Jacques Delors was the EU's bold engineer

Jacques Delors, a former head of the European Commission and key figure in the creation of the euro currency, died in his sleep in his Paris home at the age of 98, his family announced on Wednesday.

Marked by World War II and its horrors, the generation Delors grew up in developed a creative, formative determination — a determination that drove Delors, as president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, to lay the foundations of the modern EU.

Within half a year of taking office in January 1985, Delors presented his masterpiece, the White Paper on the Completion of the Single Market, and worked energetically to implement it by the end of 1992. The fact that Europeans today are free to settle and look for work anywhere in Europe, employ a worker from a neighboring country or easily buy products from all over the bloc is all thanks to this white paper.

And his political legacy jingles in our wallets. Every day, around 341 million Europeans pay with the euro currency. Few among them will know that the euro was conceived in a brief, 38-page report by Delors in 1989 that laid the foundation for European economic and monetary union.

But Delors didn't just have friends among the EU heads of state and government. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's response to Delors' proposals for European institutional reform was a scathing "No, no, no"; the two clashed fiercely on numerous occasions.

When the heads of state and government bade him farewell at his last official EU summit in December 1994, they were full of praise, and attributed "the 10 most successful years of European unification" to him.

Life of service

Delors was born on July 20, 1925, in Paris and grew up in modest circumstances as an only child. In 1948, he married Marie Lephaille and the couple had a daughter, Martine, and a son, Jean-Paul. Martine Aubry followed in her father's footsteps, entering political life and becoming mayor of Lille. Jean-Paul died of leukemia in 1982, and Marie died in 2020.

Delors began his career at the Banque de France. In 1974 Delors, who had studied law and economics, joined his first political party, France's new Socialist Party. He rose relatively quickly to join the party's executive committee, and arrived in Brussels in 1979 as a member of the European Parliament.

In 1981, Delors left Brussels to serve as economics and finance minister to French President Francois Mitterrand. It was Mitterrand who successfully proposed him for the post of European Commission president in 1985.

In 1995, after completing his term in office as European Commission president, Delors did not, as anticipated, stand as a candidate for the French presidency. He had no intention of retiring, though, and instead became involved with UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 1996 he started his own foundation, Notre Europe, also known as the Jacques Delors Institute, through which he would frequently comment on the work of European unification.

After the deaths of Jean Monnet and Helmut Kohl, that of Jacques Delors marks the passing of the last of only three Honorary Citizens of Europe, a title bestowed in recognition of extraordinary work to promote European cooperation.

Delors, a courageous and pragmatic thinker who was ahead of his time, constructed the European Union in its present form, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

This article was originally written in German.