Tania Zgajewski on the basis of the European social model(EPC, 2004). The environmental objective aims mainly at tackling climatic change and at dissociating economic growth from the use of resources. One needs to measure the depth of these ambitions. Never in the history of European integration since the 1950s had the European institutions committed themselves to so many deep reforms. The common market, the single market, and the single currency were mainly economic programmes(with, of course, strong collateral implications for society). Here, they commit themselves to the global reform of the welfare state. There is a tremendous difference in scope, which was not correctly underlined at the time. This new element has of course an evident link with the instruments which have been foreseen. There is a relation between the nature of the ambitions and the nature of the instruments which have been chosen. Second, to reach these various objectives, various instruments at different levels were to be used. They encompass both European Community(EC) measures(regulations and directives) and national measures for the most important part through the Open Method of Coordination(Dehousse, 2004; Pochet, 2002) 1 . This is, from a political point of view, one of the most important innovations of the Lisbon Strategy. The previous EC programmes of action(the common market, the single market, the single currency) were based exclusively or mainly(for the single currency) on EC measures. The Lisbon Strategy is the first programme of action based mainly on national measures. The consequences of this new element should not be underestimated. This said, at first sight, one contradiction arises. The Lisbon Strategy has very big ambitions- in fact more than the single market or the single currency. This is all very well, but there are very limited resources to fulfil them. For the most important part of the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy, the resources are national measures. At the EC level, there are no serious legal constraints and no budgetary outlays. So there is an obvious discrepancy between the ambitions and the means. This constitutes a problem. Europe is in charge of things that it cannot control(and about which the member states are not eager to act as we will see later) and for which very limited resources are available. This does not look like a good recipe for success. 1. There are already libraries of comments dedicated to the Open Method of Coordination(OMC). 64