EU Reflection Group delivered report: Project Europe 2030

We start by recalling the conclusions of the European Council 14 December 2007, one day after the Treaty of Lisbon was signed (document 16616/1/07). Reflections on “institutional” matters, current policies and the next long term budget were expressly prohibited:

Reflection Group horizon 2020-2030

8. In order to help the Union anticipate and meet challenges more effectively in the longer term (horizon 2020 - 2030), the European Council establishes an independent Reflection Group. Taking as its starting-point the challenges set out in the Berlin Declaration of 25 March 2007, the Group is invited to identify the key issues and developments which the Union is likely to face and to analyse how these might be addressed. This includes, inter alia: strengthening and modernising the European model of economic success and social responsibility, enhancing the competitiveness of the EU, the rule of law, sustainable development as a fundamental objective of the European Union, global stability, migration, energy and climate protection, and the fight against global insecurity, international crime and terrorism. Particular attention should be given to ways of better reaching out to citizens and addressing their expectations and needs.

9. The Group shall conduct its reflections within the framework set out in the Lisbon Treaty. It shall therefore not discuss institutional matters. Nor, in view of its long-term nature, should its analysis constitute a review of current policies or address the Union's next financial framework.

10. In its work, the Reflection Group will need to take into account likely developments within and outside Europe and examine in particular how the stability and prosperity of both the Union and of the wider region might best be served in the longer term.

11. The Group will be chaired by Mr Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, assisted by two Vice-Chairs, Ms Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Mr Jorma Ollila, and will include no more than 9 members selected from across the Union on the basis of merit. The Chairman and the Vice-Chairs are invited to submit a list of names to be considered by the European Council during the French Presidency.

12. The Group will consult as it deems appropriate and be responsible for the organisation of its own work.

13. The Group shall present its report to the European Council meeting of June 2010.

Project Europe 2030


Before the appointment, it was generally referred to as the Group of Wise Persons. In the report the Group added a few words to its name, in order to become discernible from past and future groups, so it became the Reflection Group on the Future of the EU 2030.



On 8 May 2010 the Felipe González, Chairman of Reflection Group, handed over the report to the President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy:

Project Europe 2030 (for the English version; 46 pages)



The report is also available in Dutch, French, German and Spanish.



Creation of jobs and growth


The main message of the Project Europe 2030 report is:

Our top priority must remain creating jobs and growth.

The beginning of the report is written in the form of a letter from the Reflection Group to the European Council (pages 3 to 6).


The Reflection Group calls for more decisive political leadership from the intergovernmental bodies of the EU: the European Council and the Eurogroup (in coordination with the Commission and the European Parliament; page 6).


The strategic challenges mentioned in this summary are generally well known, but where the European Union has mainly tinkered on the edges, the need for concrete and decisive action is pronounced with gravity.


Among the challenges requiring solutions are:


• Avoiding protectionist temptations
• Medium and long-term reforms in addition to measures to overcome the current crisis
• Strengthening economic governance by correcting losses in competitiveness, reflected in balance of payments and current account deficits
• Reforming the functioning and supervision of financial institutions
• Achieving a highly competitive and sustainable social market economy in order to maintain social cohesion and fight against climate change
• Catching up in the race towards a knowledge economy
• Implementing a common energy policy
• Leading the fight against climate change
• Tackling the demographic challenge
• Strengthening the Single Market including services, the digital society and other new sectors driving growth and job creation
• Reforming the labour market
• Modernising corporate governance practices



The letter is rounded off with a few remarks on how the EU should become a citizens’ project.


At a first glance, the recommendations read like a damning report card on the lost decade of the Lisbon Strategy.


The European Communities and the EU could establish a museum dedicated to the reform reports which were politely received by the leaders and silently shunted aside to gather dust.


Are the prospects any better now?


Possibly. Since the beginning of this year there is one EU citizen with a vested interest to make the European Council deliver, its President Herman Van Rompuy.


Can he set the wheels in motion?


A haiku for your thoughts.




Ralf Grahn

EU’s future ─ reflections to think about: Wolfgang Münchau & Felipe González

A weak Commission and egoistic member states, or something better? What has the future in store for the European Union?



The diverging trends of global challenges and national solutions confound Wolfgang Münchau in his column (in German) Europas Comeback (Financial Times Deutschland, 24 November 2009), but he optimistically concludes that the second decade of the 21st century may turn out better than the first.


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On the Spanish BlogEuropa.eu, J. Ignacio Torreblanca writes about the reflection group on the future of the European Union, chaired by Felipe González: Reflexión para la acción (22 November 2009).

The European Council which nominated the “wise persons” to ponder the future of the EU with 2020 or 2030 as its horizon, placed absurd limits on the mandate of the reflection group. Fortunately, the discussion between Felipe González and Emma Bonino in El País shows that González “thinks European” and that the group’s report will present the challenges of the EU in clear terms for the political leaders to digest.




For more on the subject, you can read Felipe González: “La toma de decisiones en la UE es diabólicamente ineficaz” (El País, 22 November 2009), a fairly long extract from a discussion with representatives from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Reflection is good, but action is better. Strategic questions such as foreign policy, immigration and energy require more Europe, hygienic standards for cheese less.


