The Lisbon Process : Lack of Commitment, Hard Choices and the Search for Political Will

At the summit at Lisbon in March 2000, the European leaders agreed to a remarkable objec-tive, namely to turn the European economy into ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. Since its inception, the Lisbon process has been fraught with difficulties, and half-way to its self-imposed deadline of 2010, the EU member states are in most cases far from fulfilling the objectives set out.

In the run-up to the mid-term review of the Lisbon process at the Luxembourg European Council in March 2005, the debate is on about what measures should be adopted to improve the progress towards the Lisbon goals. In view of the fact that the EU’s credibility is at stake, not only in terms of its international attractiveness as an economic area but even more as a political undertaking capable of preserving Europeans’ way of life, the Lisbon process now counts among the Union’s major challenges.

This topical study contributes to the current debate on Lisbon by exposing some of its weaknesses of a governance and procedural nature. It argues that improvements are possible in the short-to-medium term to the way in which policy coordination is conducted on the European level among the EU institutions, between the national and European levels and among stake-holders in the domestic setting. More serious, however, is Lisbon’s lack of popular legitimacy and its deficiency in terms of political accountability which can only be enhanced by improving parliamentary involvement, both on the national and European levels, in the debate about the objectives of socio-economic and environmental reform and the necessary political choices that it presents. In the end, however, the success or failure of Lisbon will depend on the degree of political will that European leaders are willing and able to show.