Jacques Delors, architect of the modern EU, dies at 98
BRUSSELS — Jacques Delors, a Paris bank messenger’s son who became the visionary and builder of a more unified Europe in his momentous decade as chief executive of the European Union, has died in Paris, the Delors Institute think tank told The Associated Press on Wednesday. He was 98.
“The whole of Europe mourns the death of one of its greatest architects,” the institute said in a statement. “The best results of European integration cannot be dissociated from the vision, the courage, the conviction, the perseverance and the relentless work which characterized Jacques Delors’ work during his 10 years at the head of the European Commission.”
Paying tribute, the office of French President Emmanuel Macron said: “This grandson of farmers and the son of a bank employee, whose rise was entirely due to his talent, never allowed the lofty heights to corrupt his human righteousness.”
Delors “became the builder of the EU as we know it today,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “It is our responsibility to continue his work today for the good of Europe.”
For many, the owlish but hard-driving Socialist and Catholic was simply “Mr. Europe.” The EU, which stretches these days from Finland to Portugal and is home to some 450 million people, was dubbed “the house that Jacques built” by a popular biography.
Under his 1985-1995 tenure at the head of the EU’s bureaucracy in Brussels, member countries agreed to tear down barriers that prevented the free movement of capital, goods, services and people.
Delors was also key in drawing up the blueprint for economic and monetary union, which led to the creation of the European Central Bank and the euro currency. The latter, considered by many to be Delors’ masterpiece, is now official tender for 20 of the 27 EU nations.
But in the years leading up to his death, some of Delors’ handiwork came under threat. A narrowly averted crisis over Greece shook the eurozone, while the EU’s borders came under pressure from hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants, revealing fault lines within the bloc. In 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU in a repudiation of the “ever-closer union” the former EU Commission president toiled to forge.
Further expansion eastward of the EU into territory once controlled by Moscow had been halted by ferocious Kremlin opposition. And the economies of many of the bloc’s member nations appeared to be stuck in idle, with persistent low growth rates and millions of people unable to find work.