[FR] Discipline budgétaire et politique macro-économique dans l’Union européenne

FOREWORD BY JACQUES DELORS

At the beginning of 2003, several indicators led Notre Europe to believe that, from a ‘constitutional’ perspective, the time had come to question the consistency between the medium- and long-term growth strategy adopted in Lisbon in 2000 by the Heads of State and Government and the stability pact designed to ensure the short-term stability of the European currency.

This intuition led us to organise a seminar of experts on the issue in March. The aim was to contribute to the emergence of a debate on economic governance in the enlarged Europe, which, to say the least, was struggling to get off the ground, as confirmed by the lack of work on this topic by the Convention.

The facts have confirmed that our intuition was right: the disciplines of the Stability Pact are being deeply questioned by those who promoted them and who are now arguing that economic growth is insufficient, which at least has the merit of exposing the hypocrisy of the ‘Stability and Growth Pact’. Growth is precisely the object of the Lisbon Strategy, which, as I noted at the recent Congress of the European Trade Union Confederation, is losing credibility due to a lack of real means of implementation.

Thus, between budgetary stability rules, which some have gone so far as to describe as ‘stupid’, and the invocation of growth (and therefore employment), which enjoys unquestionable legitimacy in public opinion, a new ‘democratic deficit’ has emerged, which it would be dangerous to simply play on. While this risk was clearly identified by our seminar, it must be acknowledged that the possible responses remained at the level of ideas, whether in terms of taking account of the quality of spending in budgetary discipline or the question of the budgetary resources needed for a minimum implementation of the Lisbon strategy.

The clearest conclusion from all this, as Robert Goebbels so aptly put it, is that we lack the instruments we need to steer ourselves credibly towards the prosperity to which we aspire. Like him, I believe that we do not need to reinvent what works, but to supplement it with what is missing: a pact for coordinating economic policies and a programme to ensure the financing of the major infrastructure networks that the enlarged Union needs even more than it did ten years ago, when the Commission proposed – already – a White Paper on growth, competitiveness and employment. In short, we need to move away from the certainties of a certain “single mindset” and reconnect with imagination.