The EU is still failing to promote competition and markets, and reform is necessary if the continent is to "kick into gear as an alternative engine of world economic growth", former European Commissioner Mr Peter Sutherland said last night.
Speaking at the 25th anniversary of the Prince's Trust in Belfast, Mr Sutherland said the European single market, completed in 1992, initially fuelled 1.5 per cent additional growth and created about a million extra jobs.
But he said the "momentum for reform subsequently ran out of steam". What is now needed in France, Germany and Italy is labour market reform - such as that seen in Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands - which has sharply reduced unemployment rates in those states.
"The inability to create jobs and get people working is a serious concern when, as we know, the European population is ageing so fast," he said.
Despite the political sensitivity of structural reforms, it is time to accelerate the process, he added. The proper approach which would deliver progress was the supra-national one, and not the inter-governmental model which he described as "a failed model".
He advocated "... a concept of gradually, and in defined areas, sharing sovereignty. In certain areas there should be majority voting and the policy should come from a civil service, the Commission, dedicated to producing European policies in the interests of all citizens of the union."
The EU had failed, he said, when it rejected the supranational and followed the inter-governmental approach, adding that it was "a serious mistake" to "inter-governmentalise" the Common Foreign and Security Policy and place it under the authority of the member states' governments.
The Commission should have been used as a "central vehicle" for that policy area.
Mr Sutherland, chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International, said the key to EU structure is and should remain the Commission.
"It is the heart of the EU supranational system, and it has been uniquely responsible for the EU's major successes," he said. Among its major achievements were the single market - "without which this continent would be a total economic backwater" - and the euro, which was a "major success".