To achieve his strategic goal, Delors knew that he would first have to deepen cooperation among the existing members of the EEC
When Jacques Delors, who died on December 27, 2023, took over as president of the European Commission in 1985, in Cyprus the late Spyros Kyprianou was President of the Republic and our relationship with the then European Economic Community (EEC), when we did not accuse it in the rallies , mainly of AKEL, that it constituted the "same union" as NATO (sic), was nothing more than a commercial relationship of a technical nature. It mainly concerned, on the one hand, the management of the effects of the association agreement which was maintained and implemented piecemeal and gradually with the Cyprus-EEC Customs Union Protocol, as a consequence mainly of the accession of the United Kingdom to the EEC some years before and on the other hand , the realization that the Cyprus of the "Non-Aligned" was in danger of being excluded from what the ambitious and dynamic Mr. Delors was promoting.
The course and behavior of the Christian technocrat-politician of French Socialist origin in the European Commission was a consequence of his conscious perception of the future of the EEC as an organization to prevent a new catastrophic conflict in Europe as a whole, like those that plagued the continent for the previous thousand years, and especially those that ended up developing into world wars in the first half of the 20th century. To achieve his strategic goal, Delors knew that he would first have to deepen the cooperation between the existing members of the EEC, widen it and at the same time replace the Deutsche Mark with another pan-European currency, commonly accepted by all.
In the process, he had identified the challenge in a very simple and intelligent way. The adoption of a common currency by a number of states with a different level of development and operating model that trade with each other, but do not speak the same language and do not easily move their "means" of production and especially their human resources between their borders and do not have common taxation, as mandated by Mundell's economic theory of common currencies (Optimum Currency Area Theory), requires a common framework of globally imposed fiscal and financial discipline. This was none other than the infamous Maastricht criteria. And as Delors himself had said, characteristically, the states of the EEC and later the EU had to choose between ceding a large degree of their sovereignty to the Union or committing to discipline within a strict framework of operating rules in order to achieve the their common currency. A framework that, incidentally, Schäuble, who we also now remember, imposed with his heavy German hand many years later, when the rescue of the euro and the EU required it.
In this effort, as in the previous Single European Act, of which Delors was also an architect, he had the help of the West German Chancellor Kohl, Mitterrand's tolerance, Thatcher's rigid liberal logic and the political protection of the USA of Bush. He had also, in the interim, experienced, at the beginning and at the end of his term, the enlargement of the EEC with the accession of Spain and Portugal in 1986 and subsequently of Austria and Sweden in 1995.
Somewhere, there, near the end of his ten-year term as president of the European Commission, Delors experienced the most massive, since the establishment of the common European edifice, application for the entry of new states that resulted in the 2004 enlargement with the inclusion of Cyprus and nine others countries. And, even if it was a sarcasm of History, both our application for membership in 1990 and our act of accession to the EU in 2004 were signed by Presidents (G. Vassiliou and T. Papadopoulos) who were elected with the support of AKEL. From the same AKEL that people used to shout at the rallies a few decades earlier the well-known "EEC-NATO the same union". That was Delor…