The Construction of Transnational Identities in the Narratives of a European Civic Organisation

Abstract

Drawing on a study conducted with an association of citizens operating in the European public sphere and applying the Discourse Historical Approach, this paper investigates how the organisation’s members construct their transnational citizenship and how they negotiate it vis-à-vis European, national, and local identities. The analysis reveals that informants often claim their transnational identities as membership of an expanded community of relevance, through the transportability of their civic engagement and through meta-narratives of spatiality and progress whereby cosmopolitan scenarios are often reterritorialised within the European space. These arguments are frequently realised through the metaphorical scenario of ‘spatial dynamics’ which makes sense of identities as emergent from unbounded social interaction, and through the indexicality of transnational narratives as specific discourses of socio-historical transformation of nationhood.