Was Margaret Thatcher right about Jacques Delors after all?

From the outset, Britain was out of step with the ‘European project’, and the Iron Lady’s clashes with the Commission president may well have sown the seeds for Brexit. But, says Mary Dejevsky, her objections to the bloc becoming far more than a free-trade grouping could yet prove prescient

Margaret Thatcher greets Jacques Delors at the European Single Market conference in London, in 1988 (PA)

The death of Jacques Delors this week, 18 months short of his 100th birthday, prompts many thoughts. It marks the final passing of what might be called the Europe generation – those whose youth was defined by the Second World War, and who picked up the baton of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman in their determination to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again.

What began in 1950 as the European Iron and Steel Community graduated into the Common Market, the European Economic Community, the European Community and the European Union as it exists today. As president of the European Commission for a crucial decade from 1985, Delors was the prime mover of changes that forged a majority of European countries into a single trading market, and prepared Europe for its entry on to the world stage.

It is sometimes said that Delors was more of a European than he was French and, as such, a one-man embodiment of what was becoming the European idea. One strand of supporting evidence was his decision, despite favourable polls and much urging, not to stand for election as president of France after he left the Commission in 1995. He preferred to continue his advocacy for Europe.

This interpretation may be true, but only up to a point. Delors presided over the European Commission through some of the greatest geopolitical shifts in the continent since the Second World War: the decline and fall of communism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Not only was he able to shape the future European institutions, but, inevitably, under his guidance, they took on something of a French tone.

In these crucial formative years, the EU was in many ways a project that suited France and bent to its ways. There was no need for Delors to be European before he was French. There was, to all intents and purposes, no substantial difference. With Britain, a latecomer to the already advancing European project, it was quite another matter.

Most of all, however – at least for me – the death of Delors and the memories it has unleashed on both sides of the Channel afford an opportunity to weigh what might have been.

It had surely to be a malign force of history that elevated a very serious, very assiduous, dare I say very French, administrator to the top job in Europe at a time when Margaret Thatcher, as British prime minister, was at the height of her power.

Equally serious, very driven, and in many respects very English, and from a similarly modest background (her father was a small businessman; his, a messenger at the Bank of France), Thatcher had her own views about what the future of Europe should – and even more should not – be. And, lest she forget, there was constant prodding from her party’s ever-more Europhobic wing. Here were two big political beasts harbouring very different assumptions and very different ideas about Europe.

It is tantalising to imagine how differently Europe’s future might have unfolded had someone else been sitting in either Thatcher’s or Delors’s chair. How might Harold Wilson have got on with Delors – or Tony Blair? How might Thatcher have responded, say, to Jacques Santer (from Luxembourg) as Commission president, or the Portuguese Jose Manuel Barroso? Was it a matter of political left and right that Thatcher and Delors saw Europe so differently, or more of character?

Or might it rather have been a reflection of the quite different experiences of Britain and France, and most Continental European nations, during the war?

It can be argued that it is this difference, more than anything else – Britain’s emergence from the war as an impoverished victor, without any national experience of enemy occupation or shifting borders – that has kept the UK aloof from the European Union and ultimately, maybe, led to Brexit.

And might such considerations have precluded any British prime minister, not just Margaret Thatcher, from signing up to an ever closer union? The UK’s carefully tended post-Second World War national mythology, with its assumed right to “lead” and the centrality of national sovereignty, was bound to complicate any more communal endeavour.

Maybe it was not just Thatcher vs Delors, but maybe it was. Personal character counts for more than is often realised in international – especially neighbour – relations. Thatcher and Delors might just have been the worst possible pairing at that particular juncture in European history.

Could it be, though, that in the longer sweep of history, Thatcher’s objections to the EU evolving from a primarily free-trade grouping to an economic and political federation, may turn out not to have been completely wrong. Enlargement, just as Thatcher foresaw – and intended – has sown divisions, and may prevent further entrenchment of an economic and political union. Those divisions are currently largely obscured by the show of unity following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they are becoming harder and harder to bridge.

This is because the motivations of many of the East and Central Europeans are different from those who originally joined. The Common Market was primarily a peace project, for which its members were prepared to give up a (small) degree of national sovereignty. For others, especially those to the east and especially since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, the EU is a wealth and security project – as it so clearly is now for Ukraine.

There is a basic conflict between those motivations, which manifests itself periodically in disputes, notably for example between Brussels and Budapest. This is also partly why plans for Ukraine’s accession will be a lot harder to realise than might appear from today’s promises.

Ukraine could even become the straw that breaks the camel’s back; at very least, it will strain the EU's tenuous unity to its limits. Could this be where Delors’s project for ever-closer, including monetary, union reaches its end?

Personally, I hope not. But I would also hope for a return to a recognition of the EU, as it is now, as a peace project – and one that has been phenomenally successful in those terms.

My generation of Britons grew up with school exchanges and language-learning. Nazi Germans were pantomime enemies, as distinct from real Germans who became fellow Europeans and friends. French and Germans, whose rivalry cost so much bloodshed in Europe for so long, have lived side by side, in peace, since 1945.

I use that phrasing – more familiar from the succession of now defunct Middle East peace processes – deliberately. The Good Friday Agreement has brought peace, but not reconciliation, in Northern Ireland. In invading Ukraine, Russia has not only helped Ukrainians strengthen their own sense of nationhood, but created a fearsome enemy for generations to come. How far Israel and the Palestinians are from peace, let alone reconciliation, is now catastrophically clear.

Whatever the future of the EU, its origins as a peace project, and a highly successful one, should not be forgotten. This was the achievement that Delors set out first to entrench and then to enshrine in common institutions. He succeeded in the first; the second is still a work in progress.