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At the Spring Summit on 25th-26th March, one among the most controversial debates concerned the poverty and education parts of the strategy. While EU leaders confirmed social inclusion as one of the five headlines targets, the explicit reference to cutting poverty by 25% was dropped as several Member States insisted that further work is needed on appropriate indicators.
It can be argued that, even if the new strategy, dubbed ”EU 2020”, showed some progress, it lacks a real political commitment to deliver ambitious objectives.
The goal of the previous Lisbon strategy of making the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” by 2010, failed because it was probably too ambitious – but probably also because of the economic crisis, which unravelled some of its achievements.
In addition to this, a concern with this strategy was that, when “refocused” in 2005, too much attention was placed on economic growth, while the social dimension remained weak.
Globalisation and the competition pressure from outside should not lead Europe to choose again the wrong direction. As it is written in the Communication on EU 2020 from the Commission “Europe needs to get back on track and then it must stay on track”.
It should be fully acknowledged that social inclusion and social cohesion are also key drivers for growth and for a prosperous society and they should be backed up by a good plan of action in the new strategy.
Multiple social aspects should be taken into account for contributing really to a reduction of poverty and a “greater social cohesion”, i.e. stronger social protection systems and better and equal access to quality social services to name a few.
In this respect, Social Economy has a key role to play as it provides quality jobs and quality social services, taking into account also the disadvantaged people, thus fostering social inclusion and social cohesion.
For this reason, its role should be fully supported and recognized in the new 2020 strategy. |
