Given how crucial regional co-operation is to Africa, where intraregional trade is a paltry 14%, there was a surprisingly muted response to the recent death, at 98, of one of the last century’s greatest architects of regional integration: Jacques Delors.

Delors served as France’s economics and finance minister under Socialist Party president François Mitterrand between 1981 and 1984. He demonstrated his determination to forego ideological straitjackets to find practical solutions by stabilising the falling franc and implementing an austerity budget while seeking to promote social welfare.

Delors became the first three-time president of the European Commission between 1985 and 1994, overseeing a period of unparallelled success. A workaholic, he had an astonishing grasp of technical detail, which earned him the trust of the leaders of the European Council. In the first six months of 1988 alone Delors’ hyperactive commission took more decisions than the body had done in the decade between 1974 and 1984.

During his tenure, the commission achieved a single market for people, goods, capital and services by 1992 through the 1986 Single European Act, which Delors regarded as his finest achievement. The act gave the then European Economic Community new “competencies” in employment, development, the environment and technological research.

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty mandated a single currency — the euro — created by 1999 and now used by 20 EU countries. Delors further promoted a common defence and foreign policy and oversaw the birth of the EU in 1993. This golden age of integration significantly coincided with the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War, historic events that facilitated Delors’ push for European integration.

He argued that “the only choice Europe has is between survival and decline”, insisting that a supranational union was the only way to compete with the US and Japan at a time when China was still two decades away from becoming an economic superpower. The EU increased its membership from 10 to 15 under Delors’ energetic leadership.

Before the Frenchman entered the commission in 1985 the president was primus inter pares among the 17 commissioners in the “college”. Delors’ British biographer, Charles Grant, described how his subject instituted a bureaucratic revolution that led to power and ideas being centralised and flowing top-down rather than bottom-up.

His methods were ruthless and unorthodox, relying on a clandestine network of largely French “Eurocrats” planted in strategic positions within the 17,000-strong commission. Delors’ able compatriot, Pascal Lamy, was his chef de cabinet and the eminence grise behind his success.

Despite a widespread assumption that his success was linked to support from a former political patron, Mitterrand, Delors’ closest relationship actually was with Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor and paymaster of the European project. It was Kohl who had proposed Delors for election as commission president in 1984, not the Elysée Palace.

Delors supported German reunification early, even as Mitterrand and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher dithered. Kohl and Delors met privately about once a month, including in the chancellor’s hometown in the Rhineland-Palatinate. Both men were down to earth and had a wry sense of humour.

For all his strengths, Delors could sometimes be petulant: he threatened to resign at least a dozen times a year if he did not get his way, throwing tantrums in front of leaders, ministers and commissioners. Though he hated the grubby games politicians often feel forced to play, Delors would ironically become the consummate dealmaker, stitching together visionary political compromises in his quest to build Europe.

As he prepared to leave the EU, the commission’s most effective president eloquently summed up his own legacy: “Some of the houses I build stand up, some crumble. I think of myself as an engineer, and less a philosopher or political leader … My job is to provide momentum, ideas, initiatives.”

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

This article was first published by Business Day South Africa on 18 March 2024.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pretoria.