ABSTRACT
The aims of the Committee on a Peoples Europe fitted in very well with the internal market agenda of the new President, Jaques Delors. Baron Cockfield, the commissioner for the internal market from 1984, was expected to follow Margaret Thatchers eurosceptic line, but became a driving force in laying the groundwork for the Single European Market in 1992. The social identity language functioned side by side with the identity-through-citizenship language as long as the expanding West European core was rather homogeneous in economic and social terms, and new poor countries like Ireland in the West, and Greece, Portugal and Spain in the South, expected to achieve the same standard through regional politics. The new association was with the citizen concept, which somehow, without closer analysis, was linked to ideas of a European democracy and a European internal market. The Lisbon summit in 2000 once again introduced full employment as a prioritized political task.
