Europe 2020 — A promising strategy?

Coming up with a visionary document in and about the European Union anybody runs the risk of being pushed to the corner by all sides. Some will call him idealist, other will call it empty talk, yet anothers will miss sectoral or group specific targets, still anothers will call any number -besdies page numbers -as arbitrary, academically unsound and void of implementation capacity. This has already been the case with the Europe 2020 document of the Commission published in late February 2010 2 and to be finalized by the June Council of the EU. Usual criticisms and counter-criticisms have already been voiced, and anybody studying e.g the information website euractiv.com can get a broad coverage in all official EU languages on the borderless debate. This author, having observed the ups and downs of European integration for decades, tries to avoid both over-and underestimation of any joint policy document. For one, the Community has always been moving ahead in an incrementalist-gradualist manner, relying on a lerge degree of pragmatism, common sense and compromise politics. For this reason the EU has constanlty been lagging behind its own objectives and ideals, which is a feature of normelcy. On the other hand, quite unlike many other integrational groupings, the EU has indeed been quite successful in climbing up on the ladder of various layers of integration. While some of its competitors, like the eastern trade bloc Comecon collapsed, others, like ASEAN stagnate at limited trade policy liberalization, the EU has been singularly successful in deepening its dimensions of integration, from free trade in industrial gooods and a bit of joint support for agriculture towards a political union. The latter is certainly fragmentary, but the evolution to this direction is undoubted. The Lisbon Treaty, the EMU, the European Court of Justice and an ever larger number of common policies and cooperation fora all reflect the irreversibility of