Abstract. This research tries to offer an explanation for the motivation to implement the Lisbon Strategy, its main failures and its impact upon EU economic growth process. The Lisbon Strategy, which was adopted in 2000, should have resulted in the structural change of the European Union’s economy until 2010, if taking into consideration the promotion of a sustainable economic growth, which could encourage the increase of employment and the provision of economic and social cohesion. Thus, the European economy should have get its dynamism back which it had before the oil shocks (when it had the “Thirty glorious years”), under the terms of the increase in competitiveness within a global economy and of the direction towards knowledge based economy.

Keywords: economic growth; European social model; the Lisbon Strategy; the Northern sub-model.