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Delors Committee

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The Delors Committee is widely viewed as having been the effective starting point of the process of European Economic and Monetary Union that led to the negotiation of the Treaty of Maastricht in December 1991 and adoption of the euro as the single currency of 11 of the 15 member states of the European Union on 1 January 1999.

Background

The immediate context for the Delors Committee was the international monetary instability that followed the Louvre Accord of February 1987, punctuated by the so-called Basel-Nyborg Agreement on the European Monetary System (EMS) in September 1987 and the Wall Street Black Monday on 19 October 1987. In January 1988, French finance minister Édouard 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 minister Giuliano Amato that called for greater firepower of the European Monetary Cooperation Fund. In response, German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher published a memorandum of his own on 26 February 1988, seizing the initiative from his more conservative colleague finance minister Gerhard Stoltenberg and advocating a European Central Bank modeled on the Deutsche Bundesbank, whose technical design would be defined by a "committee of wise men".

Delors leveraged this environment and in late March 1988 managed to convince German chancellor Helmut 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 president François 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 in Évian-les-Bains on 2 June 1988.

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. The proposal was formally made and endorsed at the European Council meeting in Hanover on 27-28 June. Bundesbank president Karl 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 banker Wim Duisenberg to participate nevertheless.

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