With two wars raging on its borders, a world retreating from free trade and globalisation, strong migratory pressure on its southern shores, rising rightwing populist movements clamouring for national, not European, solutions and Donald Trump looming on the horizon, Europe is facing an extraordinary set of global challenges.
At the start of an election year that could also propel Eurosceptic nationalists into a strong position in the European parliament, the death of Jacques Delors, the most effective president the European Commission has ever had, reminds us of the era when EU integration made its greatest strides, delivering peace and increased prosperity for hundreds of millions of people. Delors, in many ways, made the EU the envy of the world.
In a decade in Brussels from 1985 to 1995, Delors built the European single market, launched the Schengen open-border area, prepared the way for the euro single currency, created budgetary funds to reduce the wealth gap between the richest and poorest regions, expanded the EU’s social legislation and initiated the Erasmus student exchange programme.
A former Christian trade unionist and French finance minister under Socialist president François Mitterrand, but who was never an elected national leader, Delors used his power of persuasion and the commission’s right of initiative to propose those policies – not to impose them. He was able to demonstrate that Europeans sharing sovereignty and working together strengthens us all, and strengthens democracy.
Delors’ unique skill lay in identifying ideas whose time had come, drawing up the required technical measures and working with national leaders to break down the barriers to a closer, more integrated union. Those leaders initially included not just Mitterrand and Germany’s Helmut Kohl, but also Margaret Thatcher, until she turned against Delors when he pushed for more European rights for workers, just as she was dismantling trade union power in the UK.
So how might Delors have tackled the challenges of today’s EU? He was successful partly because he embodied the consensus of his time between Christian democracy and social democracy. He had been an adviser to a reforming centre-right French prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, before joining Mitterrand’s Socialist party. He drew his vision more from Christian social teaching than from revolutionary Marxism.
That centre ground still commands a majority in the European parliament and among national governments, although more nationalist outliers now sit around the EU summit table, complicating decisions that have to be taken unanimously. In times of acute crisis, such as Russia’s full-out invasion of Ukraine, the instinct to unite around strong action still prevails.
My guess is that Delors would have started by drawing up an inventory of proposals to tackle the key common challenges of the present-day EU, and identifying where common European action could add significant value.
These include the need to keep Ukraine supplied with money and weapons, build a stronger and more efficient defence industry, power large-scale investments in the green energy transition, extend Europe’s digital infrastructure and be at the cutting edge of disruptive technologies such as AI and quantum computing.
These priorities have all been identified by the outgoing European commission and are the focus of often uncoordinated national programmes in member countries. The challenge is to convince the present generation of leaders that common EU action with joint borrowing and investment offers the best and most efficient approach.
Richer northern countries are naturally inclined to believe they can handle these issues better nationally, without sharing their taxpayers’ money with poorer southern and eastern cousins. Germany in particular is constantly on its guard, believing that Brussels or southern countries want to pick its pocket because it is the largest net contributor to the EU budget. It is also constantly trying to slap down power grabs by the commission.
Yet Berlin needs joint EU programmes as much as Greece or Italy – not least because its business model has been wrecked by the combination of the end of cheap Russian gas and the stalling of the Chinese economy, its main export growth market. Moreover, Germany’s ability to fund its own energy transition and lamentably lagging digital infrastructure were dealt a major blow last year by a constitutional court ruling outlawing the redeployment of off-budget pandemic recovery funds for green investments.
So I reckon Delors would start today by trying to convince the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and his skinflint finance minister, Christian Lindner, that the best way to restore the competitiveness of the shrinking German economy while supporting Ukraine financially and militarily, and building a great European defence capacity, lies in joint borrowing to create European common goods.
A latter-day Delors would also work to convince the French president, Emmanuel Macron, an instinctive pro-European, to be willing to share France’s military technology with European partners to overcome the resistance of leaders in Berlin, Rome and Warsaw who see calls for EU defence integration as a Trojan horse for French defence industries.
With the pro-European Donald Tusk’s centre-right coalition in charge in Poland, and rightwing nationalist Giorgia Meloni behaving, so far, like a pragmatic European in government, all the major EU countries could potentially be won round to a package deal of big European initiatives. Meloni would need to be able to show that the package included more support for Italy on migration, but the recent long-delayed agreement to reform the EU’s immigration and asylum rules and processes goes in that direction.
How, then, would Delors have dealt with a nationalist spoiler such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán? First by trying to co-opt him, as he did with Thatcher. But if that failed, by isolating him and being willing to use EU procedures to outvote him, as he did with Thatcher to launch the negotiations for the treaty on economic and monetary union.
The commission’s current president, Ursula von der Leyen, has more authority than any commission chief since Delors. She has shown her ability to lead big initiatives by pushing through joint vaccine purchases during the Covid-19 pandemic and, in conjunction with France and Germany, joint borrowing to finance the recovery programme.
However, she is less of a team player than Delors and is often accused of bypassing fellow commissioners and their services rather than drawing on their strengths. And von der Leyen has shown a marked reluctance to risk upsetting Berlin thus far.
Perhaps once her second term is assured, she will be more willing to revisit the Delors handbook and press her native country to make the next strides in European integration possible. Delors stood up to Mitterrand, even before he got to Brussels. His successor has not had to stand up to Berlin – now is the time.
Paul Taylor is a senior fellow of the Friends of Europe thinktank
