31/05/2005 1:48:25 pm
Bolkestein in FT: Europe has been oversold. Former EU Commissioner Fritz Bolkestein writes openly in today?s Financial Times about the urgent need to focus the EU at its core mission, a free market, and stop trying to do everything:

"It goes without saying that the EU is of immense value to all who live in Europe. That lends great importance to the debate on what the Union ought to do. It should restrict itself to its core activities: to smooth the path for economic exchange between member states, to solve common problems and to create advantages of scale. ...

The trouble is that the institutional bias is always to propose more. The European parliament wants the EU to do everything. The European Commission displays the normal bureaucratic instinct: more tasks mean more jobs and more money. And often a member of the Council of Ministers tries to achieve through Brussels what they cannot get at home. ...

A single market for services promises to generate millions of jobs. ... Martin Schultz, president of the European Socialist party in the European parliament at Strasbourg, has said that if the services directive were passed unchanged, it would mean the destruction of the European social model. How social is an economic model that throws up 12 per cent unemployment as in Germany, or 10 per cent as in France?"

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