ALMOST exactly a year ago, I found myself reporting the fuss in Brussels about the failure of the Lisbon Strategy, the European Union's 10-year plan to make Europe "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010". All around me, Euro-pundits, Eurocrats and European parliamentarians chorused, as one, that the roots of the problem lay in process: national governments had ducked reform because the EU lacked the legal tools to make them reform.To use a technical term from political science, this seemed to me to be cobblers. The single biggest reason that Europe was not the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world, I argued, was that lots of Europeans (perhaps most) did not want to live in such a competitive place. For sure, they want to stay rich and comfortable, and they know that globalisation is a threat. But lots of Europeans are not prepared to do anything about it, if it means taking shorter holidays, working longer hours, graduating more quickly or retiring much later.A year on, memories of this argument resurfaced as I wrote this week's print column about the recent UK-Nordic-Baltic summit and the British government's fascination with all things Nordic. David Cameron and the coalition ...
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