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’

Ulrike M Vieten

doi:10.5130/ccs.v10i1.5794

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.

Highlights

The findings of the research illustrate how visible minorities8 perceive the European Union as an abstract and anonymous institution, and express a scale of more differentiated feelings of belonging and non-belonging to Europe influenced by structural racism, and further by nationally specific discourses of inclusion, ethnicity and notions of citizenship
European Union (EU) citizenship and European belonging are intertwined, but the notion of feeling European is anchored in everyday experiences of exercising EU mobility and citizenship rights as well as patterns of European racisms
Germany, share land borders that provide relatively easy and frequent cross-border mobility experiences for most of the interview partners. This side of vernacular cosmopolitanism and EU mobility is cherished, but it does not translate into a feeling of belonging to Europe, automatically

Summary

Introduction

With established far right populist governments in Hungary and Poland and a conservative-far-right coalition in Austria since 2017, we notice a dramatic shift from a discursive claim of a ‘cosmopolitan Europe’ (Beck and Grande, 2007) to a ‘backlash against multiculturalism in Europe’ (Alexander, 2013), for some time This development holds true for different national societies across Europe, and the (re)turn to parochial-national identities affects, in particular, visible minority citizens. Previous research underlines an ambivalent position of visible minorities vis-à-vis Europe: as far as processes of identify formation are concerned, Cinnirella and Hamilton (2007), for example, came across a more complex and nuanced position of South Asian Brits with respect to British national, on the one hand, and European belonging, on the other In their results they found that ‘British Asians were more pro-European than (our) white British participants, regardless of whether they were first or second generation’ The authors conclude that the different emphasis on past (glory & empire) and future (European community) was decisive for the distinguished evaluations of all their interview partners (ibid)

Objectives

Conclusion