Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built

"Choosing a book about Delors is perhaps not a very obvious way of talking about a period when dramatic things were happening in Europe. But taking a step back, why is Europe part of this story of globalisation? Firstly, the fall of the Berlin wall meant that the Soviet alternative to the Western system collapsed. But also because the formation of the European Union was a mini globalisation in itself. It constructed a European single market and a single currency, which broke down barriers between countries in an economic sense, and with an explicit political agenda behind it. So in Europe they were much more conscious of the political implications of what they were doing economically. In a sense that was the point. There’s a good quote in the book, where Delors, working on the single market with Thatcher, said on French radio that he was making a single market, but what he was really there to build was a political union – which was anathema to Thatcher. He was a very contemporary figure in the sense that he got markets. If you look at his significance within France, it was to reverse the socialist excesses of the first two years of the Mitterand years. So in a French context he was an economic liberal, but he was an internationalist in the sense that he understood the rest of the world in a way that believers in French exceptionalism did not. If the market was the theme of this period, Delors absolutely got that, both in France and in Brussels. He was both a visionary and a tactician, and that’s what makes him such a powerful figure. He had a very clear vision of what he wanted Europe to become, but he was also a brilliant tactician able to make alliances with people who were different, like Margaret Thatcher. And then when the Berlin wall came down he formed a whole new set of alliances with Helmut Kohl. Thatcher went off on her own trajectory, but Delors was able to remain at the centre of those creating the new post Cold War Europe. I think it’s a very interesting difference, and in fact I almost chose John Campbell’s Thatcher biography as one of my five. Thatcher is very much part of this globalisation story, partly because she pioneered a lot of the ideas that then went global, like privatisation. Obvious idea as it may seem, privatisation was a British invention. She also abolished exchange controls in her first year of office, and that laid the groundwork for the City. The City [London’s financial centre] became the pre-eminent global financial capital. So in that sense she was a globaliser. But when it came to politics, she was a nation stater. Her critics would say that is a blatant contradiction which blows up Thatcherism. I would be a bit more charitable and say it’s a tension. I think she was onto something in the way that democratic legitimacy still resides in the state, because that’s the unit that people identify with. She felt that business could be globalised but the state must remain national, while Delors believed the nation state would eventually be a unit of the past and a historical anachronism, and that creating a single market, a single currency and ultimately a single European government was the logical conclusion. In Europe now, if anything the Thatcherite vision is looking more powerful. Her view that trying to create a political union was courting disaster looks prescient at the moment. Her argument that the single currency would lead to political trouble was not wrong, and indeed there was a rational side to her reaction to German reunification – even if there was also something primitive and atavistic to it – and the problem of how to accommodate German power within the European system. Delors had a clear answer to that, which was the Euro, whereas Thatcher said that the Euro won’t contain German power, in some ways it will amplify it – and that’s where we are now. It may be that in ten years time Europe has got its act together, Delorsism has a resurgence and his vision is ultimately vindicated. But from the perspective of 2013, Delors was a visionary whose vision got a little ahead of him, and is in danger of failing."