Belonging to the nation, belonging to Europe?
Varieties of particularism and universalism in migrant identity negotiation

Maricia Fischer-Souan
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellow
CRIS & CÉRIUM (Université de Montréal)

Journal of Contemporary European Studies
Published online 2024, February 8th
doi: 10.1080/14782804.2024.2311200 (Taylor & Francis Online)

This article focuses on the relationship between migrants’ identification with the national (destination) community and European identification. How first-generation ‘immigrant patriots’, who consider themselves to be French, British, or Spanish (regardless of formal citizenship status) relate to European identity.

Through a series of case studies of South Asian, North African, and South American migrants’ identity narratives in the metropolitan areas of Paris, Madrid, and London, Maricia Fischer-Souan  argues that immigrant relationships to Europe vary a great deal. In addition, she finds that (dis)inclinations toward the supranational dimension have a lot to do with how migrants achieve and conceive of belonging in the new homeland in the first place.
Beginning with the ambivalent figure of the postcolonial migrant subject as a starting point for the analysis, she sketches out two different pathways toward inclusion at the (sub)national level that produce different relationships to the supranational level. One involves particularistic and culturally-defined orientations to belonging, while the other takes a universalistic and civic-based understanding of membership. Whether or not Europe is included in the identity equation depends on whether the conception of European membership is coherent with the identity work undertaken to achieve a sense of national belonging.

An important contribution of this article is to highlight how elements of national (host society) cultural repertoires resonate with migrant vocabularies of belonging, yet – crucially – are filtered by experiences and processes of racialization and Othering.

Consciousness and experience of stigmatisation and exclusion can be offset by personal narratives of postcolonial cultural proximity. European colonial legacies can thus be construed in terms of cultural and human connections, in addition to oppression and violence. Whether postcolonial migrants view these historical connections as being undermined or not by intra-EU connections may depend on the ways in which they achieve a sense of belonging with respect to their society of adoption.