‘Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal’ – Nietzsche.
Just over a year ago, Jacques Delors passed away at the age of 98. It is nearly 12 years since Margaret Thatcher passed away at the age of 88. These two giants of European politics argued for different pathways towards the same goal – a successful European project.
Maybe it is now time to review their legacy; how it has been interpreted – and misinterpreted; where the different visions have led and, maybe, could have led. The cause of their great schism was not about trade or economics. It was about the locus of power in the European Union – a debate that preceded their tenures and remains still relevant today.
The era of European exuberance
I remember it well. I was a part of it.
Delors was a product of that time. The enthusiasm around the European project was at an all-time high. European integration was the solution to anything and everything. Any issue would be magically resolved by ‘more Europe’. Any form of criticism of the direction of the European Community, however constructive it was intended to be, was considered heretical. Perpetrators would be canceled – even before the concept of cancel culture was as developed as it is today.
Delors was a Frenchman whose political career flourished in Europe. He considered the European project “essentially a political project.” His vision promoted the idea that European imperatives should trump the expressed desires of the elected governments of individual member states. To that end, he engineered increased powers for the unelected Commission and the further development of the ‘Community method.’ “Under this method, it is for the Commission to propose new initiatives that the Parliament and Council can then adopt by majority vote, which entails the full recognition that member countries can and should be bound by decisions they oppose.”1
The Delors vision was incubated in the French political Left – the tribe from which he had emerged. He envisioned a dirigiste, social, collectivist Europe directed from Brussels. He championed the Community method over the intergovernmental one while acknowledging that “This relationship has always given rise to controversy, especially when tensions are high and positions, inevitably, harden.”2
His approach was appealing to many. Including the then Eurosceptic UK Labour party which, having failed miserably and repeatedly in trying to sell that same idea of a social, collectivist framework to British voters, was seduced by the opportunity to impose those ideas through the European bureaucracy.
Delors also pushed through, effectively, the further development of the European Single Market. This was also championed by Margeret Thatcher, but their respective aims were different. For Delors it was another step towards political integration. For Thatcher it was about creating a large competitive market that would encourage the emergence of enterprises able to compete with the US. Of course, the single market, in the form in which it came to be envisioned (it could have been otherwise), could only be created through a raft of pan-European regulations directed from Brussels. This, maybe, sowed the seeds for the later idea of Europe as a ‘regulatory superpower.’
The schism
Margaret Thatcher’s speech at the College of Europe in Bruges has come to be seen as the origin of the great schism between how Delors and Thatcher imagined the optimal pathways towards a successful Europe.
The speech was received at the time as being Eurosceptic and some now paint it as the start of the movement that ended in Brexit. Untrue. What Thatcher actually said was “Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.”3
Yet Thatcher imagined a future for Europe that was fundamentally different from that of Delors, of the European technocracy, and of the then prevalent enthusiasm for the European project. For her, the single market was an exercise in economic/commercial liberalisation with a minimum of regulation. She resisted the idea of hyper-regulation and as a tool of political integration. “If Europe is to flourish and create the jobs of the future, enterprise is the key” – a direct repudiation of Delors’ statist instincts. In the same vein – and having just spent years dismantling the 1970s industrial structure that had destroyed the British economy – she railed against the idea of a centralised, social Europe as it was then envisioned.
She argued for ‘active and willing’ cooperation of member states in direct opposition to the Delors idea that member countries should be bound by decisions they oppose. She argued for openness to global trade not a fortress Europe. She railed against the idea of open borders “if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants.” And, as far back as 1988, she warned that Europe must up its game in building its own defence capabilities to strengthen its contribution to NATO.
In short:
“The Community is not an end in itself.
The European Community is a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people in a world in which there are many other powerful nations and groups of nations.
We Europeans cannot afford to waste our energies on internal disputes or arcane institutional debates.”
Where did all this get us?
It was almost inevitable, given the prevailing exuberant mood, that the Delors vision would win out. Where has that gotten Europe?
Maybe the biggest success of all has been the democratisation, integration and extraordinary economic and institutional development of the former Soviet states.
The Maastricht treaty embedded further political integration despite initial doubts publicly expressed by French and Danish voters. French and Dutch voters later also initially rejected the proposed EU constitution.
The Euro, despite its flaws, is now the second-largest reserve currency as well as the second-most traded currency in the world after the US dollar.
On the debit side, Brexit has happened – and everyone has lost much as a result. The rise of Eurosceptic political forces within member states seems inexorable, possibly driven in part by a backlash against the idea that member states must be coerced into doing things that they and their voting public do not want.
We remain unable to guarantee the security of our citizens absent the US defence umbrella. Social Europe is under stress as pensions and other elements of the welfare state keep growing at a faster pace than economic growth.
Immigration and the uncontrolled movement of immigrants has become one of the main fissures threatening the project. Shengen has been intermittently suspended.
As for the competitiveness of European enterprise, the below image may be a bit overdone, but it also has elements of truth.

Decades of Brussels-driven regulatory hyperactivity risks paralysing commerce with the Commission now stating that it is time to embark on a broad deregulation drive. We’ll see if it is capable of doing so, quickly.
Industries like pharmaceuticals where Europe was once a leader have moved wholesale to the US. The car industry seems next as the Chinese eat our lunch. Today, it is hard to identify any industrial sector in which Europe holds a leading position.
Despite widespread agreement around its necessity, important elements of the single market, such as a capital markets union, remain incomplete. The incentives for successful companies to list in Europe when they go public are eroding.
A classic divergence
The Delors-Thatcher schism reflected a long-standing, and persistent, divergence of views of what we mean by the European project. Maybe it represented the classic divergence between the centre left and the centre right views of the world. Both were motivated by a desire to create a successful Europe in a changing world – changes that have only accelerated since the late 1980s.
For Delors, the future lay in a centralised Europe focused on the social dimension. Its foundations would be the development of strong and effective European institutions driving harmonisation across member states. Maybe on a pathway towards an eventual European superstate based on the social democratic model.
For Thatcher, a successful, liberal Europe would be built on willing collaboration between diverse, independent nation states where political power would remain located. The foundations on which its social dimension could be built would be strong economic performance, commercial competitiveness, and credible defence capabilities.
One promoted a vision of an intergovernmental Europe where the locus of power was tied to the democratic legitimacy of elected Member State governments. The other was more technocratically inclined with power shifting to Brussels, driven by the Commission (with a thin veneer of democracy provided by the European Parliament), and placing European imperatives above those of individual Member States.
That debate remains relevant, maybe even more relevant, today. However, it remains an elite discussion lacking credible, active and open involvement of the citizens of Member States in the crucial dialogue about their future.
__
1 Alberto Alemanno. The visionary legacy of Jacques Delors. Politico, January 2, 2024.
2 Jacques Delors. Economic Governance in the European Union: Past, Present and Future. Journal of Common Market Studies, 2013, Volume 51, Number 2, pp169-178
3 The Brexit movement probably gained its momentum when the Bundesbank explicitly stated that it was prepared to defend the French franc’s place in what was then the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) but was not prepared to do the same for the British pound. The pound duly crashed out of the ERM on Black Wednesday in 1992 and ensured that the UK would never join the Euro. Had Britain not crashed out of the ERM and maybe even eventually had adopted the Euro, Brexit would have been much more difficult – maybe impossible.
This post first appeared on Joe’s Random Thoughts newsletter on LinkedIn.