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The European Union's three chief representatives appealed Friday for greater economic coordination among member countries to revive growth in the bloc following the global crisis.
"Only by working together very closely together at all levels will we be able to deliver on the main challenges facing us," said the EU's new permanent president, Herman Van Rompuy.
"And this will indeed be a challenging six months for us all... We face huge budget deficits in each of our countries due to the economic crisis.
"In order to limit the deficits, we need reforms, but we also need economic growth, structural reforms."
He said that if nothing were done, economic growth would not be higher than 1.0 percent.
Van Rompuy was speaking at a news conference with EU Commission President Manuel Barroso and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose country assumed the EU's six-month rotating presidency on January 1.
"Our main objective during this time is united policies, especially on the economy," Zapatero said.
"If we can move the European economy forward, then prosperity will be on the horizon for all of us. That is the main objective we have for this period and it is an objective that we all share."
Barroso echoed those opinions.
"It is only if we work jointly with ambitious aims that we can find answers to the concerns of the citizens of Europe," he said. "Our first priority has to be economic recovery and the creation of jobs."
Zapatero on Thursday proposed a form of European "government" on economic issues, with the promise of rewards for members that meet binding targets -- and the threat of sanctions for those that do not.
Spain hopes the EU can agree on a replacement for the bloc's long-term growth strategy known as the Lisbon Agenda.
The plan was supposed to make the EU the world's most competitive economy by 2010 but never achieved its aims with governments under no obligation to conform.
Spain plans to learn from that failure and launch a new 10-year 2020 growth strategy that it intends to propose to an EU summit in Brussels on February 11 that will focus on the economy.
Without explicitly referring to the plan, Van Rompuy and Barroso indicated they shared the idea.
"We now have a window of opportunity for a good strategy," said Van Rompuy.
"The Spanish prime minister was very ambitious. I think he was right to be very ambitious... But we are all three of us full of ambitions because we feel that in a lot of countries the sense of urgency is more than it was a few years ago."
Friday's meeting was also an opportunity for the EU's three chief representatives to show they were clear on the division of their roles after reforms under which Van Rompuy become the EU's first permanent president.
"In other countries, even in democracies it is not one man or woman who decides," said Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime minister.
"The treaty is very clear on the division of roles. It is together that we take a decision in a crisis."
Zapatero added: "We are working together in a very coordinated way."
Van Rompuy said that in addition to the economy, the February 11 summit would focus on climate change following the UN summit in Copenhagen.
"The EU must continue to be a driving force in this field," he said, adding that without the EU "the outcome in Copenhagen would have been much less".
"We as a union would like to have gone further, but there is no reason to be downbeat... There are enough elements to have positive and lasting results. This is a complicated process and we are in for the long haul."
