Jacques Delors, who passed away on 27 December 2023, will be remembered as the greatest, most effective and most visionary, forward-looking President of the European Commission - and, like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman long before him, a ‘founding father’ of a united Europe.
Before him, the President of the European Commission was little more than a Eurocrat; it was he who gave the role the same status, later recognised universally, as a head of state or government. During his ten-year term of office, from 1985 to 1995, and thanks to the support of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François Mitterrand, he drove the process of European integration forward forcefully and decisively. He began by immediately revitalising it with the aim of transforming the common market, based on the customs union, into a genuine single market by 1992. Then, while the single market was still being built, he launched his other major project - monetary union - while working on the enlargement of the Community’s competences with the founding of the European Union, via the Maastricht Treaty.
For the first time, he also addressed the Union’s ‘democratic deficit’, proposing and obtaining more powers for the European Parliament, first through the cooperation procedure (provided for by the Single European Act), and then (starting with the Maastricht reform) with co-decision, which finally gave the Strasbourg assembly a true co-legislator role in matters subject to qualified majority decisions in the Council.
The path towards the strategic objective of the single market began with two documents: the ‘cost of non-Europe’ report, which demonstrated the economic benefits of removing the remaining internal regulatory barriers, and a first ‘White Paper’, which identified all the legislative measures (around 200) needed to eliminate those barriers.
From the start, Delors identified the essential tool for completing the project and strengthening the decision-making mechanisms and the European institutions: he proposed, by means of the Single European Act, a first real reform of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which had established the European Communities (Common Market and Euratom), and convinced the Member States to approve it (1987).
Delors then played an essential role in redefining the Community financial framework, with a significant increase in budgetary resources to 1.20% of the Member States’ total GDP with the Delors I Package (1988-92) followed by 1.27% with the Delors II Package (1993-99), and a substantial increase in funds for ‘economic and social cohesion’ (regional and structural policies), seen as a necessary counterpart to the unification of the internal market. Even more important, however, was the systemic change to the Community budget framework from annual to medium-term (7-year), starting from the two Delors ‘packages’.
This prevented lengthy financial negotiations between the Member States, which slowed down the work of the European institutions for months at a time, being repeated every year. Another key element introduced by Delors in European policies was the focus on the social dimension (it was he, among others, who initiated the ‘social dialogue’ between businesses, trade unions and European institutions). Nevertheless, his social programme, which also provided for the harmonisation of the instruments to protect workers in the event of a crisis and to counteract the pressure to relocate production activities, was one of his unfinished works.
His toughest defeat, however, concerned his second White Paper, on 'growth, employment and competitiveness’, launched in style in 1993 as the last major project of his mandate. It was a proposal to revitalise and boost the economy (to be financed with EUR 20 billion over 20 years), based on, among other things, a common debt issuance (EUR 8 billion per year) and contributions from the Community budget and loans from the European Investment Bank. The aim was to support the construction of transport and telecommunications infrastructure and a number of other economic and social initiatives (essentially foreshadowing what would follow more than 20 years later with ‘NextGenerationEU’ in response to the pandemic crisis).
The plan, initially welcomed by the European Council, was later criticised and abandoned by the EU's Finance Ministers. The end of Delors' decade followed a downward trajectory, as the tide turned and he was accused of extravagant ambition, centralised Jacobinism and excessive regulation. Some of his ideas would be revisited later, however - such as the Trans-European Networks and the ‘SURE’ programme, which supported temporary unemployment schemes during the COVID-19 crisis.
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