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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.

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.