How “Social Europe” Became the Alibi for a Neoliberal EU

Aurélie Dianara

Delors is quite a renowned political figure in France and Europe. When he died at the end of last year, the political and media elite were unanimous in praising him as a great European. Before he became president of the European Commission, Delors had been a key player in the French left’s neoliberal turn in the 1980s. His political trajectory was that of a social democratic reformist who surfed on the radical wave of the 1970s before rallying to economic liberalism in the 1980s.

The political trajectory of Jacques Delors was that of a social democratic reformist who surfed on the radical wave of the 1970s before rallying to economic liberalism in the 1980s.

Delors was a committed social Christian who had been working at the French national bank and served on the national planning commission. During the early 1970s, Delors was a special adviser to George Pompidou’s Gaullist prime minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, before joining the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974.

The PS had recently reorganized the fragmented forces of French socialism under the leadership of François Mitterrand. It adopted a Common Program for government with the French Communist Party. In those years, the PS was advocating nothing less than a rupture with capitalism — those were the words that its leader used at the time. During the 1970s, like the rest of the French New Left — which we often call the “second left” in France — Delors was calling for a decentralized form of socialism based on workers’ self-management, with socialist planning in France and Europe.

Things were to change very much in the 1980s. In May 1981, after twenty-three years of right-wing government in France, the Left won the presidential election. Mitterrand became president, and a Socialist government took over, which included four Communist ministers. Delors was appointed as…