The forces of change not only welled up from within the Europe of the 1980s but swept in with exceptional force from abroad. The Community faced the escalating challenge of globalization, according to Wolfgang Streeck, in the form of the “regime competition” praised by economic liberals as optimizing welfare but decried by socialists as a race to the bottom. It was precisely this trend that the incoming president of the Commission, Jacques Delors, would try to reverse by building a centralized, federal, and state-directed Europe dedicated to the protection of the “European social model.” A man of exceptional energy, political talent, and ideological commitment, Delors was deeply immersed in the French administrative tradition. As president of the Commission, he could normally count on the support of France. He would also have the guile and good fortune to gain critical German support for his agenda. Jacques Delors, like Jean Monnet, was one of a kind, a man whose force of personality and combination of talents would produce otherwise unobtainable results. He, too, would leave a special imprint on the history of European integration. Yet Delors would have to buck powerful worldwide trends. The fate of his work would also depend upon events at the national level, including those within the United States.

THE UNITED STATES AND GLOBALIZATION: CHALLENGES TO EUROPE

The revolutionary changes that swept over the structure and operation of the European economy in the 1980s and 1990s were international in origin and have ideological, organizational, financial, and technological dimensions.