Since 2004 the Lisbon Strategy has been centred on structural reforms and economic prescriptions, while at the conclusion of the Lisbon summit a different strategy, organized partly around methods open to coordination, had introduced genuine innovation, with the hope of a real acceptance at community level of Europe’s “social dimension”. Since the second Kok Report things have changed. Important later events completely changed the picture, to say nothing of the economic crisis that exploded in 2007-2008. In these conditions we still need to establish the global balance of what is known by metonymy as “Lisbon”. This article tries to trace the main lines of the story. If we restrict ourselves to the social material of the Lisbon strategy, as two symbolic examples show (the implementation of social protection and flexicurity), it has not kept its promises. In the end it has been only a discourse accompanying the economic reforms, against a background of growing importance for community law, and privileges economic freedom over social rights.only subscribers can see the full article