Postwar European integration is generally presented in the official discourse of the European Union as very much a peace project after World War II — a project of a few visionary fathers of Europe like Jean Monnet, Alcide de Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer. In fact, it was mostly an economic project that was led by conservative, Christian Democratic, and liberal political forces. Socialist forces were marginal in the first years of this integration process, while the communist parties were absent from the European institutions until the late 1960s and early ’70s.

The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), which is the forerunner of today’s European Union. It created a common market and customs union among the founding members, which were Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The treaty came after a lot of discussions and preparatory work and marked the victory of a liberal vision of economic integration at the expense of other, more social visions.

In the Treaty of Rome, just twelve out of 248 articles were devoted to social policy, and out of these twelve articles, many were quite irrelevant. There were only three truly relevant articles, one of which created a European social fund which had very limited funding, at least until the late 1960s. The second was an important article on equal pay for men and women within the EEC, but this was not applied until the late 1970s. The third article related to nondiscrimination in working conditions and access to social protection for workers moving between different member states, but again, it was not applied until much later.

To put things simply, the general conviction of the people who drafted the treaty and the European leaders who signed it was that social progress would naturally follow from economic prosperity. The EEC would create such prosperity, and this would naturally bring about social progress. Of course, this did not happen, but things remained largely unchanged with this social deficit in the plans for European integration until the late 1960s.

European unity has been one of the most contentious questions for the European left in the twentieth century, particularly at certain moments. One such moment came just after World War II with the Marshall Plan. This was a European recovery program financed by US loans, which was intertwined with other plans for European integration in those years and with the dynamics of the early Cold War.

Communist parties and trade unions were unanimously hostile to the Marshall Plan and to later projects of European integration, such as the European Coal and Steel Community that was created in 1951, or the EEC. In the view of those parties and unions, these projects were instrumental to isolating the Soviet Union, dividing the European continent and the world more generally into two blocs, with Western Europe as part of a Western bloc under US hegemony.

They denounced those early projects of Western European integration as being capitalist, bourgeois, Catholic, militarist, and colonial. This started to change a bit in the 1960s, especially toward the end of that decade and the beginning of the ’70s. Communist trade unions were the first to change their attitude toward the EEC and its common market, which they started to view not so much as something that needed to be combated and abolished from the outside, but rather as something that could be changed and improved from within.

The communist parties also began to change their position, starting with the Italian Communist Party, where there was a group of pro-European reformers led by Giorgio Amendola. The French Communist Party, which was the other very important communist party in Western Europe during those years, was more hostile than the Italians, but it gradually shifted toward what we could call a sort of communist European reformism. By the late 1960s and early ’70s, communist unions and parties started to send representatives into European institutions and take part in the European decision-making process.

On the socialist side, things were a bit more complicated. Broadly speaking, we could say there was a line that divided European socialists and social democrats into two camps when it came to European integration and European unity. There was one camp comprising the French, Belgian, Dutch, and Luxembourgish parties, which were in favor of economic and political integration and supported those early plans after the war. Those in the second camp, including the British Labour Party and the Scandinavian social democrats, were opposed to supernational European unity.

The German Social Democrats went through a different evolution. They were initially hostile in the early 1950s, when their leader Kurt Schumacher used to denounce what he called the four European Cs: capitalism, conservatism, clericalism, and cartels. However, by the time that the Treaty of Rome was signed, they had shifted their position and voted in favor of it, like all the socialist parties of the six founding members.

The British Labour Party, on the other hand, remained hostile or divided on the question even after the UK, Denmark, and Ireland joined the EEC in 1973. I think these divisions were one of many different reasons why the European left failed to influence the European integration process and to realize a Social Europe during these years.

The end of the postwar boom was one of the factors that led European leaders to consider changes to their projects of European integration and to start imagining a European Community with a human face — that was an expression they used at the time. But there were other factors pushing them in the same direction.

