Becoming European: Strangers Finding a Place in the European Union

Abstract

This article addresses the idea of belonging in Europe from the perspective of postcolonial migrants settling in EU societies. It draws on over one hundred in-depth interviews with Algerian, Ecuadorian, and Indian individuals settled mainly in and around the cities of London, Madrid, and Paris. Rather than investigating migrants’ orientations to Europe through a narrow interest in self-identification (feeling vs. not feeling European), it delves into individual migration narratives for evidence of how Europe is imagined (if it is imagined at all) during the migration process and its relation to other physical and symbolic sites. As a frame for interpreting individual migration narratives, I introduce the concept of ‘migratory rupture’, a dialectical experience of both the disorienting and creative aspects of migration. In excavating some of the reflexive processes involved in constructing symbolic geographies of attachment, I find that regardless of the scales of comparison used to articulate place affiliation across different contexts, e.g. whether small-scale (neighbourhoods or city districts) or larger-scale (supranational or de-territorialized categories), symbolic geographies allow migrants to view their transnational life experience on a single, coherent plane and express a form of global consciousness.