Can the EU dig itself out of its economic hole?
Ten years ago, the European Union wanted to make itself the world's economic leader; now it is just trying to survive in an increasingly competitive world.
On Wednesday, the EU's executive, the European Commission, is set to suggest how the EU should modernize its economy to make it more competitive by 2020, amidst fears that the bloc is about to be eclipsed in the wake of the global downturn.
"The crisis has wiped out progress ... Europe's growth was severely hit ... Unemployment has spread ... Europe must react to avoid decline," the head of the commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, wrote in a briefing to EU leaders on the 2020 strategy.
EU leaders are expected to debate the strategy at a summit this month and finalize it in June.
The EU is currently struggling to pull out of the economic downturn, with its rebound showing none of the recent vigour recorded in the US and Asia - sparking fears that political decline may follow its economic slump.
"Europe can only maintain and extend its geopolitical clout if we manage to re-launch economic growth," Hungarian premier Gordon Bajnai wrote in a paper on the 2020 strategy.
Central to the EU's hopes are its new 10-year economic plan, which is meant to improve economic coordination between member states.
"How we go about managing our integrated European economy ... in order to improve our economic performance is one of the central questions facing the EU," the bloc's new president, Herman Van Rompuy, told the European Parliament.
But that plan has been overshadowed by the perceived failure of its predecessor, the Lisbon Strategy, which in 2000 vowed to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy in the world by 2010."
The strategy embodied a list of dozens of targets which EU states should aim for, such as investment into research and development (R&D), cutting red tape and improving employment.
Spending on R&D, for example, was meant to rise from the then level of 1.82 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 3 per cent.
But the strategy lacked any means to make member states stick to those targets - leaving the grandiose ambition exposed as little more than empty posturing.
R&D spending, for example, now lies at just 1.9 per cent of GDP.
"In our region, we all remember immediately the famous saying of Nikita Khrushchev ... that the USSR will reach the level of the US very soon, so I think that the shadow of the Lisbon strategy is still somewhere here," Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said ahead of the first EU summit debate on the issue on February 11.
"It's very clear that just such a model as was used for the Lisbon strategy, some kind of coordination of implementation, does not work in a proper way," Kubilius said.
On Wednesday, the commission is therefore expected to call for a new 10-year strategy with far fewer headline goals and much more attention paid to enforcement and peer review among member states.
The plan is expected to target better education, more high-tech investment and more flexibility in labour markets by getting member states to set national targets in line with an overall EU goal.
It is also expected to prioritize climate-friendly technologies and energy efficiency.
And controversially, it is expected to call on EU member states to exercise much tighter supervision of one another's economic plans - including, potentially, offering extra funding to states which make the most effort to improve their performance.
But it is not expected to demand sanctions against member states which miss their goals - something those states reject.
"To say that we can adopt some kind of (law) ... which would have the force of obligatory implementation is not a choice," Kubilius stressed.