[Ip-health] Guardian: EU summit unlikely to amend the Lisbon strategy of putting European competitiveness ahead of social goals

[Sarah Rimmington]

[snip] Ever the opportunist, Peter Mandelson has used the Lisbon
strategy to foist free trade on poor countries. When unveiling a 2006
paper called Global Europe (pdf), Mandelson stated that Lisbon "must be
complemented by an external agenda for improving European
competitiveness in the global economy". As part of this agenda,
Mandelson has challenged environmental protection measures in Brazil and
Mexico and Thailand's (pdf) policies on affordable medicines, because
they were deemed hostile to European firms. [snip]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cronin/2008/03/reciting_the_eu_mantra.html

Reciting the EU mantra: This week's Brussels summit is unlikely to amend
the Lisbon strategy of putting European competitiveness ahead of social
goals
by David Croninn
March 11, 2008 10:00 AM

Spring is the time of year when EU leaders feel duty-bound to recite a
cumbersome mantra. In a strange display of secular piety, our presidents
and prime ministers commit themselves to building the world's "most
competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010".

The objective of achieving this makeover was key to the Lisbon strategy,
agreed at a summit in Portugal during 2000. Back in those final months
of the Clinton administration, policy-makers on this side of the
Atlantic seemed eager to show that European capitalists can outfox their
American counterparts. But with China now performing better than Britain
and poised to eclipse Germany, an eight-year-old obsession with beating
the US appears anachronistic.

It is unlikely, though, that any representative of the EU's 27
governments will have the guts to argue that the Lisbon strategy should
be abandoned when it is discussed at a Brussels summit this week. Such
thinking would be regarded as heretical.

The truth is that the objectives agreed in 2000 were neither attainable
nor desirable. But this hasn't stopped our leaders from making the
pursuit of more laudable goals subservient to this ill-conceived strategy.

In 2004, for example, they decided that measures (pdf) viewed as
necessary to deal with climate change would first have to be assessed
from a competitiveness standpoint. This has proven a boon to the car
industry, which has successfully lobbied (pdf) to weaken proposals on
reducing emissions from new vehicles.

Ever the opportunist, Peter Mandelson has used the Lisbon strategy to
foist free trade on poor countries. When unveiling a 2006 paper called
Global Europe (pdf), Mandelson stated that Lisbon "must be complemented
by an external agenda for improving European competitiveness in the
global economy". As part of this agenda, Mandelson has challenged
environmental protection measures in Brazil and Mexico and Thailand's
(pdf) policies on affordable medicines, because they were deemed hostile
to European firms.

Admittedly, the Lisbon strategy alluded to Europe's much-vaunted social
model and indicated that it should be preserved. Achieving its goals,
however, would necessitate the dismantling of that model. Hard-won
rights recognised by EU law such as paid holidays and a limit to the
working week would have to be sacrificed on the altar of competitiveness.

It is little wonder that some of the most vociferous supporters of the
strategy are American free market cheerleaders hoping to have their
country's economic system replicated in Europe. Paul Hofheinz, a genial
former reporter with the Wall Street Journal, has set up the Lisbon
council, perhaps the most neoliberal thinktank now operating in Brussels.

Hofheinz recently commissioned IBM to write a prescription (pdf) for the
European economy. The US computer giant recommended a lowering of labour
standards so that it will be easier for bosses to "hire and fire" their
workers.

IBM offers a slightly more subtle version of what Milton Friedman, the
economist with the most pernicious influence in the 20th century,
exhorted European leaders to do in one of the last interviews before he
died. According to Friedman, the policies of Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan should be implemented all over this continent.

It would be one thing if Friedman's followers were having a marginal
impact in Brussels. But unfortunately, they are influential.
Frighteningly so.



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This entry was tagged with the following keywords: eusummit
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--
Sarah Rimmington
Attorney
Essential Action, Access to Medicines Project
Washington, DC
Tel: (202) 387-8030
Cell: (202) 422-2687
www.essentialaction.org/access/