After the Van Rompuy spectacle*1

The EU is currently all show and no substance. Last week's appointment of Herman Van Rompuy as the first council president and Lady Ashton as high representative for foreign and security policy had generated feverish speculation for months. The result confirms the lack of ambition national leaders have for the EU. In a rare moment of concord, Euro-enthusiasts and Eurosceptics agree that low-key personalities and flawed processes have trumped strategy and policy.

Now that this silly spectacle is finally over, the danger is that Europe will return to the technocratic politics of the past. This time governments will only have themselves to blame.

On Thursday the European commission will finally publish draft proposals for a new, wide-ranging strategy to lift the EU out of recession and build a green, knowledge-based economy by 2020. This strategy will replace the failed Lisbon Agenda, aimed at turning the union into «the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion» by 2010.

The trouble is that neither the Lisbon treaty nor last week's appointments give the EU proper political clout to implement ambitious and badly needed economic reforms. Instead of providing coherence, the agenda-setting power will in future be even more diffuse. And by appointing a low-key chairman-like president, the member states and the commission have the perfect fall guy if once more things go wrong.

For too long, member states expediently blamed the lack of progress in implementing the Lisbon Agenda on inadequate institutional arrangements after eastern enlargement in 2005. In reality, this has served as a pretext to pursue national interests and wrestle control over socio-economic policy-making from the commission. Now governments no longer have this excuse to turn to.

In March 2000, when the Lisbon agenda was agreed, a negotiating fudge meant that member states adopted a «new method of open co-ordination» (voluntary best practice), which strengthened the intergovernmental approach at the expense of common binding rules called the «community method». But rather than improving transparency and effectiveness, the new method replaced the ambition of EU-wide reforms with the mediocrity of the lowest common denominator and inadequate implementation. Little surprise that poor results fuel Euro-disillusionment.

After Europe's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the EU cannot fail again – otherwise the centripetal dynamic unleashed by the new method risks damaging the entire edifice. This would suit unabashed Thatcherite Eurosceptics such as Daniel Hannan MEP, whose call for greater democracy is a thinly disguised attempt to reduce the union to a free trade area where the market guarantees individual freedom. But since the «free market» involves a centralised state and unaccountable, monopolistic corporations that hold sway over labour and parliament, an EU exit won't promote democracy and transparency.

Other ardent Eurosceptics such as shadow foreign secretary William Hague vow to protect «Britain's vital national interests», which translates principally as the UK's economic interests. That will force the Tories to engage with the successor strategy to the Lisbon Agenda.

Simply to pursue national interests is to exhibit short-sightedness and an extraordinary lack of ambition. By portraying EU membership as a zero-sum game, Eurosceptics ignore both the existing economic benefits and the unrealised potential for higher EU-wide growth, desperately required for the UK, which lags behind the Eurozone. Unlocking this potential would help sustain Britain's slow recovery and also strengthen Europe's unique economic model around the world. Surely the global spectrum of possibilities is not exhausted by the free-market capitalism of the US or the state capitalism of the BRIC countries.

To produce a high-growth economy, the next eight months are crucial. Internally, the EU will decide on the successor strategy of the failed Lisbon Agenda. Externally, it will be instrumental in ongoing negotiations on climate change and world trade. All this requires a high degree of co-ordination, transparency and much more civil society participation, which Brussels and the national capitals continuously dodge.

That's where the Reflection Group comes in. Even the most interested reader would be forgiven to have forgotten about it. Created two years ago, the group's task is to set out a 2020-2030 vision, finally free of institutional navel-gazing.

To achieve this, the group should encourage a high-profile public debate with civil society about the purpose and priorities of the EU's new economic strategy. Based on shared principles and measurable objectives, the union post-Lisbon must co-ordinate action to stop member states losing ground to the Brics.

In turn, this would force the next EU budget (2014-2021) to reflect these priorities – including R&D and innovation to arrest Europe's brain-drain – rather than conflictual national interests. Failure will mean a complete disconnect between the union's short-, medium- and long-term planning.

Thus, the group has a unique opportunity to achieve more in six months than Van Rompuy is likely to do in 30 months. Responsibility falls squarely on commission president Jose Manuel Barroso – in his second and final mandate – to deliver on the new economic strategy. Otherwise his 10 years, dogged by three no votes in France, Netherlands and Ireland, will also be marked by a third «Portuguese» failure, following the unsuccessful Lisbon agenda and the unsatisfactory Lisbon treaty. No wonder even pro-Europeans increasingly despair.

Adrian Pabst

*1 First published by "The Guardian" (23.11.2009) at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/23/ashton-van-rompuy-eu-sideshow