Preventing Poverty - Creating Identity

This paper has two aims. The first aim is to study and describe the manifest ideology of the EU's social policy. The second aim is to analyse to what extent the manifest ideology might be a part of building a common European identity - by finding common solutions to commonEuropean problems (problems, more or less constructed as common). The research is a critical ideology analysis, made up of a qualitative text analysis of EU social policy documents and National strategy reports (NSR). I ask two questions. Firstly, which are the main features in the manifest ideology of EU social policy as described in the texts? Secondly, what picture of a European identity is visible when reading the EU social policy texts and the National Strategy Reports? I have found five main features of the manifest ideology. These revolve around: how the world and change in the world are described according to the EU; the mutual interaction between the Lisbon objectives and greater social cohesion; the creating of social cohesion; the importance of how policies are constructed and implemented and the EU's self-image. The texts offer either two quite different pictures with regards to the question of a European identity or ones that is partly incoherent. The analysed EU policy texts put across a picture of a uniform Europe, suggest that there is something genuinely European and a common European identity. However, the picture obtained when reading the NSRs and the collected picture of the EU policy texts and the NSRs is much less coherent. The paper argues that the manifest ideology could be a part of building a European identity, but it does not manage to prove that it actually is.