A growing body of literature has explored the sources and consequences of European identity; however, there remains a limited understanding of individuals' perceptions regarding what it takes to be European. To fill this gap in the literature, this paper studies Europeans’ perception of “Europeanness” through a two-step process. First, we conducted a qualitative text analysis to explore how German citizens describe Europeans and non-Europeans in their own words. In a representative survey, respondents identified traits and behaviors they associate with being European and characteristics that they think exclude someone from being European. Using latent semantic scaling, we analyzed the relationship between open responses and ethnic (e.g., birthplace, religion, skin color) and civic (e.g., values, democratic support) understandings of European identity. This reveals key traits used to define “ingroup” and “outgroup” membership, reinforcing the ethnic-civic dichotomy in European identity. In the second step, we used the categories from the semantic scaling to conduct a conjoint experiment. Participants evaluate hypothetical profiles differing in civic and ethnic attributes, indicating whether they consider the social prototypes European or not. This enhances our understanding of European membership criteria and helps us distinguish between those with a more exclusive or inclusive understanding of who is European, as well as the characteristics they use to make this distinction. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the diverse nature of European identity and its impact on European integration from the perspective of German citizens, aiming to overcome the limitations of traditional survey methods with predefined answer categories.