Single currency's single-minded founding father

The father of the euro works in a cramped first-floor office on a noisy street facing the back of the Paris stock exchange. The French presidency was within his grasp in 1995, but Jacques Delors declined to stand. Nor will he participate in the June 1999 European parliamentary campaign. Now 73 years old, Mr Delors prefers to run a small think tank called Notre Europe, a few blocks from the Banque de France, where he started his career 53 years ago.

When I enter the room, Mr Delors seems cautious and suspicious. He wants to record our conversation on tape. Outside the window, the Bourse is bedecked with brightly coloured banners heralding the exchange's conversion to the euro on January 4th. As president of the European Commission for 10 years, it was he who laid the foundations for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). He pushed through the Single European Act of 1985 - articles of which he still cites from memory - badgered European leaders into adopting his 1989 plan for EMU, then oversaw the Maastricht Treaty that established the timetable for the single currency.

When Mr Delors completed his third mandate as president of the Commission in 1995, the Financial Times said "his contribution to the European cause rivals those of Jean Monnet, Walter Hallstein and Robert Schuman, the founding fathers of the European Community".

Mr Delors has said he does not aspire to be "the guardian of the museum of the fathers of Europe", but when I ask how it feels to know that the euro will become reality in just a few days, he harks back to the founding fathers. "My first thought is for those who, right after the war, had the vision of a united Europe - to prevent our countries ever reverting to war," he says. "Some of them are still alive, and I know how strong is their emotion, their happiness too."

A single currency was first suggested by the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner in 1970. But it was shelved because of the rise in oil prices and US abandonment of the gold standard. With (false?) modesty, Mr Delors minimises his role in re-launching the project in 1985. "I am satisfied like an artisan from whom someone ordered a table and chairs, who did everything he could to craft a fine work, and who today sees it in front of him, " he says. "I consider myself to be only one element in the chain."

Chancellor Helmut Kohl - "a great European if ever there was one", he says - asked Mr Delors to propose a plan for monetary union in June 1988. His report was adopted at the June 1989 Madrid summit. That was the most dangerous moment in the conception of the euro, Mr Delors says now. "What was difficult was obtaining the agreement of all the members of the committee on the report. There were some pretty delicate moments - some were sceptical about whether EMU was possible or worthwhile, others disagreed on the modalities." He regards obtaining a unanimous decision by the committee as his greatest achievement.

Mr Delors' relations with Margaret Thatcher's Britain were extremely poor. British tabloids called him "the Czar of Brussels" and the Sun urged its readers - to Mr Delors' fury - to shout, "Up Yours, Delors." While he and Mrs Thatcher were in "total disaccord" on European questions, he claims their personal relations were cordial and that he feels "only esteem for the English people". But will the British ever be real Europeans? Mr Delors shrugs. "The response belongs to the future," he says. "I don't want to comment on that."

Britain and Germany initially objected to a single currency, but Mr Delors believed in it for two reasons. "A single market will only bear fruit if there is a single currency, if we are no longer disturbed by variations in exchange rates.

"Second, since we started to build Europe by economic measures - since all attempts to do so by political means had failed - we had to go to the furthest limits of economic integration . . . so that people would feel the necessity for political union, which was after all the objective of the fathers of Europe."

A third reason mentioned by his biographers, but which he tactfully omits, is that EMU was the only way to break the Bundesbank's domination of European economies.

Mr Delors apparently does not share the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine's belief in the "federating shock" of the euro - its magical ability to foster greater political integration. "We mustn't put the cart before the horse," he says. "First we have to make a success of this project."

He fears the "Euro X" council of finance ministers established at French insistence is insufficient. EMU "cannot succeed unless there is a balance between monetary and economic control . . . as it stands, the economic pole . . . does not satisfy me. Alongside the so-called Stability Pact, we should have had another pact on the co-ordination of economic policies."

Mr Delors believes historical decline is the greatest threat to Europe. "At the end of the 19th century, before the two World Wars of the 20th, not only was Europe proud of having shared its great ideals with part of the world - pluralist democracy, human rights," he explains. "But moreover she had a dominant influence in the world. Since then, she had to accept de-colonisation, and that was a good thing. Twice she needed North America to triumph over fascism. And whatever anyone says, we needed the American shield during the Cold War. Europeans have modernised their economy and improved their standard of living, but think they can give up international influence.

"I am not resigned to this," he continues. "Historians will reproach us for not raising our heads . . . Do we have today the political vision of a united Europe, the courage to intervene in the affairs of this world whatever the cost? And also the courage to defend our own interests? If we have that, we can achieve a much more satisfying, less ambiguous relationship with the United States."

Mr Delors rarely speaks of his Catholic faith. "As long as I was a public figure, I never wanted to speak of my religious convictions," he explains. "I thought it was inappropriate, all the more so because I am very tolerant. But it is a fact that my religious convictions brought me very close to `Christian personalism', which is a philosophical approach whose main thinker was Emmanuel Mounier who created the review Esprit. This philosophical base always guided my commitments as a militant - both in trade unionism and in a Catholic movement called La Vie Nouvelle."

By this point, Mr Delors has shed his natural suspicion of journalists. He leaves the room to bring back two glasses of orange juice. The tape on his recorder has run out, but he doesn't bother to change it.

His creed personalisme communautaire - is a progressive, humanist form of Christianity that started in the 1930s and has Protestant as well as Catholic adherents. "Each individual is considered unique and worthy of respect, but at the same time he is defined by his relationship with the community to which he belongs," Mr Delors explains. "This leads us to distance ourselves from Marxism, because of its materialism and its determinist aspect, and it leads us to condemn neo-liberalism, which takes us from the market economy to a market society."

But, I protest, EMU is the ideal tool of economic liberalism.

"The navigator knows where he wants to go, but sometimes there are adverse winds," Mr Delors says with Jesuitical practicality. "You have to adapt to the wind - otherwise you go nowhere. You proclaim your convictions in the desert, but you do nothing."

While Mr Delors' children were growing up, their home was often the venue for trade union meetings. His daughter, Mrs Martine Aubry, is now the French minister for employment and solidarity, and ranks second in the French government. She physically resembles her father, and like him has a gruff manner that sometimes masks her generosity. Mr Delors admits that father and daughter discuss politics, that she asks him for advice. "But she is herself, and I am me," he insists. "For years, everyone said, `Jacques Delors' daughter'. I'm very happy that now they say `Martine Aubry'. It's much better that way."

Mr Delors feels his daughter is continuing his work, and this gives him satisfaction. In France, where he served as Francois Mitterrand's finance minister before moving to the European Commission, he is remembered as the man who would not be king. Although opinion polls in 1994 showed that two thirds of the French public wanted him to be president, he refused to stand.

"People say I'm an intellectual who wandered into politics," he muses. He does not miss the gold-leaf salons of the Elysee. "I thought I might be elected, but that I would not have the majority to carry out the programme that was right for France and Europe. What would have been the point in lying? I couldn't bear to do that."