How the spirit of Jacques Delors might be rekindled

American evangelicalsWWJD, EU WWJDEU don bracelets adorned with the letters “What would Jesus do”? officials, faithful to a calling of a different sort, have of late been pondering their own : “What would Jacques do?” The death of Jacques Delors on December 27th has had many in Brussels wondering how to recapture the aura of the messianic president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. In just a decade the Frenchman bequeathed to Europeans the single market, then laid the grounds for the euro and passport-free travel among other federalising milestones. After a national homage in Paris on January 5th, words once uttered by this latter-day founding father of the are being recited, psalm-like, to guide today’s euro-disciples. What would it take to recreate the conditions that got Europe lurching forward together?A big part of rebooting Delorsism is to realise it was only partly the result of Mr Delors’s undoubted political talents. A chief ingredient of his success was the way Europe was at the time. A generation of national leaders who grew up through the second world war—notably François Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany—had reached their political apogee by the mid-1980s, and had a sense that their legacy should include banishing Europe’s ugly nationalisms. Tepid growth in the 1970s had given a glimpse of Europe’s future irrelevance if it failed to jolt itself onto a different track. Seizing the moment, Mr Delors cajoled national governments into giving up vetoes, particularly when it came to some economic matters, thus bringing down barriers between countries. He convincingly explained how a little loss of sovereignty could result in a lot of economic gain.