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To understand how community-level policies affect social policies in the EU’s member states, and will affect them in the future, it is useful and indispensable to analyze the current developments in this policy area. The European Employment Strategy is, in this respect, a very interesting case in point. Initiated at the Luxembourg special job summit, the strategy has been rather smoothly developing for the last five years and it is under review for decisions at the end of the year 2002. What is remarkable is that, on the discourse level (from a “cognitive analysis” perspective) conceptions and representations have considerably been unified among the actors that participate to the devising and following-up of the strategy (both at Community and national levels). Their policy discourse abides very broadly by the main tenets of the sort of universal policy-mix that governs the entire planet today — although it is bound to be more and more challenged in the future. But, going beyond this facevalue perspective, a remarkable maintenance of national differences and conflicting views emerge. This diversity is, notably, interpretable in terms of national political discourses and the values that underpin them.