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The Lisbon strategy, launched in 2000 to promote growth and employment by developing a highly competitive European economy, is an incoherent mixture of economic liberalism, social democratic aspirations and neo-Schumpeterian technological determinism. This article presents the macroeconomic environment of the Lisbon strategy and calls into question the generally accepted notion that Europe lags behind the USA in terms of productivity and innovation. It discusses the implications of the most important integrated guidelines that member countries should follow to implement the Lisbon agenda and argues that they represent more a neoliberal programme than a renewal of the European social model. This article also presents the results of empirical work that tested the effectiveness of the various market liberalisation measures promoted by the Lisbon agenda. These results show that one should not expect significant results in two key areas: innovation and employment.

"Die Lissabon-Strategie, die im Jahr 2000 ins Leben gerufen wurde mit dem Ziel, eine höchst wettbewerbsfähige europäische Wirtschaft zu schaffen, ist eine inkohärente Mixtur aus Wirtschaftsliberalismus, sozialdemokratischen Zielen und neo-schumpeterianischem technologischen Determinismus. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt das makroökonomische Umfeld der Lissabon-Strategie und stellt die allgemein akzeptierte Auffassung in Frage, dass Europa in Sachen Produktivität und Innovation hinter den USA zurückbleibt. Die Autoren erörtern die Folgen der wichtigsten integrierten Leitlinien, die von den Mitgliedstaaten befolgt werden müssen, um die Lissabon Agenda umzusetzen, und argumentieren, dass diese eher einem neoliberalen Programm als einer Erneuerung des europäischen Sozialmodells entsprechen. In dem Beitrag werden ferner die Ergebnisse empirischer Arbeiten vorgestellt, bei denen die Wirksamkeit der verschiedenen von der Lissabon-Strategie geförderten Marktliberalisierungsmaßnahmen untersucht wurde. Aus diesen geht hervor, dass in zwei Schlüsselbereichen, nämlich Innovation und Beschäftigung, keine nennenswerten Ergebnisse erwartet werden sollten." (Autorenreferat, IAB-Doku)

Pessimistic comments are crowding the medias about the failure of the Lisbon strategy. At the end of 2004, the latest Kok group's report has emphasized "the failure of the Lisbon strategy." There is now a debate about the remodeling or the rationalization of the strategy. Before taking decisions, it would be opportune to organize a reflection about the extent of the failure & its causes. Otherwise any reform runs the risk of being not adapted or even counterproductive. Different questions must be examined: what is the real competitiveness problem?; is there a real need of an EU initiative?; do the different characteristics of the approach chosen in 2000 make sense? Adapted from the source document.

The present article aims to shed light on the concrete implementation of the Lisbon strategy with regard to its governance framework and to participation (of social partners) in particular. The focus is on the European Employment Strategy (EES) (defined in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 and then integrated into the broader Lisbon strategy that emerged in 2000) and the open method of coordination on pensions (the process of soft coordination of pension reforms agreed at the Stockholm Council of 2001). While the EU discourse has a strong emphasis on social partnership, evidence from the two cases in this article shows limited participation. While social partner access varies considerably between coordination processes, it is evident that expectations concerning increased participation have not been fulfilled in the Lisbon strategy.

This paper examines the economic and social thought that has evolved around the Lisbon strategy, which aimed to turn the European Union into the world's most competitive knowledge economy by 2010. It argues that a new regime of rationality has emerged in which economic and social objectives, which were previously thought to be at odds with one another, have become increasingly aligned. The supposed antinomy between economic efficiency and social security has been gradually replaced by a Rawlsian-inspired understanding of social justice in which the individual right to self-development and employment is seen to go hand-in-hand with economic innovation and competitiveness. This alignment, which is expressed through the worshipping of the Nordic welfare model in general and the notion of flexicurity in particular, seems to have a strong depoliticizing effect.

This article examines the politics of the Lisbon strategy before and after its major watershed reform in 2005, with particular attention to the role of the European Commission. Operating in an ambiguous partial delegation of power, the Commission changed from performing a strong administrative role in the 2000-04 period to performing a political role after 2005. The institutional analysis of this article combines contextual factors and internal factors for explaining this variation. The findings reveal that although internal factors play an important part in explaining change, they are highly related to contextual factors. More precisely, the ability of the Commission to unfold actively its ideological and normative leverage and unfold specific forms of procedural leverage after 2005 is highly related to the member states' decision to clarify the formal division of tasks between them and the Commission. In other words, situations of procedural ambiguity are not necessarily to the advantage of the Commission, since it does not invariably have the ability to use this ambiguity in its favour. Adapted from the source document.

This article provides a brief review of the literature on the Lisbon strategy. The aim is to shed light on the changing attitudes of experts and academics towards the strategy (both on its launch in 2000 and during its subsequent evolution through the mid-term review of 2004–05). The focus of the article is on three main questions: the political and economic rationale of the strategy, the use of participation to increase EU democratic legitimacy, and the cognitive potential of the strategy through learning dynamics. Three broad tensions seem to require more political and analytical attention. The first tension has to do with the reform of the European social model; the second is related to the ambiguous compromise between the supposed depoliticisation of socio-economic reforms through the Lisbon strategy and the aim of improving participation of stakeholders; and the third tension has to do with the respect of national competences on the one hand, and the improvement of strategy's efficacy to shape cognitive and normative maps on the other. For all these, the Lisbon project has represented a first, but not definitive, answer.