1 Of European Exceptionalism

The politically and ideologically charged context of post-1970s American neoliberal ascendance provided a backdrop against which the often-contradictory quest for a European Social Model gained traction. The cultural and social movements, leaders, policies and institutional changes that emerged out of the Seventies — a crucial turning point in American and world history — fundamentally reshaped the United States by moving the nation out of New Deal and Cold War liberalism into a new conservative era.¹¹

This transition forged an intellectual environment conducive to the seemingly hegemonic affirmation of the tenets of monetarism, supply-side economics, deregulation. As curtailing the intrusions of the Federal Government and dismantling the welfare state became the mobilizing tropes of the Republican elites, social provisions were irrefutably lambasted as economically counterproductive, politically toxic and — perhaps more importantly — morally corrosive. In reality, policy retrenchment in critical domains of health care, income support and pension schemes, was extremely difficult to achieve and, in most cases, the results were limited.¹² In his incisive account of such inconsistencies, Paul Pierson wrote:

The Reagan administration attempts to go on the offensive against this extensive system of retirement provision collapsed in the face of massive and unified resistance. Increasingly, the administration found itself on the defensive, forced to respond to a policy agenda not of its own choosing. Although some cutbacks resulted from trust-fund pressures, the Social Security program survived — indeed almost flourished — through a decade of budgetary austerity.¹³

Delors swiftly attacked and publicly exposed this conundrum.¹⁴ Yet, the flourishing network of conservative think tanks, philanthropic organizations, activists, intellectuals and pundits was relentlessly committed to reshape the public debate, creating and sustaining an impregnable narrative that eventually cornered the opponents.¹⁵ Individualism became the dominant language and frame for talking about society, economics, gender, history. The intellectual vigor of the neoliberal crusade variably resonated across the Atlantic as Margaret Thatcher launched her own attack against social democracy and neoliberal tendencies in postwar Dutch society gradually mutated into a key influence on the policy paradigms of the 1980s.¹⁶

In light of the transnational shrinkage of the “language of the social” and against the mounting pressure towards the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the deregulation of manufacturing and finance, small government and balanced budgets, Delors tried to resist the tide waging a battle of ideas which pivoted on two main assumptions. The first moved from an acute awareness of the pace and irreversibility of change in the international political economy. The second was rooted in a peculiar understanding and use (and abuse) of modern European history. For its overarching power, the United States loomed large in his mind: it was the mirror into which his Europe reflected itself; and the formidable counter-model against which his narrative of Europe would be refined.

Writing prose of exceptional fluency, narrating lucidly and arguing cogently, his pages and speeches were enlivened by rhetorical devices, piercing characterizations, striking metaphors, ironic wit and occasionally Manichean language.

One of the linchpins of Delors’s discourse was the incessant invitation to fully acknowledge the reality of the present challenges and the momentous change. The “shock of the global” had contributed to the acceleration of inescapable forms of interdependence, particularly visible in the technological revolution, that he deemed hazardous to ignore. Delors would therefore relentlessly insist on the irrevocability of globalization and the impossibility, for the European Community, to overlook the constraints it imposed. Potentially, the EC had the ability to choose how to govern the transformation of the world economy. It didn’t have the possibility to block it, let alone reverse it. Invoking the need for a realistic and dispassionate analysis, he then tackled the inherent tensions between the national welfare state and European integration, which — he argued — had dramatically intensified after the major transformation of the international political economy of the 1970s.¹⁷

Delors was fully aware that the legitimacy of the nation-state traditionally rested upon its capacity to shield, protect, support its citizen “from the cradle to the grave.” As the ultimate provider, and caretaker, the State was reluctant to surrender its sovereignty in this fundamental policy area, that had been a central tool in preserving the allegiance of its citizens since World War II. But he maintained that the inability of the nation-state to face the enhanced global competition in an age of financial crisis and technological development had exhausted the possibility for a social-democratic change at the national level, and therefore a much broader euro-Keynesian project had to see the light.¹⁸

Equally influenced by the Social-democratic heritage and Christian social thought, and in tune with the broader evolution of the French Socialist Party, Delors purposely eschewed what he called “the temptation to simplify.”¹⁹ The question was not whether the State should completely retreat or retain its prerogatives. The question was how it could be reformed to be rescued. The envisioned transformation pivoted on a specific understanding of the marketplace that — in his view — exemplified the irrefutable and widening transatlantic estrangement. And in such distance and difference lied the distinctiveness of European history.

Speaking at the opening session of the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1981, Ronald Reagan argued that what “united (the societies that had achieved the most spectacular, broad-based progress)” was “their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace. Everyday life confirms the fundamentally human and democratic ideal that individual effort deserves economic reward.”²⁰ “So let me speak plainly,” he continued: “We cannot have prosperity and successful development without economic freedom; nor can we preserve our personal and political freedoms without economic freedom.”²¹ The upshot was a call for reducing “the rate of government spending, honouring the commitment to balance the budget, reducing tax rates to encourage productive investment and personal savings, eliminating excessive government regulation.”²²

Far from objecting to the importance of economic competition and freedom of enterprise as sources of dynamism, Delors questioned instead the efficacy of the market as exclusive instrument of regulation, particularly at the macro-economic level. While in favor of rationalizing State intervention and supporting a more active labor market policy, he would also insist on the defense of crucial State functions: redistribution and provision of fundamental collective services.

