Madrid, 31 January 2013. Marcos Peña, President of the Spanish Economic and Social Council, highlighted the consensus of the social partners and of organized civil society as the great contribution of the Council’s report, New economic governance in the European Union and growth, drawn up and adopted by its plenary session with all votes in favour. “We tried to speak with a single voice and this consensus is what we have contributed – a common analysis and joint proposals,” he said at the opening of today’s event to launch the report which the Council adopted at the end of last year. He stressed that the novelty is not so much the analysis of the adjustments needed in EU institutional structure as the fact that all the organizations represented on the Council agree as to which are really indispensable.
This perception was shared by all the Council groups present at the roundtable held as part of the event. Jorge Aragón (trade unions), Enrique de la Lama (employers) and Juan María Concha (social economy on behalf of organized civil society) agreed that the report had been enriched by consensus, as the particular group positions were confined to more specific aspects. However, Aragón noted the need to further defend the European social model and to regulate markets which have proven inefficient over this crisis. De la Lama, for his part, pointed to the need for more coordinated Community economic policies centred on greater productive efficiency across Europe. Juan María Concha stressed the importance of the social economy in the Community economy as a whole and highlighted the need for greater European competitiveness.
Rafael Montero, chairman of the Council’s Single Market working group responsible for drawing up the report, set out its conclusions with particular focus on the report’s proposals for enhancing European governance. Short-term measures to curtail the sovereign debt crisis, but also medium and long-term ones to provide instruments designed to prevent similar crisis situations. Montero noted that the report, backed unanimously, was drawn up over a very short period, namely just two months of hard work – a speed which was vital in allowing the Council to respond to the attacks suffered by Spanish debt in the summer.
Josep Borrell, well acquainted with the Community process from his experience in a spell as President of the European Parliament, gave the keynote talk. He questioned whether the response to this crisis from Community spheres will be the same as on past occasions, and accordingly it is uncertain whether the EU will emerge from it reinforced. Borrell noted that solutions may come from intergovernmental agreements, as has been the case so far, or from federalist approaches, with progress in economic and monetary union and also in political terms. But according to Borrell there is as yet no sign of such approaches working.