Can Europe feature a new deal to rally its member states for the decades to come?

The world experienced a dramatic shift by the end of 20th century with the wave of liberalization of exchanges, whether trade, capital or information, the demise of the soviet bloc and the capitalist turn taken in all the developing world, not least including China. These changes in the broad external world had implications for Europe that may have been widely underestimated. The Lisbon agenda for Europe’s response, to become in a decade the most successful “knowledge based economy”, was clearly out of date, if only because the dot.com crisis after the East Asian financial crisis had shown the difficulties of the game. The first decade of 21st century was lost. The 2008 North Atlantic financial crisis brought Europe back to cruel realities. The update of the Lisbon agenda for 2020 is much more cautious. Will this reappraisal suffice to guide a dismantling Europe across the rough waters of the external world in the next two decades?

The paper will assess the strong and weak points of the Lisbon agenda. It will then review how the updated Agenda 2020 draws the lessons of the lost decade and of the 2008 financial crisis to set the Europe integration on a new path. Finally, the paper will try to appreciate the opportunities and the constraints of the revised EU project and to see how it can be adjusted to consider various scenarios that are likely to occur in the broad external world which is by now largely conditioning the Europe future.