CHALLENGES FACING THE EU: SCOPE FOR A COHERENT RESPONSE

ABSTRACT

The EU faces a number of major challenges: to shift its support from the industries of the past to the knowledge-based industries of the future; to rescue the Lisbon strategy, designed to build a knowledge-based economy but so far achieving little; to re-engage with the European public after the difficulties with the Constitution. The paper argues that these challenges are intimately connected and that it is only by addressing them together that there is any hope for success. It elaborates these connections with particular reference to a reinvigorated Lisbon strategy with a strong social dimension. It concludes by delineating the corresponding challenge that faces the research community: to undertake a fundamental revision of its analysis of social policy in relation to modern economies; and to build a new toolkit for intelligent benchmarking.

Keywords:

• Lisbon process
• knowledge-based economies
• benchmarking
• accountability
• competitiveness

Notes

¹Only in the interstices of EU programmes have a range of more interesting experiments in cross-national policy learning developed: despite the efforts of the Commission, so to speak (Zeitlin and Pochet 2005: esp Conclusion).

²The Commission's new proposals for promoting democracy, dialogue and debate are very worthy, but they do not further downward accountability and the scrutiny of national policies by reference to European best practice, along the lines proposed here (European Commission 2005h).

³On the dangers of such stagnation, in the case of at least one member state of the EU, see Petmesidou and Mossialos (2005).