You had the important workers’ and students’ movements that emerged in the late 1960s and continued well into the ’70s, as well as feminist and environmental movements. More broadly, there was an intensification of social conflict in Western Europe during those years. This had an impact on European leaders, prompting them to give more consideration to the social aspect of European integration.

There was another factor which is less well known: the affirmation from the late ’50s onward of a union of Third World countries pressing for the redistribution of power and wealth under the rubric of what they called the New International Economic Order. This had an influence on European decision-makers, especially those from the Left.

During this period, the Bretton Woods monetary system fell apart, and the postwar boom was exhausted. These years saw the disintegration of the postwar compromise, which had characterized the “golden years” of welfare capitalism for thirty years after the war in Western Europe. From the late ’60s until the early ’80s, all of this contributed to open up a window of opportunity for new alternatives and possibilities.

The European integration project, just like the world order in general, seemed to be at a crossroads. There were different roads that could have been taken, leading to radically divergent solutions. Neoliberalism was only one of several options available. One symbolic illustration of this was the joint award of the Nobel Prize for Economic Science to two sharply contrasting thinkers in 1974: the Swedish social democratic economist Gunnar Myrdal and the Austrian champion of neoliberalism Friedrich Hayek.

This window of opportunity led the European left to start discussing and struggling for their “Social Europe” project. It was a time when the European left was experiencing a moment of success from the late ’60s. Social democrats led governments across Western Europe: in Scandinavia, which was their historic stronghold, of course, but also in West Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK during the 1970s, and in France from the beginning of the ’80s. There were also countries like Luxembourg and Italy where social democrats were part of coalition governments.

At the same time, West European communists had very significant electoral successes, especially in France and Italy. European trade unions were also reaching a peak in terms of membership and influence. In this context, the European left could hope to influence the European integration process and to change Europe from within.

During the long 1970s, socialist parties and trade unions, as well as (to a lesser extent) their communist counterparts, started to improve their approach to transnational cooperation in order to better influence European policy. In 1973, the European Trade Union Confederation was created. For the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, unions from social democratic, Christian democratic, and communist traditions were united in an organization that represented around forty million workers. The following year, the Confederation of Socialist Parties of the European Community was set up, which was the forerunner of today’s Party of European Socialists.

The “Social Europe” project was devised during those years primarily by European socialists and social democrats and by the main European trade unions, especially those organized in the European Trade Union Confederation that I mentioned. These ideas were shared to some extent by European communists.

The project aspired, for example, to use European institutions to regulate, plan, and democratize the economy, to harmonize social and fiscal regimes at the European level, to raise living standards and working conditions, to shorten working hours, and so on. There was a series of proposals that would generally shift the balance of forces in favor of workers rather than capital.

The Social Europe project also included environmental concerns as well as proposals for the democratization of European institutions that the Left considered to be antidemocratic or undemocratic. In addition, there were aspirations to rebalance the international economic order in favor of the “Third World.” Did any of these plans come close to being realized? Yes and no.

In the 1970s, several of these proposals did make their way onto the European agenda. The efforts of the European left were crucial, for example, in the adoption of the first social action program in 1974 by the European Community. This resulted in a number of measures and directives, including the enhancement of the European social fund that I mentioned earlier, and the creation of different European agencies for vocational training and working conditions. The most important progress was in relation to gender equality and health and safety at work, with the European Council passing a series of directives in the second half of the ’70s and in the ’80s concerning these two fields.

But it’s important to stress that the main proposals of the Social Europe project as imagined by the Left during the long 1970s were never implemented or realized. I can give you two examples of prominent struggles by the European left during those years that were defeated. One is the battle for an alternative economic strategy in support of full employment. The European left decided to highlight one demand in particular, which was the reduction of working time without the loss of wages.

This was the big campaign of the European left in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The battle went on for several years, and the European Trade Union Confederation even organized its first pan-European demonstrations in support of it. But the campaign ultimately led to nothing, or next to nothing. The European Council only adopted a nonbinding and very unambitious recommendation on the topic in 1984.

