The Lisbon Enigma - The Fall and Rise of a Secret Enigma
The Lisbon Enigma - The Fall and Rise of a Secret Enigma

Summary/Abstract: On 22 and 23 March, 2005, the EU’s prime ministers and heads of state convened in Brussels to survey the so-called Lisbon Process, a complex set of reforms with a set deadline. Any honest account of events would have been bound to report that the Lisbon Process produced one of the major failures in the history of the European Union. Up until then, the Union had more or less managed to usher through institutional reforms and repeated enlargements without fuss and on schedule. Examples include institutional reforms as complicated and time-consuming as the creation of the Single Market in 1992, the finalisation of the European Monetary Union in 1999, or the accession of ten new countries in 2004: all of these were completed on time and, in essence, successfully. But not the Lisbon Process, it seems, which has grossly failed to satisfy the goals it has set. What went wrong, and how will the Union deal with this failure? [...]

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