Acceso usuarios
Amandine Crespy 
This article explains how, despite a wide consensus on the need to liberalize services as the very cornerstone of the Lisbon Strategy, oppo- nents succeeded in significantly diluting the dere- gulatory force of the draft EU Services Directive.
A study of organized mobilization by left-wing poli- tical parties, trade unions and the alter-globalist Attac movement in three countries – Belgium, France and Germany – reveals institutional and dis- cursive explanatory factors that were closely inter- related. The opponents succeeded in Europeani- zing the conflict, and their strategic discourse invoking a social Europe, on the one hand, and stressing the close nexus between the citizenry and the European Parliament, on the other, largely determined the fate of the Bolkestein Directive, which ended in a parliamentary compromise
