Jacques Delors and European Integration

The Paris summit of the heads of the nine member-governments of the European Communities last October presented another in a long series of theatrical non-events that have come to characterize international politics in Western Europe. To be sure, the final declaration of the meetings paid lip-service to a list of central problems that now confront the EC group: the need to coördinate economic and monetary policies and to establish communal regional, social, energy, environmental and industrial policies; and finally the desirability of creating institutional structures for the development of common policies toward the outside world. But the vague final reference to the transformation of the current institutions into a "European union" by the end of this decade was an attempt to camouflage continued political divisions among the nine and the paralysis of each of their governments.