Jaques Delors is a French economist and politician. He became the eighth President of the European Commission in January 1985 and was the first person to serve three terms in that office. Since leaving the Commission, he has chaired the UNESCO Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, (1993-1996). He founded the Paris think tank Notre Europe in 1996 and remains one of its presidents, and in 2010 M. Delors supported the new initiative the Spinelli Group, which was founded to reinvigorate the move for federalism in the European Union.
“We don’t just need firefighters; we need architects too.” Interviewed on 8 September 2010 by Nikola Tietze and Ulrich Bielefeld for Mittelweg 36, Jacques Delors, three times President of the European Commission, speaks of “this Europe of values”, its triumphs and failures, and his hope that the federal Europe of nation-states he encouraged during his term will, eventually, become a reality.
