Introduction

In March 2010 the Commission published the new ten-year strategy for Europe, named ‘EU2020’. In this chapter we compare the new strategy, ‘EU2020’, with the Lisbon Strategy that was agreed upon in 2000 in connection with the Portuguese Presidency. We also take into account the mid-term evaluation of the Lisbon Strategy as well as the Commission's own final evaluation of the Lisbon Agenda. The historical record of the Lisbon Strategy and the adequacy of the new strategy cannot be assessed without taking into account the current crisis of the European project: a crisis that involves not only high unemployment and public finance problems everywhere in Europe but also acute risks for bankruptcy in member states belonging to the euro-area currency union. The form and depth of this crisis reveal fundamental weaknesses of the Lisbon Strategy and at the same time it indicates how radical the shift in strategy needs to be.

In the first two sections we first compare the two strategies in terms of context and content and then discuss the consequences of the mid-term revision of the original Lisbon Strategy. In the fourth section we analyse how the Lisbon Strategy contributed to different objectives with special attention to respectively employment, social cohesion and knowledge-based economic growth. In the fifth section we discuss to what degree the Lisbon Strategy has succeeded to serve as scaffolding for the Economic and Monetary Union. Finally, we conclude and discuss why Europe needs a new vision as well as a more ambitious strategy than the one offered in EU2020.

Different origins, contexts and contents

While the Lisbon Strategy came out of a process where the national government in Portugal was initiator and driver (with Antonio Gutierrez as Prime Minister and with Maria Rodrigues as Sherpa), the new ‘EU2020’ strategy has been designed ‘in-house’ by the Commission. The Lisbon Strategy was prepared over a longer period, during which the Portuguese government consulted national governments and involved international experts.