Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Delors

Delors frames Europe’s late-20th-century liberal revival not as ideological triumphalism, but as damage control. “Counter-offensive” is a telling militarized metaphor: liberalization isn’t depicted as a natural evolution of enlightened markets, it’s a coordinated pushback against something that’s gotten out of hand. The target is “irresponsibility,” a deliberately elastic accusation that can cover fiscal recklessness, inflationary wage bargains, political clientelism, or the kind of short-term populism that makes budgets look like campaign brochures.

The genius of the line is how it moralizes an economic agenda without sounding moralistic. Delors doesn’t say “socialism failed” or “markets are efficient.” He suggests a crisis of adulthood. That rhetorical move lets “liberal” reforms - tighter monetary rules, discipline in public spending, market integration - pose as housekeeping rather than revolution. It’s an appeal to a weary electorate: not “embrace the market,” but “let’s stop behaving like amateurs.”

Context matters. Delors is the emblematic technocrat of the European project, a key architect of the Single Market and the preconditions for monetary union. By the 1980s and early 1990s, Europe had lived through stagflation, bruising deindustrialization, and the credibility problems of governments that promised social peace while borrowing against the future. Calling the shift a “reaction” implies reluctant necessity; it preempts the charge that liberalization is a corporate coup by casting it as a public service.

Subtext: Europe’s new liberalism wants to be seen less as ideology than as responsibility dressed in policy. The line flatters rules, expertise, and constraints - and quietly warns that politics without limits is the real enemy.