Employment and the Lisbon Strategy

Abstract

When the European Employment Strategy (EES) was first created and implemented an enthusiastic academic debate rapidly emerged focusing on what this strategy represented (or could represent) for the development of an espace sociale européenne – which Delors had already defined many years ago as being a conditio sine qua non for the completion of the single market programme – and for governance and legitimacy questions about the evolving European Union (EU), as well as examining the nature of the tools and instruments employed therein and thus the strategy’s relationship to law and constitutionalism. To put it shortly, the focus of scholarly work was specifically centred around the identity of the EES ‘as a strategy in its own right’, owing also to its treaty-based nature, by examining the EES in comparison with other existing modes of regulation and co-ordination of the EU and, more broadly, its relationship with the community method. This academic focus reflected the way the EES was conceived and presented at the European level, namely, as a promising ‘new’ and non-binding form of the EU’s social governance that could be differentiated from other modes of regulation of the EU because of its distinguished features and characteristics.