The EU has had a key role in sponsoring lifelong learning, but this has not been matched by analysis of its lifelong learning policies. Contributions have concluded that EU lifelong learning policies share the OECD’s economistic orientation: although formally social cohesion is an aim, in practice concerns about inclusion, cohesion and citizenship are either at a discount or framed in terms of employability (Edwards 2002; Field 2006). This paper seeks to explain how EU lifelong learning policies came to adopt this economistic tone. The common explanation is globalisation (cf Brine 2006, Field 2006), however, this overlooks the significance of other factors. This paper argues that the EU’s orientation toward competitiveness in lifelong learning is not to be located mainly in late-modern concerns with globalisation. Rather, competition has framed EU policy in all sectors from the formation of the European Economic Community as a Common Market in the 1950s. From this perspective, what stands out about EU lifelong learning policy is not the discourse of competitiveness but the development and framing of other, secondary, discourses. The argument is that EU education policy’s principally vocational orientation reflects the EU’s founding treaties, and stems more from ‘path dependency’ than ‘globalisation’. Since the early 1990s, EU lifelong learning has developed in parallel with concerns about European identity. International lifelong learning policies, despite their ‘economic competitiveness’ orientation, have provided space for the EU to extend its lifelong learning policies and practices. Within this, EU institutions have nurtured programmes emphasising citizenship and social cohesion. Inevitably vocational concerns predominate. One aspect of the EU’s achievement is to have provided a space for wider social concerns in difficult times. Whether this can survive amid recent ‘“crisis” discourse’ (Robertson 2007) remains to be seen.