What Reagan’s vision symbolized, from Delors’s perspective, was instead the ultimate triumph of an atomized, disaggregated, privatized society, ruled by individualism, logics of profit and unrestrained competition; built on loose societal bonds and dramatically deprived of the foundational value of solidarity. The marketplace needed a moral conscience, he warned the European public, or societies would peril.

When, in 1985, U.S. Secretary for Commerce Malcolm Baldrige suggested the Europeans should let themselves be inspired by Reaganomics, Delors harshly responded: “here, in Europe, we don’t want a savage economy.”²³ What he aimed at was a reinvigorated economic community that could function as a place of sustainable economic growth, managed technological advancement and, above all, an area of social harmony. His vision of European modernity was based on the support of individual as well as societal aspirations: sustained dialogue between management and labor; health and safety standards at work; recognition of the role of workers in the company; more and better free time, defense of natural environment, new urban planning, enhanced quality of collective services, equality of chances.

In the mid-1980s, for his outspoken condemnation of the main tenets of neoliberalism and for his vivid depiction of an alternative model, he was frequently portrayed as the European leader capable of finally resisting the temptation of Reagonomics. This picture, however, doesn’t capture the many ambiguities and contradictions of the time. It tells one story, among many. The United States of Ronald Reagan remained, for Delors, a source of inspiration and a counter-model, a dubious hegemon but a needed one, a bluff and yet a threat. For the tremendous development of technological innovation, for the resources channeled to exploit its power and create new jobs, for the pace of growth and because it was a dynamic, young country, the United States was also to be admired.²⁴ Delors would relentlessly insist on Europe’s urgent need to catch-up in the technological competition. While the US spending on research and development had increased by 30 per cent over the first five years of the decade, transnational European cooperation and investment were still very low. Delors’s perception of what Servan-Schreiber had hinted at twenty years before — le défi américain — was pressing and the challenge had to be transformed into an opportunity to seize. However, what Europe needed was an endogenous response: “the solution does not lie in the imitation of foreign models, being them American or Japanese. Europe has the capacity to invent a specific path.”²⁵ Despite Delors’s admiration for the Silicon Valley, which he visited on his first trip to the US as President of the Commission, he made repeatedly clear that Europe’s road to progress would lead elsewhere. In an interview with the Washington Post on April 21, 1985 he claimed: “We are in a different position and we also have different traditions.”²⁶

The social attribute of this European tradition, pivotal in all his utterances, was ubiquitously pitted against the American model.²⁷ And it was presented as the linchpin of both the European project and heritage:

Poised between alienating, sterile, collectivism on the one hand and exuberant and socially intolerable individualism on the other, democratic Europe has been able to keep its balance, in a living humanism which does not belong to it or to you alone. We find this search for the best possible solution to the human problems of twentieth century society in Stockholm, Madrid, Bonn, Oslo, Vienna or Paris.²⁸

Evoking the wisdom and intellectual authority of one of the most influential and renown European historians — Fernand Braudel — Delors recalled how Europe was “committed to a shared destiny by Christian religion, rationalist thought, the development on its continent of science and technology and its taste for revolution and social justice.”²⁹

As he would frequently assert, the fundamental concepts of social justice and equity are embedded in Europe’s historical consciousness: “Europe is the land of the election of the balance between the society and the individual. Today, outside Europe this equilibrium is almost everywhere broken.”³⁰

Appealing to this foundational history was part and parcel of a largely shared understanding of European civilization as deeply and irremediably shaped by its ancient past. As Delors urged his “fellow European citizens” to reconnect more fully and more proudly with their traditions, the New Right in the US was keenly projected towards a new American dawn that stood in sharp contrast to the Old world. Suggestively, the Republican national convention of 1980 had staged the poem “America For Me” by Henry van Dyke:

Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down

Among the famous places and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of their kings —
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.

…

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack;
The Past is too much with her, the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.
Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!³¹

Throughout the 1980s, and well into the 1990s, many American conservative intellectuals used Europe as a negative model in the US culture wars.³² Antithetical understandings and representations of crucial issues like secularism, the welfare state, the environment, human rights, the role of international organizations and multilateral governance, global threats and developmental possibilities not only exacerbated a more general transatlantic divide but also shaped specific narratives that would have a lasting impact on conflicting and often competitive collective identities.³³

Delors’ s insistence on the specificity of an inherently superior European social model seems to have decisively contributed to that perception of difference and distance.

Reflecting upon Reagan’s mantra, what he saw in the issue of deregulation and marked hostility to the State was:

an approach that leads to a very dangerous conception of the respective places of the individual and the society and the relationship between. It means turning the back to what has been the ethics of trade unionism and social democratic thought for years, which consists in saying: the individual has rights and duties, but society also has them. And the European civilization is the only one which, by its very foundations, guarantees a common, philosophical base that attaches great importance to the dialectical tension between the individual and the society; whereas in the United States the emphasis is on the exaltation of the individual, and in Japan, despite a very protective family life, it is the weight of society that appears preponderant.³⁴

In this sense, the Reagan revolution unequivocally provided Delors with a well-defined conceptual framework to think about what a united Europe should not be.³⁵. In the name of its identity, for the sake of its citizens and for the larger world.