Another important battle during those years focused on democratization of the workplace and the economy. This was a very important topic at the time, which led in 1980 to the proposal of a European directive for workers’ rights to information and consultation in multinational companies. This was known as the Vredeling directive, after the Social Affairs Commissioner Henk Vredeling, a Dutch social democrat who had pushed for this proposal.

Of course, this provoked very strong hostility from employers and business circles, as well as important opposition from within European institutions themselves. In the end, the directive was buried after years of discussion by the European Council in 1986. There would be subsequent directives on these two questions in the ’90s and 2000s, but they were much less ambitious than what the European left had striven for in the long 1970s.

Delors is quite a renowned political figure in France and Europe. When he died at the end of last year, the political and media elite were unanimous in praising him as a great European. Before he became president of the European Commission, Delors had been a key player in the French left’s neoliberal turn in the 1980s. His political trajectory was that of a social democratic reformist who surfed on the radical wave of the 1970s before rallying to economic liberalism in the 1980s.

Delors was a committed social Christian who had been working at the French national bank and served on the national planning commission. During the early 1970s, Delors was a special adviser to George Pompidou’s Gaullist prime minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, before joining the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974.

The PS had recently reorganized the fragmented forces of French socialism under the leadership of François Mitterrand. It adopted a Common Program for government with the French Communist Party. In those years, the PS was advocating nothing less than a rupture with capitalism — those were the words that its leader used at the time. During the 1970s, like the rest of the French New Left — which we often call the “second left” in France — Delors was calling for a decentralized form of socialism based on workers’ self-management, with socialist planning in France and Europe.

Things were to change very much in the 1980s. In May 1981, after twenty-three years of right-wing government in France, the Left won the presidential election. Mitterrand became president, and a Socialist government took over, which included four Communist ministers. Delors was appointed as finance minister.

At the beginning, the new government introduced many radical social and economic reforms, such as extensive nationalization of industry and finance, the creation of new jobs in the public sector, a rise in the minimum wage, a Keynesian stimulus plan, and so on. At the same time, unfortunately, France’s main trade partners, starting with Helmut Kohl’s West Germany and Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom, were adopting deflationary austerity policies as a response to the economic crisis of the time, in complete contrast with what the Left was doing in France.

As a result, France was confronted with increasing trade and budget deficits, but also with speculation and continued downward pressure on its currency. It faced a growing difficulty in securing loans and financing its expenditure. It’s important to note that France was a member of the European Monetary System (EMS), which was the forerunner of the current monetary union. This limited the country’s monetary leeway.

In March 1983, after three devaluations of the franc, the French government had to choose between sticking to the socialist program on which it had been elected, which implied leaving the EMS, or abandoning the program in order to remain in the EMS. It opted to abandon its program and carried out a radical change of economic policy, based on deflation, budget cuts, the reversal of nationalizations, financial deregulation, and so on.

The turn toward austerity, known as tournant de la rigueur in French, has remained a collective trauma for the Left in France up to the present. This turn was undertaken in the name of Europe, but also under the influence of Jacques Delors as finance minister.

Delors is usually depicted not just as a great European, but as the father of Social Europe. This is on account of his role, when he was at the head of the European Commission, in institutionalizing what was known as European social dialogue, in strengthening European social and cohesion funds, and in expanding European competencies and regulations in the social field.

In reality, however, if you look at what he was doing from when he took office as the new commission president in 1985, Delors placed economic liberalization at the top of his agenda with the single market project. This project had the objective of completing the European Community’s already existing internal market with the removal of all the remaining obstacles to free movement of goods, capital, services, and people. This was supported by all the European governments, especially those of Thatcher and Kohl.

Pressures from the various business lobbies, especially the European Round Table for Industry (ERT), were crucial in shaping the single market program. The ERT was created in 1983 and included the CEOs of seventeen top European transnational corporations at the beginning, such as Volvo, Nestlé, FIAT, and Phillips. The rationale of this program, which was institutionalized by the 1986 Single European Act, was very much oriented toward the free market. Over the years that followed, some critical directives were adopted concerning the liberalization of capital movement and the deregulation of banking and insurance.

