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Showing posts from September, 2008

The EU Needs a New Business Model

Note: A keynote speech delivered on 19 September 2008 at the European Business School Symposium in Frankfurt. Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J. M. Keynes The rejection by the Irish of the Lisbon Treaty has led to much soul-searching in Brussels and elsewhere in Europe. Putting aside the question how the EU got itself in this particular predicament, namely, allowing 1 million voters, accounting for 0.2 percent of the EU's total population to veto a 269-page treaty teeming with bureaucratese of mind-boggling opaqueness, the debate-still on going as we speak-is not likely to go very far. The fact is that it is not the Irish that are to be blamed-one should in general not put to referenda questions which cannot fit in less than one page and even that is risking it. It might be useful to review briefly here, at the outset, the content of some of this soul-searching. One can identify several schools of thought. • There are some