However the new advanced strategy draws no the consequences

Unsurprisingly, the spring European Council which was held last month approved the broad outlines of the strategy "Europe 2020" to succeed the decade 2000 Lisbon agenda proposed by the European Commission.

The Greek crisis has certainly contributed to Eclipse launch in public debate, but the main cause of its low echo is to look elsewhere: "Europe 2020" looks like it is mistaken to the Lisbon strategy it is intended to replace, and the semi-échec no longer disputed by anyone.

Indeed, the overall inspiration of the strategy launched in great fanfare in March 2000, in a political context at the antipodes of the present situation, remains unchanged.

The ideal of a smart, sustainable and socially inclusive growth had already characterized the Lisbon agenda, which is not problematic in itself. But the inability of the method and approach of the Lisbon strategy to achieve the objectives it was set - bureaucratic and, well before the shock of the global crisis of 2008 - should cause a major challenge.

Since then, the global crisis, its harm sustainable employment, public finance and cohesion in the Union, and what it revealed the inadequacy of instruments Europeans - with the exception of the institution that is the ECB - to manage shocks of this magnitude have not that confirm the lack of a "strategy" - the word "speech" would be more appropriate - Lisbon-typebased on a simple non-binding coordination of national reform processes.

The European Commission acknowledges this reality in the introduction to its communication, where a sense of urgency and the spectrum of European decommissioning happily replaced the self-satisfaction which prevailed in Brussels before the crisis. Similarly, it reads with comfort that "the best chance of juice success for Europe lies in its ability to act collectively as a Union". However, the new advanced strategy draws no the consequences.

The "open method of coordination", main reason for the inefficiency of Lisbon remains at the heart of the new strategy. The Commission continues to develop its role as the main incentive for moderately attentive States, rather than as a strategy leader.

In this disappointing continuity, on reporting, although some welcome improvements, including the reduction of the number of objectives, their better targeting and their national implementation; the new concentration on education and higher education; or even closer articulation between national reforms coordination and implementation of policies and Community instruments, including binding institutional mechanisms in the euro area.

The conclusions of the European Council stated in the same sense that the new strategy must mobilise all Community poli-ticks, and especially a strong external dimension, based it also necessarily on to Community instruments, to promote European interests on the world stage. The absence of this double community and external component was in fact one of the major shortcomings of the Lisbon process as a European strategy for globalisation.

But in the political and economic situation of Europe, these few inflections are likely to not be enough. The Commission failed to ask the real questions: what will be the engine of European growth of post-crisis And where will come its funding in the current state of public finances

It would have much better like most of the think tanks European derived lessons from the failure of Lisbon and those of the crisis, to the Member States with their responsibilities (or their contradictions) in terms of political will and of European ambition: second-best solution in normal time, intergovernmental cooperation is all the more in times of crisisas again illustrate the case of the Icelandic volcano.

The Lisbon strategy, which purported to make Europe "the most competitive knowledge of the world economy" by 2010, was not credible by excess of ambition. His remake of today may be even less, for the opposite reason.