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Delors policy beliefs and strategy for EMU are analysed, in particular his role as animateur and ingénieur of the negotiations. His leadership before and during the Delors Committee is seen as central, especially in producing a unanimous report that bound in the EU central bank governors. Thereafter, his role is less significant. His role is considered in the context of his larger vision of European unification and his past experience as French Finance Minister. Within the European Commission, EMU is a case of informal presidentialization.

Mitterrand's beliefs about Europe and EMU and his governing style are analysed. The history of his engagement with this issue is traced from the ERM crisis of 1983 and the issue of reconciling socialism to the ERM through to the Balladur Memorandum and the French management of the Delors Committee in 1988–89. The hesitations of Bérégovoy are examined, alongside the role of presidential leadership in taking an active role after the Delors Report, especially through Guigou.

This chapter explores Jacques Delors’ blurred vision of Economic and Monetary Union. It shows how the former central banker, French finance minister, member of the European Parliament, and Commission president was committed to—but vague about—the project of Economic and Monetary Union. It relates this understanding to Delors’ economic and political education, the individuals that exerted the greatest intellectual influence on him, his place within the French political and policy-making tradition, and the institutional context in which his views evolved. Delors’ legacy for EMU—and his evolving views on this project in view of the euro crisis—are also explored.

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the informal realm of European deliberation and decision-making and the role the Commission presidency plays in it. The Commission presidency occupies a unique intermediary position within the institutional system of the European Union, as the only office that participates in the four European-level policymaking arenas—the College of Commissioners, the European Council, the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament. Mediative-institutional leadership encompasses the capacity to build consensus in the different decision-making arenas of the European Union as well as managing and guiding the Commission’s work effectively. The chapter analyzes the performance of institutional mediation of three Commission presidents, Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso. The study is based on twenty-nine semi-structured expert interviews as well as fourteen interviews conducted by the Oral History Program of the Historical Archives of the European Union.

This chapter conducts a systematic comparison of the agenda-setting performance of three Commission presidents, Walter Hallstein (1958–67), Jacques Delors (1985–95), and José Manuel Barroso (2004–14). Since the Commissionis vested with the right of initiative at the EU level, influencing and shaping the EU’s agenda is one of the Commission president’s primary political functions. The chapter first focuses on the preference setting of topics, that is, when did Commission presidents announce their agendas, which were their main political topics, where were their speeches delivered, and how did their issue attention develop over time. Next, speeches delivered in the European Parliament are analyzed in terms of issue framing and rhetorical strategies to understand why particular topics made it onto the president’s agenda. The analysis is enabled through systematic content and discourse analyses, making use of a total of 1,177 public and semi-public speeches of the three presidents under study.

Politics is not a business exclusively conducted “behind closed doors,” so any comprehensive analysis of political leadership needs to take into account leaders’ public performance. This chapter examines the public leadership performance of the Commission presidents Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso. Based on the theory of candidate–media agenda convergence, performance of public leadership is considered strong when a leader is not only visible in the media but when his or her political agenda and issue frames are accepted by the media and overlap with the topics with which he or she is associated. The analysis thus focuses on the media’s attention allocation to the presidents’ political agendas and the tone of the reporting, assessing it as positive, neutral, or negative. The analysis is based on one print medium, the British Financial Times, encompassing 536 articles between 1958 and 2014 that directly cover each president under study.

This chapter provides a systematic overview of the office of Commission president, introducing the office’s political leadership demands, institutional structure, and situational setting and how these have developed over time. The chapter argues that the institutional-situational environment of the Commission presidency has remained relatively weak and unpredictable concerning the provision of political leadership, meaning that neither variable provides resources that reliably exceed the office’s many constraints. The chapter then turns to the variable of personal (pre-)dispositions, explaining the grounds of comparability on which the three case studies, Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors and José Manuel Barroso, have been selected and summarizing their career backgrounds and relevant political attributes. The conclusion sets forth the basic argument of the study—that if the institutional structure and the situational setting are weak and unstable, personal (pre-)dispositions predominantly influence the provision of political leadership, and therefore substantially shape patterns of political leadership performance.

The epilogue provides an update on relations between religious communities and European institutions from the 1979 European elections until today. In particular, it focuses on Delors’s call for the ‘heart and soul’ of Europe. For the first time in the history of the acquis communautaire, the 2009 Lisbon Treaty institutionalises an ‘open, transparent and regular’ dialogue between European institutions and ‘churches, religions and communities of conviction’. The epilogue presents the shape of this dialogue today in relation to the material of previous chapters.

