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

Bibliographic Data

ID7735461
AuthorsUlrike M Vieten (0000-0002-6397-0528, Queen's University Belfast, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume10
Issue1
Pages27-44
Publication date2018-03-29
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCosmopolitan Civil Societies An Interdisciplinary Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1837-5391 • E-ISSN: 1837-5391
PublisherUniversity of Technology, Sydney (UTS) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5130/ccs.v10i1.5794
OpenAlexW2790973786
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited48

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

Ambivalence · Citizenship · Ethnic group · European union · Geography · German · Middle class · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Turkish · European Union Policy and Governance · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology

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