TheDelors Committee, formally known as theCommittee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union, was anad hoc committee chaired byEuropean CommissionPresidentJacques Delors in 1988–1989. It was set up in June 1988 upon a mandate from theEuropean Council to examine and propose concrete stages leading to European Economic and Monetary Union; its report, commonly known as theDelors Report, was published in April 1989.[1]
The Delors Committee is widely viewed as having been the effective starting point of the process ofEuropean Economic and Monetary Union that led to the negotiation of theTreaty of Maastricht in December 1991 and adoption of theeuro as the single currency of 11 of the 15 member states of theEuropean Union on 1 January 1999.[2]
The immediate context for the Delors Committee was the international monetary instability that followed theLouvre Accord of February 1987, punctuated by the so-called Basel-Nyborg Agreement on theEuropean Monetary System (EMS) in September 1987 and theWall Street Black Monday on 19 October 1987. In January 1988, French finance ministerÉdouard Balladur circulated a memorandum calling for a European common currency to address the EMS's shortcomings, followed in February by another text from Italian treasury ministerGiuliano Amato that called for greater firepower of theEuropean Monetary Cooperation Fund. In response, German foreign ministerHans-Dietrich Genscher published a memorandum of his own on 26 February 1988, seizing the initiative from his more conservative colleague finance ministerGerhard Stoltenberg and advocating a European Central Bank modeled on theDeutsche Bundesbank, whose technical design would be defined by a "committee of wise men".[3]: 315-317
Delors leveraged this environment and in late March 1988 managed to convince German chancellorHelmut Kohl, who at that time held the half-yearly rotating presidency of the Council of the European Community, to set up a committee along the lines suggested by Genscher and to directly involve central bank governors in the process. The re-election of French presidentFrançois Mitterrand in May 1988 further favored a new initiative, on which aides of Delors and Kohl started to work together immediately afterwards. Kohl and Mitterrand cemented an agreement on the process at a French-German summit inÉvian-les-Bains on 2 June 1988.[3]: 318–319
It was thus Delors's idea that the committee should be principally composed of the EU countries'central bank governors, who were both technically most directly in charge and potentially the most opposed to currency unification, since that would make them lose their distinctive national monetary authority.[4] The proposal was formally made and endorsed at theEuropean Council meeting inHanover on 27-28 June. Bundesbank presidentKarl Otto Pöhl initially viewed the fact that the committee chair would be a politician rather than a central banker as unacceptable, but he was eventually persuaded by fellow central bankerWim Duisenberg to participate nevertheless.[5]: 123
Aside from its eponymous chairmanJacques Delors, the Committee consisted of the following members (in alphabetical order as listed in Annex II of the report itself):[1]: 40
The committee's rapporteurs were Gunter Baer, a BIS official who had worked at the German finance ministry and theInternational Monetary Fund, andTommaso Padoa-Schioppa, at the time a senior European Commission official. The committee's meetings were usually held inBasel, on the side of the monthly meetings of central bank governors at the Bank for International Settlements.[6]: 212
The committee's report was titled "Report on economic and monetary union in the European Community".[1] It outlined a three-stage plan for the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union, including the evolution of the existing Committee of Governors into theEuropean Monetary Institute and ultimately theEuropean Central Bank. The report was endorsed by theEuropean Council inMadrid in June 1989.[2]: 3 It was nevertheless viewed as controversial, not least in the United Kingdom.[7]: 637
Following the Madrid meeting, a working group chaired byÉlisabeth Guigou with Padoa-Schioppa as Vice Chair, known as the Guigou Group, prepared the ground for the opening of anIntergovernmental Conference by the European Council meeting inStrasbourg in December 1989.[8]
Viewed in retrospect, the Delors Committee was spectacularly successful,[2]: 3 aided in its task by thefall of the Berlin Wall a few months after the delivery of its final report. According to Lamfalussy, the success owes to Delors's "genius" in persuading leaders, and especiallyHelmut Kohl, of the indispensable nature of monetary union to ensure the viability of theEuropean single market, which allowed him to overcome the resistance of national central banks and especially of the Bundesbank.[9]: 136–137
Also with hindsight, the Delors Report placed insufficient emphasis on matters of financial stability andbank supervision.[2]: 13-15 According to Larosière, these had been viewed as too divisive for the committee's consensus-driven approach.[10]: 119 This was however corrected in theMaastricht Treaty with an enabling clause that became the basis two decades later forEuropean Banking Supervision, with a decision of principle in mid-2012 and implementation in November 2014.[11] There also remained an imbalance between a completemonetary union and a much less completeeconomic union in the implementation of EMU.
The full archive of the Delors Committee is held at theEuropean Central Bank.[12]