At the same time, it is true that Delors and his commission hoped to cash in on the success of the single market program with new initiatives in the social field. Having been active in the Socialist Party during the 1970s, he knew the Social Europe project and had assisted in formulating it. But the social aspects of his agenda did not have the same success as the economic aspects.

For example, the packages that he put forward during his time at the commission were adopted after lengthy negotiations within European institutions and between member-states, which increased the funds for economic and social cohesion. Yet such funding remained limited, as did the overall budget of the European Community. Even today, the entire budget of the EU barely exceeds 1 percent of European GDP.

Another example was the charter of workers’ fundamental social rights that was ultimately adopted in 1989, having been a demand of the European left and trade unions for several years. This charter did proclaim several social and economic rights, but it was nonbinding. The social action program that was adopted to implement this charter the same year only consisted of forty-seven instruments, compared to the nearly three hundred instruments for the single market program. Most of these forty-seven instruments were nonbinding recommendations and opinions.

Delors remained at the head of the commission for ten years between 1985 and 1995. Qualitatively, that period saw the transformation of the European Community into the European Union in 1993 after the passage of the Maastricht Treaty. Apart from the single market and the process of economic liberalization, the main change was the creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU), which turned out to be the greatest political success of Delors.

In 1988, the European Council appointed Delors to chair a committee composed largely of European central bankers to come up with new proposals for the realization of economic and monetary union. The Delors report was released a year later and adopted by European governments in 1989, setting the course for such a union. It was then enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty, which was signed in 1992.

The core of this new treaty was the commitment of the member-states, with the exception of the UK and Denmark, to adopt a single currency under the authority of an independent central bank by 2000. This was a very important decision, because it meant that European governments would abandon key aspects of national economic and monetary sovereignty, starting with the right to issue money and alter exchange rates.

The treaty also formally introduced for the first time the so-called convergence criteria, also known as the Maastricht criteria, which put in place mandatory rules for the economic policies of member-states. For example, they limited the size of government budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP and public debt to 60 percent of GDP. The criteria also pushed member-states to keep inflation rates low. Much to the regret of Delors, the negotiators who devised the treaty refused to include criteria that were related to unemployment rates and other social aspects.

There were other qualitative transformations during those years, such as greater integration in the fields of security and foreign policy and closer coordination of justice and policing. But the main changes were the single market and the EMU, which constitutionalized the neoliberal turn of the EU.

It should be obvious to most people that if you unleash trade, liberalize services, and let capital move freely within the EU (or any kind of regional trade area) without prior fiscal and social harmonization, then you inevitably pit workers and national welfare regimes against each other. The single market led to a race to the bottom over social rights, salaries, taxation, and redistribution, from the 1980s up to the present.

This was obvious to the European left in the 1970s when they were discussing and formulating their project of a Social Europe. That was why they had been talking about upward social and fiscal harmonization, about greater control over capital movement and multinational companies, and about economic planning, rather than deregulation or economic liberalization.

While the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 liberalized the economy and imposed budgetary rigor, the social dimension of European integration that had been promised to trade unions and to European citizens continued to lag behind. There was an agreement on social policy that was included as an annex to the Maastricht Treaty, but it scarcely increased European competencies in the social field and could not counterbalance the constitutionalizing of neoliberalism at the core of the new European Union.

There was also a social protocol in the treaty, which institutionalized a new European social dialogue between employers, trade unions, and European institutions. However, this led to very few results because of resistance from employers and in the absence of pressure from European institutions and governments, but also from social movements.

During the first twenty years of the protocol, only three directives were passed under this procedure, concerning parental leave, part-time work, and fixed-term employment. The results were very meager. Today it is quite obvious that Europe has been going further and further away from the Social Europe project that the European left had been fighting for in the 1970s and moving toward a neoliberal Europe whose social dimension would have to be compatible with free markets and the extension of private property.

