Jacques Delors
6 quotes
Biography
Jacques Lucien Jean Delors was a French politician who served as president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. Delors played a key role in the creation of the European single market, the euro and the evolution of the (then) European Economic Community (EEC) towards the modern European Union (EU).
"Europe needs an army to fight the resource wars of the twenty-first century."
"I have five questions that I ask people who have power, and I recommend them to the House. If I see someone who is powerful, be it a traffic warden, Rupert Murdoch, the head of a trade union or a Member of Parliament, I ask myself these five questions: "What power have you got? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How can we get rid of you?" That last question is crucial. We cannot get rid of Jacques Delors; we cannot get rid of the [European] Commission. We can get rid of a Government; but we cannot get rid of European legislation that a Government have entrenched during their period in office—be they a Labour Government with the Tories coming or the other way around."
"At the very moment the eastern bloc disintegrated, the EEC mooted a major step in the opposite direction. The commission’s head, Jacques Delors, proposed in 1990 that the EEC become an executive agent of the European Parliament, with the currently sovereign Council of Ministers as merely its senate. This would drastically increase the unelected commission’s authority and diminish national sovereignty. It was constitutionally–not to mention politically–explosive. The EU was becoming a state without a nation. Britain’s Thatcher reacted in the House of Commons, ‘No, no, no!’ She later added, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ The Delors initiative won little support and was scrapped, but Thatcher’s days were numbered. In November 1990 she was felled by a party coup and replaced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major."
"We have to struggle against the conservatives from all sides, not only the right-wingers, but also the left-wing conservatives who don't want to change anything."
"The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people."
"The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people."