One of the challenges when developing the Urban Boundaries Project (UBP) in Portugal concerned the articulation between macro political structures and the micro of local practices and interactions. Within educational research, there is the idea that if we look at the global we miss the particularities that constitute the interstices of human sociability, and, conversely, if we look at the local we miss the “big picture” of the problems we are trying to address. In the UBP we sought to overcome this dichotomy by realising how it is in the concrete situations that the global manifests itself. It is not a matter of having one in detriment of the other, but of acknowledging how the universal operates within the particular which, in return, colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency. In this paper, and taking advantage of the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, we give an account of how working through the local demands posed by the two communities that besiege the UBP we were able to highlight the incongruence of an European discourse that although praising the high goals of equality, freedom and solidarity, ends up fabricating an European rabble that stands for the truth of current Europe.