'We Have a Right to be Here!': EU Citizenship and Belonging

EU citizenship is triggered by an element of cross-border mobility within the EU (Currie 2008; also Cases 64/96 and 65/96 Uecker and Jacquet 1997 ECR I-3171), and therefore it underpins the legal status, entitlements and experiences of EU migrants. But how do individual EU migrants within a specific  national context - that of the UK - translate EU citizenship into a personally relevant category of belonging?

The purpose of this paper is to identify the perceptions and the challenges that shape the sense of belonging of EU migrants within the context of the UK. Belonging here is interrogated as membership as well as ownership of a particular social space (Geddes and Favell 1999: 25, 34). This means that the category of belonging is examined both in the informal acceptance and recognition that it implies but also in the formal status that it acknowledges. Belonging is methodologically useful here as it captures the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that always accompanies migration and is also inherent in the category of citizenship (Kofman 1995: 121).

The paper aims to explore the following dimensions of belonging:

1.            Informal dimension

i.              Self-reflection on identity, membership, commitment, loyalty, common purpose;

ii.             External feedback on identity, membership, commitment, loyalty, common purpose;

2.            Formal dimension

i.              Self-reflection on status, entitlements, experiences;

ii.             External feedback on status, entitlements, experiences