Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-10-Speech-3-010"
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"en.20040310.1.3-010"2
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"Mr President, one of the European Council’s tasks will be to conduct an impact assessment on the Lisbon strategy, and, in this, it would do well to ponder the lesson contained – or so I see it – in the document addressed to it by the Commission, which shows how the free-market approach that characterises the EU’s current policies is incompatible with an advanced social model based on the non-elitist and inclusive encouragement of people’s abilities. I will of course reassure Commissioner Kinnock that the Commission’s document refrains from drawing such conclusions from the four years of the Lisbon strategy, but its circumlocutions and other understatements are eloquent testimony to its authors’ embarrassment at having to draw up this particular balance sheet.
One of the objectives that the EU set itself at Lisbon was full employment by 2010. How far have we got? Employment has proved pretty resistant, or so it appears from the report, which goes as far as to invent the piquant neologism of ‘delayed improvements in employment levels’, before admitting the bitter truth that, ‘in its first decline in ten years, the euro zone recorded a loss of some 200 000 jobs (in net terms) in 2003, and the unemployment rate should continue to rise slightly in 2004’.
At Lisbon, the EU also set itself the goal of becoming, by the same date, the most competitive and most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. What view does the Commission’s interim report take of that? Let me quote: ‘following the implementation of the Lisbon strategy, this has given rise to undeniable progress, instituting the transition needed towards a competitive economy characterized by growth, etc.’. Then come the facts in all their brutality. After four years of the Lisbon strategy, let me quote the Commission, ‘the percentage of young people dropping out of the school system without any qualifications was over 18% in 2003, 17.2% of young Europeans aged 15 do not have the minimum necessary skills (reading, writing, arithmetic)’. Those are the words of the Commission. This unsparing judgment is followed up by reference to ‘the decline in overall investment, in both the public and private sectors, to the detriment of the priority areas identified by the Lisbon strategy, such as research, innovation, education, and training’. Finally, the Commission’s report offers a new and bold definition of another of the Lisbon strategy’s key concepts: ‘the sustainable development approach is beginning to be taken into account in the definition of policies [...] it is thus that several Member States have embarked on reforms to their pension systems in order to face up to the problems of an ageing population’. If that is what sustainable development is, then the Council must surely be full of ecologists.
Having laboured and brought forth this diagnosis, the Commission offers its solutions: the free-market model is getting nowhere, long live the free-market model – or so its watchword appears to be. It thus sees it as ‘vital to maintain a strong-competition policy in the internal market’, going on to add that the Stability Pact must be adhered to, that it is necessary to press on with reforms to pensions and healthcare systems, that environmental policy must be made to pay, and even that the most profitable areas of education and training must be identified.
How bad, though, must the social and political crises brought about by this free-market ideology be before a glimmer of critical intelligence has the chance to make its presence felt in the EU’s corridors of power? All the evidence indicates that the only way of saving the European ideal is to make a clean break with this machinery for churning out human mess and despair. After the Spring Summit, it will be time to work towards a new spring for Europe."@en1
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