Jacques Delors destroyed the European left

The Socialist Jacques Delors laid much of the groundwork for the techno-authoritarian and anti-democratic juggernaut that the EU has become

I’ve written for UnHerd about the legacy of Jacques Delors, the former President of the European Commission who passed away on Wednesday. Delors is often eulogised as the “founding father of modern Europe” — as if that were a good thing. A more apt description would be “founding father of the techno-authoritarian and anti-democratic juggernaut that is the EU”. Indeed, no single single individual bears a greater responsibility for the neoliberalisation and Maastrichtisation of Europe — and the birth of the euro, the most dysfunctional and upward-wealth-transferring currency ever created — than Delors. As I write in the article:

There’s a story European progressives like to tell themselves: that, after the horrors of the Second World War, their governments struck a quasi-utopian compromise between capitalism and socialism — only for it to be corrupted by the import of the cutthroat capitalism that defined Reagan’s neoliberal counterrevolution in the early Eighties.

It’s a comforting fable, designed to excuse their own failures. It is, however, completely untrue. Neoliberalism wasn’t exported to Europe from across the Atlantic (or from across the Channel, for that matter). It was a largely homegrown affair — one that was, in fact, spearheaded by European Socialists, and by one Socialist in particular: Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Thomas Fazi

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