Europe – Migration – Identity: Connections between migration experiences and Europeanness

This introductory essay places the articles of the special issue within the context of current scholarship on Europeanness and European identities as well as on transatlantic and inner-European migration. It probes the relationship between various migration experiences and identifications with Europe and the possible emergence of a European self-understanding among migrants. This exploratory collection of papers puts the two bodies of scholarship in dialogue and several case studies offer a wide variety of vantage points on the themes of Europe, identity, and migration. Much can be learned, they suggest, by careful historical and sociological investigations of the connections between migration experiences and Europeanization.