Do I Belong?: Reflections from Europe

by Antony Lerman (Editor)

Beginning in childhood, one of our strongest and most fundamental human emotions is the desire to belong. This emotion extends beyond merely the self, affecting on a macro scale at a political level. Since its foundation in 1957, the European Union has encouraged people across its member states to feel a sense of belonging to one united international community—with very mixed results. Today, faced with the fracturing impact of the migration crisis, threats of terrorism, and rising tensions, governments within and outside the EU now seek to impose a different kind of belonging through policies of exclusion and border control.
 
In this collection of personal essays, a diverse group of novelists, journalists, and activists reflect on their own individual senses of citizen belonging. In creative and disarming ways, they confront the challenges of nationalism, populism, racism, and fundamentalism and offer fascinating insights into some of the most pressing questions of our Why do people fear growing diversity? Is there truly a European identity? Who determines who belongs?
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Literary, accessible, and timely, Do I Belong? provides unique commentary on an insufficiently understood and defining phenomenon of our age.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2017

Reviews

[Serena Ives · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came looking to add some nuance to my understanding of the European idea, just to balance out the pretty one-sided rhetoric I feel I grew up with, and I really enjoyed this. While this collection of essays is still definitely pro-European, and relatively optimistic about the future of Europe, it presented some interesting reflections that I found articulated some feelings and doubts I’ve had myself over the years. Each essay feels deeply personal, with most written in the first person and striking a balance between political/ theoretical critiques of European identity and the authors’ reflections how they ‘belong’ in Europe accompanied by personal and family anecdotes and their own definitions of what a European identity implies. Taken together they really demonstrate the complexity of European identity and the demands it can make of the individual. Highlights for me were ‘Guilty Pleasure,’ on German guilt, ‘Europe’s Problem with Otherness,’ which deconstructs some deeply exclusive elements of a collective European identity, and ‘Growing up under Different Skies,’ which reflects on the author’s experience growing up between Palestine and Austria and making the decision to raise a bilingual son in Vienna. I did feel like the book sometimes veered away from meaningful discussion into these abstract and slightly cringe wishy-washy soliloquies on the beauty of it all etc etc. but for the most part I found a lot of value in the authors’ reflections, from both a personal perspective as someone with my own ‘European’ identity, and from a more general perspective of wanting to understand some of the most important issues that face the EU today.