Jacques Delors: his vision for Europe was for a single market for capital, labour, goods and services; and economic and monetary union

Born: July 20th,1925

Died: December 27th, 2023

Jacques Delors, who has died at the age of 98, will be remembered as one of the most talented, visionary – and divisive – figures of post-second World War Europe.

A thinker on a grand scale, Delors devoted 10 years in Brussels, between 1985 and 1995, and his subsequent public life to one overarching goal: the creation of a united Europe able to punch its weight on the world stage next to the US and other powers such as China, India, Japan and Russia. But the multiple crises into which the EU fell in the first two decades of the 21st century threatened to halt and even reverse elements of this project.

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The building blocks of his enterprise were twofold: the single European market for capital, labour, goods and services; and economic and monetary union. Delors also presided over the EU’s increase in size from a 10 to a then 15-nation club of mainly western European democracies.

Now the EU is a different creature – a continent-wide bloc with 27 member states, which for more than a decade has struggled with emergency financial rescues of countries, the mass arrival of refugees, climate change, Brexit, war in Ukraine and other challenges that were barely on the horizon in Delors’ heyday. Even so, almost three decades after he left office today’s Europe still bears his indelible mark.

Delors’ contribution to the European cause rivals those of Jean Monnet, Walter Hallstein and Robert Schuman, the founding fathers of the European Economic Community, launched in 1958. As an elder statesman he was Europe’s equivalent of Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, and Lee Kuan Yew, the late prime minister of Singapore.

Yet the Delors decade coincided with a polarisation of public opinion over European integration. No doubt the recession of the early 1990s and the forces of nationalism let loose by the end of the cold war were partly to blame. But Delors admitted that he might have over-reached himself in his final years as president of the European Commission.

His combination of intellectual rigour, wry humour and combative politics irritated some Europeans, especially in the UK, who abhorred or took a more detached view of his plans for closer integration. In his native France his support for a federation of European states under Franco-German leadership provoked severe criticism. In Germany, despite admiration for the early support he gave to unification in 1990, his name became a byword for Brussels’ meddling.

For Ireland his championing of the EU single market and later of the creation of the euro meant he had a fundamental impact on the State’s economy and society. The creation of freer trade increased the attraction of Ireland for US investors in particular, while the switch from the Irish pound to the single currency involved pooling monetary sovereignty as control of interest rates moved to Frankfurt and the ECB.

Delors met and married his wife, Marie Lephaille, in 1948. The elder of their 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 leukaemia in 1982 at the age of 29.

Born in Paris on July 20th, 1925, Delors started his career at the Banque de France, the central bank, in 1945 and stayed there until 1962. After seven years at the state planning committee he worked from 1969 to 1972 as an adviser to Chaban-Delmas. 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, summoned him to Paris to be finance minister.

In this capacity, during a turbulent three years from 1981 to 1984, Delors steered Mitterrand’s U-turn from hazardous, leftist economic experiments to sober, market-oriented policies. Throughout his career, however, his Christian faith and left-of-centre views drove him to seek a balance between fiscal responsibility, market liberalisation, protection of workers’ rights and social welfare.

Delors maintained a prodigious work rate and demanded no less of his commission colleagues. One secret of his success was his intensive preparation for the summit meetings that made the big decisions on Europe’s future.

Delors arrived in Brussels in 1985 after being picked for the commission presidency by Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, West Germany’s chancellor. Bursting with ideas about a single European currency and a common European defence, he soon realised that he would have to proceed more slowly than he might have wished. In his first four-year term he confined himself largely to the project of creating a barrier-free internal market by 1992.

This idea had first appeared in the Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. Yet the single market was more than an antidote to Europe’s slow growth and its failure to create enough jobs. Delors understood that the 1992 programme and its legislative counterpart, the Single European Act of 1986 which came into effect in 1987, were highly political.

The 1986 Act provided not only for the free circulation of capital, goods and services but also people. Delors was later to describe it as his finest achievement: a slim treaty, with plenty of muscle and no fat, which laid the foundations for a united Europe. His experience with the follow-up Maastricht treaty on European Union, agreed in 1991 but signed in 1992, was less agreeable.

Maastricht’s origins lay in a vision of European economic and monetary union first mooted in 1970 by Pierre Werner, then Luxembourg prime minister. It was derailed by the oil crisis of the 1970s and subsequent international monetary turmoil.

Delors believed in the project as the indispensable complement to a single market and as the tool for breaking the Bundesbank’s monetary hegemony. He appreciated that West Germans would not abandon the Deutsche mark unless they received guarantees that Europe’s new central bank would be cast in a similar mould, independent of political pressure and powerful enough to protect their currency’s value. “Not all Germans believe in God but they all believe in the Bundesbank,” he quipped.

Delors drove the project forward in the face of opposition from EU central bankers, led by the Bundesbank, and from Thatcher. Suspicions of Delors and his proposed currency union ran high in the UK. In November 1990 The Sun, the nation’s best-selling tabloid, splashed the headline “Up Yours Delors” across the front page of an article that chauvinistically warned him to “frog off” and not try to abolish the pound. That outburst aside, and against expectations, Delors succeeded in pinning down a timetable for reaching monetary union in three stages by the end of the century, with the Maastricht Treaty agreed in December 1991. Far from creating a European superstate, the bogeyman of British eurosceptics, Maastricht balanced the enduring power of the nation state against the public’s resistance to faster political integration.

Many politicians would have crumpled under the onslaught which characterised the Maastricht ratification process. The Danish “No” in a 1992 referendum; the currency crises leading to the virtual collapse of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1993; and a recession that pushed the number of people out of work in Europe to almost 20 million: all these combined to threaten to drive a stake into Delors’ ambitions. Ireland had voted yes to the treaty in 1992, but got caught up in the currency crisis and had to devalue the pound in early 1993.

Delors’ exit from Brussels in 1995 marked the end of a political era, especially once he decided, after much agonising, against entering the race for the French presidency eventually won by Jacques Chirac. Mitterrand and Kohl, Delors’ two partners in the great leap forward in European integration, were on their way out.

In 1996 Delors set up Notre Europe, a think-tank also known as the Jacques Delors Institute, devoted to progressive economic and social goals as well as European unity. In a Daily Telegraph interview in 2011 he blamed the post-2009 euro zone crises on “a combination of the stubbornness of the Germanic idea of monetary control and the absence of a clear vision from all the other countries”.

Delors seemed doubtful that the EU would pull itself out of its troubles. He told The Telegraph: “Jean Monnet used to say that when Europe has a crisis, it comes out of the crisis stronger...but there are some, like me, who think that Monnet was being very optimistic.” Referring to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher, he said: “I am like Gramsci. I have pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023