The European vision of modernity had indeed an inherent global dimension and ambition. It stemmed from “a desire to remain present on the stage of history, whereas previously at Yalta, without consulting the Europeans, certain people had decided to divide Europe. We never accepted this,” Delors emphatically said at the Council of Europe only two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he continued, “you can see the changes in progress in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, the concomitance of these changes with the speeding up of European integration since the Single European Act. All that gives us reason to set ourselves the target of overcoming the division of the Old World. In a word: we must wipe out Yalta!.”³⁶

And do more, eventually. What Delors yearned to shape was a united Europe that would lead the way in developing a balanced international order that could prove the compatibility between economic dynamism and social justice.

Beyond championing an economic reform of the European Community to achieve this goal, Delors relentlessly advocated for the need to anchor policies to powerful narratives, because narratives underpin and bind communities, they inform and shape politics, they stir a sense of belonging and as such they gain relevance. The EC had to be seen not only as a set of practices, institutions and lobbies, but as an intellectual and cultural construction, a design of the mind evoked by visions, perceptions, and hopes.

The crucial function of this storytelling was to evoke people’s memories of the past, link them to their experience of the present and, above all, imagination of the future.³⁷ Far from being merely descriptive, his narrative aimed to produce ideas about cultural, socio-economic and political developments that seem significant, understandable, and acceptable to his audience.³⁸ Speaking the language of the social, in the age of neoliberal ascendance, was a way of signifying the European tradition and constructing a meaningful vision for the future.

To do so, Jacques Delors tapped into a longstanding and shared narrative of European primacy in the field of social policy that he interpreted as unrivaled, unchallenged and unique. Within this grand scheme, nuances, contradictions and contingency were somehow dispersed. A Manichean and almost a-historical reading of the development of social security and social rights apparently led to eclipsing the US experience and contribution to the field.

As historians have variously detailed, in the first phase of the history of modern welfare the Old Continent was the original laboratory of ideas. Daniel Rodgers has unveiled how American cosmopolitan progressives crisscrossed the Atlantic from the late Nineteenth century thorough the New Deal to learn from Europe and repair the damages of unbridled capitalism.³⁹ But the torch was then passed to the United States with Roosevelt’s “Four Freedom Address,” the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by Eleanor Roosevelt.⁴⁰ As US historian Maurizio Vaudagna fittingly recalls, “social security and social rights came to form an essential component of the wartime notion of the West, the Atlantic community, and democratic citizenship.”⁴¹

However, as the American “politics of growth” superseded the European emphasis on social security and as the rise of the New Right and the neoliberal revolution seemed destined to permanently transfigure the American social landscape, the US “radical” social moment sank into oblivion and it was almost muted in Delors’s narrative. More importantly, social policy transmuted from the lynchpin of Atlanticism into major source of discord and basis for rival exceptionalist discourses.

Within an irredeemably fractured West, bolstered by a stronger awareness of its past, Europe could now potentially surge to embody a new polity. Using a metaphor tellingly cherished also by the French Minister of Culture — and strong critic of US neo-imperialism — Jack Lang, Europe was committed to avoid the establishment of a world order similar to that of “a fox in the henhouse:”⁴²

It is necessary to reach dynamic compromises … not only to defend our legitimate interests at the industrial, agricultural, and financial level but also to contribute to an international economic system different from the one of the “fox in the henhouse.” We must demonstrate, through our proposals, through our exemplar activity, that efficiency and justice can go hand in hand … Equality doesn’t mean only rewarding entrepreneurial spirt and willingness to take risks; it also means nurturing an embracing society, mindful of equality of chances …⁴³

More than thirty years into the single market, in the midst of seismic shifts within the EU and beyond, one is left to wonder what is left of Delors’s championing of Social Europe. The current, blatant state of crisis surely exposes the limits of the past and it imposes a critical reflection on the shortcomings of the integration process.

While the institutional architecture and the economic reforms put in place in the 1980s proved inadequate to deal with the challenges of an ever-integrated world, the tenets of Delors’s vision seem nonetheless to endure. As Timothy Garton-Ash observed:

Like no other continent, Europe is obsessed with its own meaning and direction. Idealistic and teleological visions of Europe at once form, legitimate and are themselves informed and legitimated by the political development of something called the European Union. The name ‘European Union’ is itself a product of this approach, for a union is what the EU is meant to be, not what it is.⁴⁴

While not inventing this approach, Delors has certainly championed it. His intellectual construction contributed to draw the boundaries of Europe’s distinctiveness; it turned the imagined Europe into a project for the modern future: Europeans may not be living in a superior, egalitarian, cohesive and morally commendable society, but they are bound by a mission to move towards it. This is what defines them, he claimed, as a “civilization.”