Europe is for being recognized for more than an ethnic background” : middle class British, Dutch and German minority citizens’ perspectives on EU citizenship and belonging to Europe’

Abstract

The paper pinpoints some crucial themes of European belonging arising in the narratives of minority key activists with various hyphened legal national citi-zenship status, e.g. South Asian Brits, Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish/ Kurd-ish-Germans. The interviews capture how visible minorities’ perspectives on European belonging are influenced by structural racism, but also by national-ly specific discourses of symbolic inclusion or exclusion of ethnic minorities respectively.
 In this original research project in total 43 key minority activists, men and women and all of middle class social status were interviewed between au-tumn 2009 and summer 2012, e.g. pre-Brexit, in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. The findings of the study underline ambivalent post-cosmopolitan identities and more contradictory notions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity in Britain and the Netherlands, due to specific colonial / post-colonial contexts, and a different use of these categories in Britain and the rest of Europe. The minor-ity citizens interviewed in Germany expressed a more troubled position here as their relationship to the European Union is influenced by their feelings of belonging to Turkey, the latter outside the EU and at the border of Europe. 
 As the ‘new’ citizens interviewed in this sample live in major cities, such as London, Berlin and Amsterdam, individual feelings of belonging to Europe, perceptions of being European and cosmopolitan were very much shaped by the concrete city spaces and a positive identification with metropolitan urban identity.

Becoming European: Strangers Finding a Place in the European Union

“…There is growing research into how non-Europeanorigin populations relate to the added European dimension of political and cultural membership. Studies of European identity and support for European integration are increasingly interested in the perspective of minorities (Agirdag et al 2016;Cinnirella and Hamilton 2007;Dowley and Silver 2011;Erisen 2017;Roeder 2011;Teney et al 2016;Vieten 2018), as well as the potential significance of 'Europe' in processes of migrant integration (Sperling 2013). Survey research on these issues indicates that minorities support European integration more than non-minorities.…”

“…Qualitative studies on non-EU migrant identification with and understandings of Europe illuminate some of the ambivalence in these attitudes. Experiences of discrimination or marginalization visà-vis dominant groups and the increased politicization of migration across Europe may limit the sense of belonging to Europe (Vieten 2018). At the same time, the freedom of mobility associated with the European Union can offer a potentially more 'open' space of belonging and foster cosmopolitan and post-national understandings of membership as well as opportunities for individual growth and freedom (Sperling 2013;Vieten 2018).…”