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The mandate and the membership of the Reflection Group are available on its web pages, although the following version of the membership list comes from the web page of Vaira Vike-Freiberga:

Felipe González Márquez, former Prime Minister of Spain and former Secretary General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Spain)

Vaira Vīķe – Freiberga, former President of Latvia (Latvia)

Jorma Ollila, Non-Executive Chairman and former CEO of Nokia Corporation and Non-Executive Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell (Finland),

Lykke Friis, Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark),

Rem Koolhaas, architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (the Netherlands),

Richard Lambert, Director-General of the Confederation of the British Industry and the present Chancellor of the University of Warwick (United Kingdom),

Mario Monti, former European Commissioner for Internal Market, financial services and financial integration, Customs, Taxation (1995 – 1999) and Competition (1999 – 2004), President of the Bocconi University of Milan and the first Chairman of Bruegel, a European think tank founded in 2005 (Italy),

Rainer Münz, Head of Research at Erste Bank in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (Austria),

Kalypso Nicolaidis, Professor of International Relations and Director of the European Studies Centre at Oxford University (Greece, France)

Nicole Notat, former General Secretary of Trade Union CFDT Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail) and Chairman of Vigeo, the leading European corporate social responsibility ratings agency (France)

Wolfgang Schuster, Mayor of Stuttgart, capital of the State of Baden-Württemberg (Germany)

Lech Walesa, former President of Poland (Poland).



Slovenian professor Žiga Turk, who blogs in English on BlogActiv, is secretary general of the Reflection Group.


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Is Münchau’s optimism warranted for the European Union’s second decade of the 21st century? To an extent it will depend on how the European leaders receive the report from the Reflection Group chaired by González.



Ralf Grahn



P.S. Do you find EUSSR myths fascinating? Are we EU citizens worth a better European Union? Read some or all of the 481 Euroblogs aggregated on multilingual Bloggingportal.eu. On most of the blogs you can comment and discuss our common European future.

Europe: Populism or democracy?

Ahead of the European elections in June 2009, we have seen two political trends. One the one hand, after the historic EU enlargement in 2004 and 2007 and since the beginning of the current Commission, the communitarian spirit seems to have ceded to increasing intergovernmentalism and national self-interest. The financial turmoil has accelerated both nationalistic responses and intergovernmental summiteering, with various ‘ad hoc’ initiatives thrown in for good measure. The Treaty of Lisbon would have brought some belated efficiency gains after the expansion to 27 members, but the Lisbon Treaty fails miserably in creating a European level democracy.

On the other hand, popular estrangement has increasingly favoured nationalistic and populist parties in national and sub-national elections. Referendums, purportedly on pan-European issues like the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, have boosted anti-reformist and self-absorbed movements, left or right, in France, the Netherlands and Ireland.

Municipal elections in Finland are hardly hot stuff for international media generally, but the spectacular gains by the populist True Finns are the latest indication of anti-European sentiments on the rise. Although the True Finns captured less than six per cent of the vote, their swayed almost six times as many voters as four years ago.

The International Edition of Helsingin Sanomat has more:

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/MUNICIPAL+ELECTIONS+SUNDAY+2345+National+Coalition+Party+largest+party+True+Finns+big+winners+gains+for+Greens+/1135240557573

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More than ever, pan-European solutions and actions are needed to enhance our security and to regain our prosperity, but populations are increasingly rejecting the European leaders’ intergovernmentalist and functionalist project.

The group of wise persons has been expressly forbidden to even think about so called institutional issues, but today’s challenges do not call for institutional tinkering in the customary manner.

The wise persons ─ and the European leaders ─ have to look at the foundations of the European project. Without democratic legitimacy and accountability the European Union is running aground. Only a European Union based on its citizens can give us the foundations we need to weather the storms.


Ralf Grahn

Rescuing the Court: Group of Wise Persons

Reforming the procedure of the European Court of Human Rights was not enough. The member states of the Council of Europe had to look beyond Protocol No. 14 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, amending the control system of the Convention.

During the Warsaw Summit (May 2005) the Council of Europe set up a Group of Wise Persons to examine the long term efficiency of the control mechanism of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Group stressed the need for Protocol No. 14 to enter rapidly into force and noted that only one more instrument of ratification was needed. The Group then proceeded to examine further reforms, because “the survival of the machinery for the judicial protection of human rights and the Court’s ability to cope with its workload are seriously under threat from an exponential increase in the number of individual applications which jeopardises the proper functioning of the Convention’s control system”.

The Group did not want to affect the unique feature of the supranational European Court, the right of individual application.

The Group proposed an amendment to the Convention allowing for future decisions on operating procedures of the Court to be taken by way of unanimously adopted resolutions of the Committee of Ministers, without amending the Convention itself each time. (Thus, lengthy ratification procedures could be evaded.)

The Group proposed adding more resources to the Court by the way of a judicial filtering body, the Judicial Committee, which could hear all applications raising admissibility issues and decide the applications which are either manifestly well-founded or manifestly ill-founded.

The Human Rights Court is meant to offer subsidiary control. Therefore it is important to improve the legal and judicial systems on the national level. The Group emphasised the importance of disseminating the Court’s case law and the recognition of its authority above and beyond the judgment’s binding effect on the parties.

The Group proposed opening up the possibility for national courts to ask the European Court for non-binding advisory opinions. Article 41 of the Convention should be amended in order to award compensation to the injured party on the national level.

The Group encouraged the Court to make the fullest possible use of the “pilot judgment” procedure in cases where structural or systemic problems affected large numbers of people.

In order to reduce the Court’s workload, the Group recommended more use of friendly settlements and mediation.

The Commissioner for Human Rights should actively work with the member states when there were serious violations of human rights.

In a little more than a week’s time these proposals are to be dealt with by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, when the Committee of Ministers convenes for its yearly meeting on the ministerial level. Actions are eagerly awaited.

Ralf Grahn