Banal Transnationalism in a Small Nation-State: Space, Place, and Belonging in Danish Mobilities

Referring to the literature on small states in global politics (Lijphart 1975; Katzenstein 1985; Jones 2005), "elective belonging" in a global era (Butler and Savage 1995; Savage et al 2005), and the spatial analysis of European identity or cosmopolitanism (Gabel 1998; Mau 2011; Medrano and Berezin 2008) our paper in contrast to their typical findings will explore how banal or everyday forms of transnationalism are integrated into local lives in Denmark even in provincial locations a long way from the global city hub (Copenhagen) or European borders. Our discussion draws on a series of qualitative interviews conducted as part of the FP Project EUCROSS "The Europeanisation of Everyday Life" with residents in different parts of Denmark, as part of an effort to develop new qualititative methods and instruments in European identity research (Duchesne et al 2013). Counter to their politically expressed Euroscepticism and nationalism, ordinary Danes of a variety of backgrounds engage in a wide range of European, global and cosmopolitan practices in everyday life, which nuance their obviously expressed range of "banal Danish-isms" (Billig 1995; Jenkins 2012). Intriguingly, it is the ostensibly more cosmopolitan residents of Copenhagen who appear to be most anxious about their identities in a changing global context. The paper also forms part of the effort in the recent sociological and geographical literature (i.e., Andreotti et al 2011) to shift discussions on mobility away from the limited numbers of obvious movers in Europe to more settled, mass populations.