This chapter examines the relationship between public perceptions of government legitimacy (or satisfaction with democratic performance) at the national level and those at the supranational level, namely support for the European Community. The results are complex and not straightforward, and reveal a wide range of historical and contextual factors. From this perspective, the legitimacy of internationalized governance depends as much on what happens within nation states as on what happens between them.

The article explores the results of a recent European empirical study within the project Margin: tackling insecurity in marginalized areas, funded with the Horizon 2020 Programme, on the perception of insecurity in five European cities (Barcelona, Budapest, London, Milan, and Paris). The results of the fieldwork (ethnographic observation, focus groups and interviews) in the five cities show how social cohesion and socio-economic inequalities are the main factors in the production of the feeling of insecurity in the urban space. According to these major results, metropolitan neighborhoods reveal new and growing invisible borders, segregate vulnerable groups and create gated communities in wider contexts.

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