At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.