| Summary: | <p>This thesis is an ethnographic study of identity, belonging and bureaucracy among permanent officials in and around the European Union civil service. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the European Quarter of Brussels over 18 months, its focus encompasses two central research queries. The first seeks to capture a shifting institutional ethos inside the European Commission, investigating how policymakers see their roles as Union officials and embody, negotiate and problematize a particular administrative identity. The second analyzes how Europeanness as a recognition of selfhood, a mode of belonging and a way of life is enacted and performed within these spaces. Data was collected primarily through semi-structured, in-person interviews with current and former officials working in 16 policy directorates and services. The study pays special consideration to the aspects, norms and formalities of ‘work-life’, defined as the dimensions of experience pertaining to one’s occupation. It argues that Brussels-based European identity is not a delimited category anchored in specific points in time and space but an ‘elective identity’ that is a steppingstone to a global cosmopolitan manner of being in and interacting with the world. Its findings speak to an anthropological understanding of the conditions and possibilities for being European and belonging to Europe, where Europeanness emerges as an assertion of systemic integration in a turbulent geopolitical context marked by overlapping crises and enduring fragmentation.</p>
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