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The paper pinpoints some crucial themes of European belonging and transnational identities arising in the narratives of minority key activists with various hyphened national citizenship status, e.g. South Asian-Brits, Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Germans. In the context of the current post-cosmopolitan climate with a political shift to the far-right across Europe, concerns of visible minority citizens struggling with racisms and a lack of inclusion in the European project, are discussed. In this original research 43 key minority activists, academics and professionals, were interviewed between autumn 2009 and summer 2012, predating Brexit in 2016. The 'new' citizens interviewed in this sample live in major and middle sized cities, and their individual feelings of belonging to Europe, perceptions of being European and cosmopolitan are very much shaped by urban metropolitan spaces. The findings of the study underline ambivalent post-cosmopolitan identities and more complex notions of 'race', racism and ethnicity, particularly in Britain and the Netherlands and due to specific post-colonial situations impacting the individual feeling of belonging to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual's ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]