"Europe is for being recognized for more than an ethnic background" - Middle class British, Dutch and German minority citizens' perspectives on EU citizenship and belonging to Europe.

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]