The European Commission and Europe 2020: smart, sustainable and inclusive growth

This book focuses on European political entrepreneurship in the Europe 2020 strategy. The aim of the book is to analyse the Europe 2020 strategy and the role of European political entrepreneurship in debating, shaping and implementing the strategy within the EU’s political levels of governance. In 2010, the European Commission released an official communication titled ‘Europe 2020 – A strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’. It succeeded the European Single Market programme (1986–92) and the Lisbon Strategy (2000–10) and was decided on by the European Council at a meeting on 26 March 2010, chaired by President Herman Van Rompuy. The Lisbon Strategy aimed to transform Europe into the most competitive economy in the world, but it was more or less a failure due to an overloaded agenda, lack of member state commitment, lack of ownership and political steering, conflicting priorities and the ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy in a socioeconomically and politically heterogeneous Europe (Stec and Grzebyk, 2018: 120–22; Fura et al., 2017: 969; see also Kotz, 2005; Erixon, 2010; European Commission, 2010). In the new Europe 2020 strategy, the Commission called upon EU institutions, member states, regional and local authorities and the private sector to address the economic crisis (Wandel, 2016: 10; Zeitlin and Vanhercke, 2014: 8–9) by promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. It referred to smart growth as promoting an economy based on knowledge and innovation, sustainable growth as economic growth based on resource efficiency and a greener economy and inclusive growth as growth that provides for social integration. The Commission further argued that fundamental measures, beyond day-to-day and regular political and economic activities, had to be implemented by engaged European actors seeking new economic and social models and presenting the state of the world, on all political levels of European governance (see Silander, 2018; Barbier, 2011). From 1995 and up to 2010, the Commission and member states had played different