The architecture of EMU that was created by the Maastricht Treaty following the Delors report transferred the monetary policy of twenty countries to the supernational level. It deprived European countries of the monetary tools they had previously been using in the face of economic difficulties to regulate inflation and unemployment. They were also limited in their investment capacities by the Maastricht criteria.

The independent European Central Bank (ECB) was very much aligned with German ordoliberal policy, which gave priority to the fight against inflation over anything else, especially the fight against unemployment. Under such conditions, and with no real mechanisms of solidarity in the monetary union, this structure could only turn into a straitjacket, especially for countries that traditionally had weaker currencies and economies, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. It forced these countries to follow the rules of the eurozone’s strongest currency, which has always been the German deutschmark.

The eurozone faced an acute debt crisis after the 2008 financial crash, which lasted for many years. This demonstrated the negative impact of liberalization and of monetary union, especially on the weaker European economies. Greece was the clearest example of this. It was hit very hard by the crisis after 2008 for various reasons that were structural to its economy, and its debt increased sharply. As a result, Greece was punished by the markets, which increased the rates they charged for borrowing and made it impossible for the country to finance its debt and expenditure.

This pushed the Greek government to ask for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union. The risk of a Greek default directly threatened the banks of other European countries, mainly those of France and Germany, which had massively invested in Greek state bonds. This is why the so-called Troika of the commission, the ECB, and the IMF forced Greece to accept loans of €110 billion, which were conditional on the implementation of severe austerity measures: cuts to public services like health and education, destruction of the minimum wage and of wages in general, and so on.

To cut a long story short, the money mostly went to French and German banks while the Greek economy was destroyed by these austerity measures. This was to a significant extent because Greece had lost sovereignty over its monetary policy, because of the absence of a real solidarity mechanism in the EMU and because of the neoliberal Maastricht criteria.

This is a question that I have been asking myself in my work and while writing my book. I think that the failure of the European left to build a social or socialist Europe during the long 1970s contains important lessons for the Left today. On the one hand, and most important, it suggests the need for a significant degree of pessimism about the possibility of ever turning the EU into an instrument for social, democratic, and ecological progress.

It is worth emphasizing that the balance of power was much more favorable to the labor movement and the Left during the 1970s than it is today. The framework of European socioeconomic governance was also far more malleable back then, at a time when there were only six or nine countries around the European table, than it is today. Now there are twenty-seven member-states sitting at the council table, and neoliberalism is much more deeply anchored in European treaties and policies.

In this context, I think that attempts to reimagine a Social Europe for the twenty-first century appear more and more like a fantasy. During the past few years, the COVID-19 crisis forced European leaders to open tiny breaches in the Maastricht consensus: for example, the Stability Pact was suspended for several years. However, conservative forces are busy reimposing these rules and reasserting a policy of austerity.

At the same time, for those on the Left who still believe that the EU can be changed or perhaps supplanted by another form of European cooperation and unity, the historical perspective and the forgotten defeat of Social Europe is an invitation to work relentlessly to overcome internal divisions and strategic weaknesses. The lesson of this story of a defeat is that the Left has to invest much more in internationalism.

Some people on the Left today find reasons to be optimistic as social democratic, green, and radical left parties, as well as trade unions and civil society groups, are better organized at the European level in some ways than was the case a few decades ago. Today citizens are more attentive to European politics than they used to be. The climate crisis is also pushing people to think about issues internationally in a way that didn’t exist until recently.

This is all true to some extent. But I think this story of a defeat shows us that in order to move the European project in a radically different direction, which is what we need, the Left would have to build a genuinely transnational alliance or bloc that is clearly opposed to the neoliberal and reactionary versions of Europe. It would have to agree on a common program clearly oriented toward the interests of workers and launch an offensive based on mass popular mobilization.

Today we are very far from being able to do this. Without an intervention of this kind, the Left will have little chance of turning the EU into a Social Europe, or even turning it into something that would be less of an obstacle for any progressive social, economic, and environmental transition in Europe.