Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

the smaller weaker member states who really felt they had to take notice.
Also, the Eurogroup elected a permanent President in the person of
Luxembourg’s Jean Claude Juncker but still lacked effective single external
representation. It was striking how in the EU’s intra-institutional debates
on the Constitutional and Lisbon Treaties, very little attention was paid to
economic questions as opposed to improving the EU’s effectiveness as a
“global actor”. Internally, debate focused on the justice and home affairs
agenda, not economics. Governance and political will have arguably failed
to keep pace with economic integration.
The Lisbon process was in part conceived as an alternative to the classical
focus of integration. Yet though it was re-launched with a flourish at the start
of the Barroso Commission in 2004, it failed to engage political attention
or deliver high-profile results. Lisbon’s bolder ambitions were clearly
beyond reach, even in 2004: the 2010 deadline had always been overambitious,
especially given the EU10 enlargement. One valid criticism of
Lisbon was that the initial goals were inadequately specified or prioritised.
The Barroso Commission attempted to narrow the focus to “growth and
jobs” as recommended by the Kok report. However, pressures within the
Council and Parliament soon widened them again. More seriously, the
German refusal to contemplate the “naming and shaming” of member
states failing to reach their targets meant that delivery depended on an
opaque partnership between the EU and its member states that lacked
real political purchase.
In terms of further market liberalisation, services have the most economic
potential as they constitute some 60% or more of the EU economy. In
the latter days of the Prodi Commission, Frits Bolkestein, the Dutch
liberal Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market, convinced his
colleagues that the way to liberalise “services” was through an omnibus
measure based on codifying in EU law the founding freedoms of the
Rome Treaty. This broad based approach liberalising a vast range of
economic activity from sensitive “public services” such as health and
social care, to high value added professional services, ran into immediate
political difficulties. The Services Directive that eventually emerged was
substantially amended – strict economic liberals would say watered down
– by the European Parliament. This demonstrated the limits of political
will to drive Single Market purism beyond goods.
Beyond that, there was sparse legislative achievement in harmonising
internal rules and standards, not to mention questions of taxation, with
the important exceptions of the passage of the REACH Directive and much
Chapter 1 – Roger Liddle 15