European integration, were on their way out. By avoiding an election campaign, Delors missed the chance to advocate for a strategic negotiation between France and Germany on political and economic union in Europe.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, right, with Delors in July 1994 © Arnd Wiegmann/PortalIn 1996, Delors founded Notre Europe, a think tank, also known as the Jacques Delors Institute, dedicated to progressive economic and social goals and European unity. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, he blamed the post-2009 Eurozone crises on “a combination of the stubbornness of the Germanic idea of currency control and the lack of a clear vision from all other countries.”
Delors seemed to doubt that the EU would get out of its troubles. He told The Telegraph: “Jean Monnet always said: When Europe has a crisis, it emerges from the crisis stronger.” . But there are some, like me, who think that Monnet was very optimistic.” He referred to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher, and said: “I am like Gramsci. I have pessimism about the intellect and optimism about the will.”
It was only when Ursula von der Leyen took office in 2019 that the European Commission regained its role as an engine of integration with its responses to the pandemic and Russia's war against Ukraine. Von der Leyen is now considered the strongest Commission president since her French predecessor, but Europe may never again see a Commission president with the same stature as Delors.