The Delors Commission between 1985 and 1994 marked the zenith of this sort of integrationist zeal.
He and Jacques Delors, the commission president, always saw the project as primarily political.
When Mr Delors declined in 1994 to stand for the presidency, many Socialists turned to Mrs Aubry.
But in truth the commission had grown rather too full of itself under Mr Santer's predecessor, Jacques Delors.
France may offer Pascal Lamy, chief of staff to Jacques Delors when Mr Delors was the commission's president.
EU, including Poles and so on, will, Mr Delors thinks, inevitably weaken the vision of the founding fathers.
Indeed, many French Socialists blame the 1995 presidential victory of conservative Jacques Chirac on Mr Delors's refusal to run.
But there is a bigger reason to court Mr Delors than mere nostalgia.
So the pendulum may swing back towards someone in the mould of Jacques Delors, the president from 1985 to 1994.
Brussels-watchers long suspected that it was Mr Delors's own presidential aspirations that held him in such thrall to French farmers.
Instead the group, chaired by Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, gave it qualified approval.
One of the main architects of the single European currency, Jacques Delors, has said the eurozone was flawed from the beginning.
But his candidacy was blocked by Britain, which was fed up with the bossiness of the outgoing European Commission under Jacques Delors.
Mr Barroso has thus revived the term coined by his predecessor, Jacques Delors, but has not explained what he means by it.
There has been less of the in-fighting that marred Mr Delors's tenure.
He has been making noises, rarely heard in the days of the Delors commission, about the need to cut costs and raise productivity.
The single currency, dreamt up by Mr Delors and now called the euro, has since been pushed mainly by the French and Germans.
But Mr Delors's latest formula, though not actually on the table at Nice, has the virtue of seeming to offer something to everyone.
The commission's Mr Santer has been in office for two-and-a-half years, but has deliberately adopted a lower profile than his predecessor, Jacques Delors.
Recently he suggested that Jacques Delors, the former (French) head of the European Commission, should find a way to reform the Union's institutions.
MPs have been emboldened to go after its members as they would never have dared to do in the days of Jacques Delors.
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Under Mr Delors, it was more of a super member-state, the one that (in theory) looked after the interests of Europe as a whole.
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Jacques Delors, the then commission president, predicted at the time that the inter-governmental structure would prove unsatisfactory in practice, and so it has turned out.
In the 1980s, when Jacques Delors as commission president was pursuing an integrationist vision, the answer seemed to be to go for ever closer union.
Yet in 1992, the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, almost scuppered the Uruguay round of world trade talks rather than cut farm spending.
Mr Delors depended not only on a close Franco-German alliance, but also on the self-confidence of these countries, which are both now in a defensive funk.
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Mr Delors insists that all European countries must share the blame for the debt crisis - which has led to fears for the survival of the euro.
Despite personal links to the area, she is regarded as an outsider: her father, Jacques Delors, one-time head of the European Commission, is from the Massif Central.
Horrified by the consequences of Thatcherite economics, first the unions and then the party turned to the social democratic Europe of Jacques Delors as a countervailing force.
All these votes and opinion polls suggest that European voters are far from convinced, to put it mildly, by Mr Delors's pan-European vision of a tighter political union.
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