This paper develop the concept of asymmetric state capacity as a way to understand the difficulties which the EU is experiencing in pursuing its Lisbon Strategy aim of becoming the 'the most competitive and dynamic knowledge- based economy in the world, capable of sustainable growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.' It examines the tensions between the European Commission and the Council of Ministers as they work within the open method of coordination (OMC) to reform European education systems and suggests that education policy is an area in which national state strategies and priorities serve to emphasize the contradictions of the Lisbon Strategy itself.Empirical evidence is presented in the form of the results of the application of Critical Discourse Analysis to two versions of a 2004 document: 'Education and Training 2010 - The Success of the Lisbon Strategy Hinges of Urgent Reforms.' The European Commission produced an initial draft which was subsequently modified to produce a joint report of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers. This paper suggests that the differences between the two documents do not concern the approach to education as a vehicle for economic growth within the globalized knowledge-economy, since at the level of discourse the two documents are remarkably similar. The key differences are identified as centering around the extent to which competence for the governance of education is to be rescaled to the European level.In seeking to explain the extent and significance of contested governance, this paper examines the supranational and intergovernmental roles and perspectives of the Commission and the Council and suggests that the OMC should be considered as an institutional fix, an attempt to accommodate both supranational and intergovernmental dynamics within the EU while facilitating the pursuit of Lisbon Strategy reforms of education systems. This paper suggests that the OMC as a method for promoting reform of education systems is struggling to balance competing dynamics and interests and that this is because of a) the position of education within national policy fields and b) the potential for reform of education systems to make particularly clear the contradictions of the Lisbon Strategy as a whole.In conclusion, this paper argues that EU education policy development within the Lisbon Strategy and through the OMC is inherently contradictory and that a useful way of conceptualizing the contradictions is through the development of an understanding of asymmetric state capacity. This is presented as a frame for the consideration of the contested nature of the rescaling of educational governance capacity within the EU. The EU is presented as a policy field in which multi-level governance takes place in the shadow of state hierarchies with different capacities in different dimensions. The OMC is seen as an unstable institutional method for the harnessing of asymmetric state capacities towards EU goals. The current sense of the need for urgency in pursuing education reform in the Lisbon Strategy is seen as being likely to produce attempts to reconfigure the balance of asymmetric capacities in such a way as to make the OMC an even more unstable institutional fix.