EU Rearranges the Deck Chairs

BRUSSELS - The European Commission is preparing a wholesale revamp of the beleaguered Lisbon Strategy - its ambitious goal to become the most competitive economy in the World by 2010 - in a bid to restore momentum to the process.

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The Commission's Competitiveness Group - which drew up the report - recommends repointing the Lisbon strategy around 10 so-called 'central policy areas'

These include: 'attracting more people in employment', 'more and better research and development', 'promoting innovation and sustainability', 'completing the internal market' and 'creating the conditions for a strong European industrial base'.

There is also a policy area entitled, 'increasing the adaptability of workers and enterprises and the flexibility of labour markets'.

And a draft outline of the 2005 Spring Report, entitled, 'European partnership for growth and job - relauching the Lisbon Strategy', warns how urgent it is to breathe life into the process.

'Without action, European growth would decrease to 1.5 percent of GDP in the coming years which, then, would damage our social model", the draft reads.

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Unmentioned (and perhaps unmentionable) is the inconvenient fact that the "social model" is the problem.

Rather than such gauzy goals as "attracting more people in employment," the eurocrats would be advised to foster a euroculture that values competition, respects the work ethic, venerates the individual, rewards risk-taking, abhors taxation and reverses the soul-crushing, incentive-sapping tide of nanny-state socialism that has eroded European competitiveness for more than half a century.

Of course, such a recommendation is at cross-purposes to the foundational precepts of the Brussels übergovernment. See, what's being conclusively proven is the futility of top-down approaches for growth, especially ones driven by circle-jerking government bureaucrats. The Lisbon Strategy, revamped or otherwise, is like the Soviet Union's Five Year Plans, only without the warmth and hominess of its hive-like urban housing cooperatives. So far.

A parallel story whose essential message will surely escape Brussels' grasp:

Germans Don't Want the Corner Office:

Most Europeans would rather be the employee than the employer

Fear of failure makes Europeans happier to be cashing regular paychecks than starting their own business. Americans, on the other hand, are more likely to want to be their own boss, according to an EU report.

The European Union's report showing 61 percent of Americans want to be their own boss compared to 45 percent of Europeans comes after five years of surveying more than 21,000 Americans and Europeans about their feelings toward self-employment.

'There are cultural differences between Germans and Americans,' Goetz W. Werner (photo), founder of German drugstore chain dm, told DW-WORLD.DE. 'Americans say, 'Let's try it,' a German wants to consider all the possibilities first -- that's why Germans often lack boldness.'

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Really, if they could fix that, they could fix Europe.