The conclusion offers a summary of the main theoretical and empirical insights this book has produced. The empirical findings confirm the study’s basic argument that weak institutional powers and an unreliable situational setting presuppose a stronger dependence on the incumbent’s personal capacities and (pre-)dispositions to successfully address the office’s leadership demands. A comprehensive assessment of the political leadership performance of the three Commission presidents Walter Hallstein, Jacques Delors, and José Manuel Barroso, concerning their agenda-setting leadership, mediative-institutional leadership, and public leadership, finds that Hallstein’s leadership performance was moderately strong-executive, Delors’ was strong-entrepreneurial, and Barroso’s was weak-passive/non-leadership. A preliminary evaluation of the leadership performance of Jean-Claude Juncker, Commission president between 2014 and 2019, follows. Finally, there is a plea to substantially strengthen the institutional powers of the Commission presidency to make it less dependent on individual agency and incumbents’ personal (pre-)dispositions.

This chapter reviews the role of the UK in the creation of the European Single Market, including the leadership of the UK Commissioner Lord Cockfield, Mrs. Thatcher, as then Prime Minster, and Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission. The chapter argues that the timing of the negotiation and implementation of the Single Market on the arbitrary date of 1992 was chosen to coincide with both Mrs. Thatcher’s neo-liberal market ideology and the UK presidency of the European Council. The chapter particularly illustrates the way in which the Single Market was established to include all the wider implications of internal trade including the free movement of labour, business regulations, internal transport as tools of competitiveness. The chapter also demonstrates that shaping influencing on the key transport projects supported by the EU to improve internal access have been the ones that have been implemented within the UK without any reference to EU policy or support. It concludes that these policies without clear derivation become orphan policies that emerge and have no political hinterland.

As President of the Bundesbank Council, Karl-Otto Pöhl occupied a pivotal position in the negotiations leading to EMU, principally within the Delors Committee and within the Committee of EC Central Bank Governors. Based on original research, this chapter examines the factors conditioning Pöhl’s attitude to EMU, the paradox that accompanied his contribution to EMU, and his longer-term legacy. Pöhl was sceptical of the idea of monetary union, and many (including Margaret Thatcher) thought that he would block the proposal; but in fact, he agreed to sign the Delors Report. Later, he was instrumental in designing the ECB statute, and in particular the emphasis on the price stability mandate. At the same time, he offered public criticism of the project of monetary union. The chapter offers an insight into the role of the Bundesbank staff as well as of the President of the Bundesbank Council in the making of monetary union.

The euro, the only transnational currency issued and managed by a single common institution, was the last utopia of the 20th century, a true economic utopia armed with its own rules and institutions. It was a complete economic and monetary revolution: a currency that did not rely on a state or on a commodity. The project behind the euro was born in the late 1980s, when Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, proposed it as the next step for Europe’s economic and political integration. There were reasons to be sceptical, but Europeans decided to push through with the project nonetheless. In Europe, there was strong preference for fixed exchange rates, and the subordination of other central banks to German monetary policy decisions was not a stable configuration. But there were also deeply political reasons to push through with the project, which German reunification helped to trigger.

The architects of the euro could see that an independent central bank and a mechanism to enforce budgetary discipline were not enough to ensure the new currency’s viability. They could see that a lasting monetary union was bound to require something more, but could not agree on what this “something” was. Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, saw the euro as a milestone on the road to an even more ambitious endeavor: a “federation of nation-states.” German chancellor Helmut Kohl largely spoke of “political union”, while Mitterrand’s France spoke of “economic government”. Both these expressions were borne of the same intuition, but superficial differences obscured deeper convergence and fuelled suspicion. In the end, the euro was created without significant political foundations and without any mechanisms for solidarity between countries, and Eurozone countries were left to deal with the challenges and risks associated with the common currency on their own.

In this chapter the idea of the labour constitution is adopted as a framework through which to analyse the history of the EU and, in particular, the question of worker participation at different levels of economic organization—different sites of decision-making—within the Union. The focus lies with the European social dialogue at the supranational, cross-sectoral level, and its precursors in the Economic, and Coal and Steel, Communities. Viewed through the framework of the labour constitution, the key question to be addressed is taken to be that of the potential of the dialogue to function in a way comparable with the collective bargaining and corporatist arrangements of the (old) member states: to democratize the EU economic order, and to deliver improved substantive outcomes for European workers.