Delors outlines agenda for Maastricht reforms

Date: 12/10/1995

By Elizabeth Wise

JACQUES Delors, who frequently clashed with finance ministers during a decade as Commission president, is pressing for a political counterweight to the single-mindedness of the future European Central Bank.

In a rare public appearance in Brussels since leaving in January, Delors expressed optimism about the future of the European Union despite the difficulties it is currently facing and the uncertainty over reaching the goals set out in the Maastricht Treaty.

“We're in a difficult period but we'll get out of it because we have economic growth and the credibility of economic and monetary union (EMU) is strong, even if some countries are turning in on themselves,” he said. But he warned that EMU would not work unless member states coordinated their economic policies to the same extent that they are coordinating their monetary policies. “The E must be as strong as the M in the union,” he said.

Delors called for tighter cooperation both in building a common foreign and security policy and in judicial affairs. He insisted on the need for more work on Europol, saying that trying to fight organized crime without shared data was “like being on the Maginot line in 1939 with soldiers but no tanks or airplanes”.

Delors was in Brussels yesterday (11 October) to receive the Adolphe Bentinck prize at the Centre for European Policy Studies.