Lisbon Agenda a big failure

The outgoing President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, has described the EU's strategy to become the world's most competitive knowledge based eonomy by 2010 as a big failure. Mr Prodi said that a widespread use of the national veto had allowed Member States to block progress, despite prompting by the European Commission.

Prodi is a key supporter of the European Social model, the main reason that Europe is so uncompetitive. What can he mean by these statements.

You can t have unanimity in all economic areas, or if you do, you must accept the failure of Lisbon, he said. Lisbon is a big failure. To support his conclusion, Mr Prodi highlighted the failure to agree on a workable Community Patent after almost 15 years of discussion as symptomatic of the problem.

So the failure of the Lisbon Agenda is the fault of not enough integration. If only we would give up control of our economies to higher beings in Brussels, all would be well. A pan European patent would be nice, but it is hardly the thing that is holding back innovation in Europe. As I quoted yesterday, creativity and change can only come from diversity. The harmonization of the EU is the biggest barrier to innovation. But as we have come to expect from Eurocrats, the answer is more integration, now what was the question.