National, European or Cosmopolitan identification? Insights from the heart of Europe

Trilingual Luxembourg shares borders with three European countries and has a foreign population percentage of 47%. Given this multicultural context we wanted to explore firstly the national, supra-national or non-national identification among the native population, secondly their stereotypical judgements of EU Member State countries and attitudes towards the European Union and thirdly identify predictors for cosmopolitanism. With a sentence completion task we investigated the reasons for a feeling of belonging to a national entity or lack of it. All 255 participants in our study (Mage = 38.8 SD = 10.7, 59% female) had Luxembourgish citizenship. Forty percent provided a national self-identification (“Luxembourger”), 36% supra-national identification (“European”) and 24% a non-national identification (“cosmopolitan”). These three groups did not differ in terms of stereotypical assessments of the EU Member states regarding warmth and competence (stereotype content model). Yet, when asked about their own assessment of Luxembourg, differences occurred with supra- and non-national identifiers providing significantly lower ratings under the self-rating condition. The three groups differed in their attitude towards the European Union. Low commitment (MEIM subscale), high contact with non-natives and group self-identification predicted cosmopolitanism. There were no effects in terms of self-efficacy, age, gender or socioeconomic status. The content analysis of the sentence completion exercise revealed that affective components dominated arguments for belonging whereas cognitive reasoning governed the statements expressing a lack of belonging. The implications of these findings among natives within the multicultural context of Luxembourg will be discussed – against the rise of nationalism in many European countries and beyond.