Blair brainstorms on future of social Europe

By Dana Spinant and Tim King

Date: 20/10/05

The UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will preside over next week's EU summit, is to have a brainstorming session tomorrow (21 October) on the future of a European social model.

He will meet leading academics from different European universities to discuss globalisation and its effects, ahead of the special summit at Hampton Court next Thursday (27 October).

The UK prime minister has been widely criticised in continental Europe for taking advice only from academics who believe the European social model is not sustainable and should be reformed drastically, a view which has been labelled as Anglo-Saxon.

The Belgian professor and former European Commission adviser André Sapir is seen as having Blair's ear. He gave a presentation to the informal meeting of EU finance ministers in September, which called for reform of "dysfunctional labour markets and social policies". Sapir's analysis later came under attack from those wanting stronger welfare states.

Blair wants to show with tomorrow's event, which he is hosting at 10 Downing Street, that he is not limited to taking advice from an academic whose work is controversial in some continental European countries.

The other academics who will attend are: Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics, widely regarded as Blair's guru of The Third Way, Maurizio Ferrera (European University Institute, Florence), Anton Hemerijck (Leiden University), Karl Aiginger (Austrian Institute of Economic Research), Patrick Weil (French National Research Centre, CNRS, in Paris), Wolfgang Merkel (Humboldt University, Berlin), Joachim Palme (Swedish Institute for Social Research), Luc Soete (Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology) and Loukas Tsoukalis (LSE). The briefing has been organised by the Policy Network, a centre-left think-tank based in London.

Matt Browne, director of the Policy Network, said: "Blair wants to listen to their suggestions and ideas on what issues and values are common to European social models and to brainstorm on what initiatives can be taken at the European level. He wants to learn from the expertise of every nation."

Blair will be looking for advice on how Europe should respond to globalisation, which is the theme of the Hampton Court summit. Both tomorrow and next Thursday he will be discussing how best the EU can maintain its prosperity, while keeping social standards. He will argue that the EU has a distinctive role in the world, with distinctly European values expressed through its approach to aid, trade and the Common Foreign and Security Policy.

But he is also concerned about the challenges that the EU faces internally such as migration and terrorism.

According to a source close to Blair, the message that the British prime minister wants to bring to the summit is that the EU should concentrate its action on two areas to improve Europe's competitiveness: providing structural funds for readjustment and working to create world-class European universities.

He favours a push to create a European network of universities that can compete with the US, as well as ways of looking at how EU funds could be used to attract and retain the best researchers.

Preview of a brainstorming session, on 21 October 2005, on the future of a European social model. The event was to be hosted by the UK's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was to meet leading academics from different European universities to discuss globalisation and its effects, ahead of a special summit at Hampton Court on 27 October 2005.