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incorporates economic and social pillars of the sustainable development of the EU. This way, the
Lisbon Strategy and the EU Strategy for Sustainable Development are mutually complementary in
respect to the question of sustainable development of the EU and its member states.
Already in the March 2000, the representatives of states and governments in the
Lisbon strategy agreed upon the aim to make EU the most competitive and most dynamic
knowledge economy with the ability of sustainable economic growth with more job openings
and better social cohesion until the year 2010. In order to reach such aim, they specifically
agreed that transformation to a knowledge oriented economy and society, modernization of
European social model and the appropriate macroeconomic politics is needed. They have
reached a consensus on that all the particular member states shall therefore together support
the change towards the information society, support the processes of research and
development, accelerate the process of structural reforms to reach competitiveness and
innovation and strengthening the common market; they will invest in people and fight the
social exclusion and actively pursue macroeconomic politics which stimulates sustainabl e
and healthy economic situation and appropriate growth. The generally ambitious aims and
the bold resolutions of the Lisbon strategy actually stands for the EU‘s most concrete
answer by which it decided to react on more and more intense global economic competition
pressure. Nevertheless, the starting point for the economic problem’s resolution in the
Lisbon strategy itself (on which later the European Union Strategy for Sustainable
Development took up) was set to be an economic, but also social and environmental renewal ,
in other words - the sustainable development . For Slovakia, not only as the ordinary member
of the European Union, but also as for a state which is undergoing through the
transformation process, this coincidence is even more important. The aim of the Lisbon
strategy’s to mediate more effective European economy through more socially and
environmentally appropriate conditions on one hand comes up from a general need to assure
its sustainability, and also on the other hand from various different economic assumptions
and theories, which explain numerous ways by which the social and environmental areas can
at the same time become the base for it’s upcoming improvement. 7 In line with the
intention of building a new, stronger economy, the Lisbon strategy foremost emphasizes the
role of innovations, education , and the social and environmental dimensions . Though it is
clear that also for the competitiveness of Slovakia the sustainable development is inevitable,
7 For instance the politics of innovation of the Lisbon strategy is in many ways based on the broader economic theory of
J. A. Schumpeter, according to whom innovations are the mechanism of economic changes. Besides innovation, the
Lisbon strategy has also reached a certainty about importance in questions like for example the knowledge economy or
the technology government, also based on the theories of various modern economists, sociologists and anthropologists,
of besides of the above mentioned J. A. Schumpeter, for instance of the Ch. Freeman, C. Perez or M. Castells.