Migrants and European Identity: Beyond the National Narrative?

Historically citizenship regimes have been based on the regulative idea of exclusive national communities. National identities have provided the rationale for modes of inclusion and exclusion, for determining legitimate forms of membership and access to the set of rights attached to this status. One of the key normative expectations concerning an emerging European identity and transnational citizenship regime is that they are cosmopolitan in nature and to a large degree exempt from the exclusionary underpinnings of traditional national identities. This paper analyses the formation of the European identity in historic perspective with a view to the role that migration has played in this process. In what form do migrants figure in the construction of an emerging European identity, both as a reference point for the non-European ‘Other’ and for the fundamental components of the integration process (cross-border mobility, ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity, etc.)? The argument about the role of migrants is made empirically with respect to the discursive construction of a European identity in official EU documents and policy initiatives as well as the way in which third-country nationals have become included in the institutional configuration of a European citizenship regime.