Erasmus creator Jacques Delors: A humanist worth emulating

Tributes to Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, who died on 27 December, have ranked him as an inspirational European alongside Jean Monnet, another founding father of the European Union.

The former French minister is overwhelmingly praised for his achievements as commission president between 1985 and 1995, both in steering the creation of Europe’s globally important single market in 1986 and, for laying the foundations for economic and monetary union, including the single currency, the euro, via the Treaty of Maastricht of 2002.

In a ceremony of homage to Delors conducted with all the pomp of the French state, President Emmanuel Macron also shone a spotlight on Delors as the creator of the Erasmus programme.

Delors was exceptional among commission presidents in advancing educational opportunities within the constraints of the policy-making rules of the EU (before 1992, the European Economic Community).

Education was being widely seen as an engine of economic growth, as the world turned towards the idea of a knowledge economy. As Delors had always maintained, it was also an essential element of social policy, and the economic and the social should advance together.

But Delors also saw education more widely as an instrument for human and social betterment. From an early age he had a multidimensional view of education as having the potential to enrich many aspects of an individual’s life: the personal, the professional, the cultural and the civic.

A UNESCO commission on the purpose and possibilities of education, which he chaired late in life, saw the purposes of education as “learning to learn, learning to do, learning to live together, learning to be”.

To me, as someone who saw Delors at work over these years, four examples illustrate how his educational philosophy could flourish within EU policy-making rules.

Tempus Programme

The creation of the Tempus Programme in 1990 shows Delors as an instigator. He was inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the existence of a model in the Erasmus programme (created in 1987) to consider how the EU could help students and academics from the communist east to enjoy an Erasmus-like experience.

Late on a Friday evening and working away in his shirt sleeves in an almost empty commission building, he summoned the relevant education official, Hywel Ceri Jones, to ask him to create a programme for Central and Eastern Europe based on the Erasmus model.

As Jones recounts the story, Delors did not beat about the bush. “Come back to me on Monday with programme proposals for higher education and vocational training modelled on what your officials have already achieved with Erasmus and training initiatives,” he said.

The hyper-intense weekend in which Jones worked with one of his brightest officials produced the outline of the Tempus Programme and a foundation for vocational training. Delors’ intuition had caught the mood of the moment. The president’s proposals went through all the procedural hoops in record time. The Tempus decision was approved just six months later.

No programme can be created by individual fiat. Hywel Ceri Jones played an essential role, as did a dozen or more officials. But in calling on Jones from the start, Delors could count on formidable commission skills. Jones was the official who, more than anyone, had developed the potential for the EU to take a constructive role in education.

From 1973, when the UK joined the then EEC, and he was an almost invisible dot on the commission organigramme as a humble desk officer, he, like Delors, took the view that education and training were an integral part of social policy. The essentials of the Erasmus programme grew out of a pilot scheme developed within his commission unit back in 1976.

Erasmus programme

The case of Erasmus shows Delors as pivotal, or so I argue based on academic research. A less committed president might have vetoed the proposal at an early stage. But he backed the two commissioners involved: Peter Sutherland, the education and training commissioner, and his successor Manuel Marin, both of whom in turn were backing their teams. Other commissioners could have created a hurdle, but they did not.

Delors was also there at critical moments, like ensuring the budget commissioner played his part in allocating the future Erasmus a budget many times over what education had received in the past. At another moment, with a Thatcher veto in the background, his role was to work on the heads of government whose political approval was needed before what he called “this little programme, Erasmus” could become law, as it did in June 1987.

Macron was right to cite Erasmus. The programme has been a triumph for the education community and Delors’ conception of multi-strand education. It is one of the EU’s most appreciated programmes. In its current form as Erasmus+, it annually enables more than 650,000 students, apprentices, pupils, volunteers and teachers to engage in study, training, teaching and volunteering in another country. It also supports the Bologna Process which underpins the European Higher Education Area and the Jean Monnet professor scheme.

Treaty of Maastricht, 1992

Delors was not tempted to use the force of law when it came to education. Though he was considered dictatorial by Thatcher and her allies, Delors was highly supportive of the Treaty of Maastricht in his determination that the EU should not in future legislate on education, but he felt it should do everything to encourage support for its many dimensions.

As he told me after he retired: “There was never any question that I would have pushed for legislation for education. Education has to be a national matter. We are talking about national identity, national cultural traditions and national ways of doing things.”

White paper

Another very ‘Delors moment’ occurred in 1993. As many advanced economies were interpreting the idea of a knowledge economy along neoliberal lines, European leaders requested a white paper on a new economic model.

Luce Pépin, who wrote the commission’s official history of education and training in 2006, writes that the White Paper “was probably one of the most complete and most ambitious of discussion papers produced up to that time ... highlight[ing] the importance of education and training systems as promoting individual fulfilment and citizenship values [as well as] supporting job-creating economic growth”.

Macron and others have attributed Delors’ many achievements to his early years and the values inculcated by his peasant grandparents, his modest family circumstances, and their Catholicism. When the young Jacques flirted with ideas of life as a star footballer, a jazz musician or even becoming a grand couturier, he got packed off to the Banque de France, where he became active in the trade union movement.

The trade union was his opportunity to work out the practice and philosophy of industrial relations based on social partnership in support of economic growth, rather than the traditional class struggle. It was integral to the project that the “social dialogue should operate at local level”.

As he was to say later, the three pillars of such a relationship were competition as necessary for stimulus, cooperation between participants, and solidarity as an expression of unity and human dignity.

Lifelong learning

That last element was theorised later as containing opportunities for la formation permanente or lifelong learning, on the understanding that the education undertaken would be at the employee’s choice, whether vocational or cultural. Formation permanente was incorporated into French law in 1971.

Delors’ achievements owed much to the context in which he was operating. It is hard to imagine he would have fared so well in a national political context focused on short-term concerns. The point of the EU was to think more strategically.

He inspired great personal loyalty from those who worked for him, but he was also lucky in his time to be able to count on productive political relationships with the French President Mitterrand and Germany’s Chancellor Kohl as well as the European Parliament.

Of course, he did not achieve all that he wanted to, especially as the economic climate became increasingly neoliberal. But his humanism is a legacy others might reflect on and try to emulate. Not least those in Britain and those in the EU who would like to see Britain back in Erasmus+.

Dr Anne Corbett is senior associate at LSE Consulting, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom. Her 2005 book Universities and the Europe of Knowledge (Palgrave) has a detailed account of how the Erasmus decision was developed and agreed.