Citizenship, Nation-building and Identity in the EU

The Contribution of Erasmus Student Mobility

Cherry James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351065009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With Brexit looming, a major issue facing UK Higher Education is whether the UK will be able to stay in the Erasmus Programme. This book sits at the intersection of three main interrelated themes - EU citizenship, the current state of the university in Europe, and student mobility - as they play out in the context of an EU funded programme established not least to promote European identity, European consciousness and European citizenship.

Exploring through interviews with students from many countries, this book weaves together the themes of citizenship creation as a device for building a nation and a polity, the university as a public space in the era of the marketization of higher education, and communicative interaction as the mechanism by which citizenship is created. Ultimately it asks if the building bricks of national citizenship can be transposed to the transnational scale, and assist in creating the transnational, EU citizenship. It finds, surprisingly, that far from encouraging and facilitating the communicative interaction on which the development of EU citizenship was postulated, central features of the Erasmus Programme inadvertently work against this outcome.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU law and European and EU studies, Citizenship Studies, sociology, and more broadly to higher education in general.

1 EU citizenship – through a glass darkly

(a) Introduction

One September in the early years of the twenty-first century, a seventeen-year-old girl from Australia applied to study at university in the UK. In her personal statement, she referred to her mixed ethnic background (Australian father with German immigrant forebears, mother Singapore Chinese educated in Singapore and the UK), the time she had spent living with a family in Germany one Christmas and the inspiration to study in the UK from a family holiday to the UK some years earlier. After the customary comments about her prowess at basketball and the piano, she finished with a flourish and the upbeat optimism of youth, ‘I see myself as a citizen of the world!’

The young lady in question is not an EU citizen and will not become one unless the domestic laws of an EU Member State permit her in the future to acquire that Member State’s nationality and she chooses to avail herself of such an opportunity. She was almost certainly not versed in the historical tradition of cosmopolitanism and may not have given much thought to the quixotic and elusive concept of citizenship with its varying paradigms of rights, duties and meanings. However, she saw a connection between her desire to study in a different country and her status as a ‘citizen of the world’. She saw a link between education, citizenship and identity; between the opportunity to be educated in a country other than her home country and her own personal development and between education far from home and her future place as a member of the adult community.

This first chapter will endeavour to identify some of these connections, specifically from an EU perspective. EU citizenship is a relatively recent creation, and its substance is not clear in every respect; moreover, it is evolving.¹ But if we ask whether Erasmus student mobility contributes to EU citizenship, some clarification of this somewhat inchoate concept is required, so that an investigation can take place into whether Erasmus student mobility contributes to it, the question which this book considers.

We start by looking at what the EU says about its citizenship. ‘What the EU says’ is very multifaceted. In terms of EU citizenship, particularly in the context of students and education, the most promising perspectives are those of the Treaties, the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and the Commission. These are therefore what we explore to see the express and implied claims about EU citizenship made by the EU itself. This is a broad canvas, and given the investigation envisaged, it requires contextual focus. Therefore, in this chapter and in the following chapters, we ask what are the particular ways in which students, student life and higher education are perceived as fertile soil for the growth of EU citizenship and why they are so perceived.

The EU’s own conception of the nature and status of EU citizenship as it may develop in the context of Erasmus student is followed by a chapter focusing on universities, particularly the role they have had historically in developing citizenship. The process is that of universities as public spaces susceptible to the development of citizenship through communicative interaction. The emphasis of the EU on higher education and student mobility as vehicles for the development of EU citizenship suggests that universities might continue to have this function on a transnational scale, EU citizenship being lived and fleshed out by students who choose to undertake study periods in universities situated in different EU countries from their own. A subsequent chapter focuses on the Erasmus Programme itself, in particular the EU law and policy in higher education which has shaped Erasmus and given rise to its perceived links with citizenship development; then, given the postulated significance of communication in the development of citizenship, a further chapter focuses on the role of language in Erasmus student mobility.

The conceptualisation of EU citizenship and how it may be created, drawn together from these chapters, informs the interview questions asked of students who have undertaken Erasmus study mobility. The EU’s views of and claims about EU citizenship and the potential of Erasmus student mobility to cultivate it are thus put to the test. What is the nature of the EU citizenship anticipated by the EU as being cultivated under the auspices of Erasmus student mobility, to what extent is this conception of EU citizenship lived by Erasmus students and cultivated by the phenomenon of Erasmus student mobility and what is the nature of the EU citizenship which emerges?

The results of the interviews shed light on these questions. The EU claims that a period of Erasmus mobility ‘gives[s] students a better sense of what it means to be a EU citizen’.² Are these students, then, exemplars of EU citizenship as perceived by the EU itself? Are they thus contributing to the development of the unfinished and kaleidoscopic concept of EU citizenship? And if so, what is the nature of that citizenship and how does it match up to the view of citizenship constructed as our starting point?

A conceptual point needs to be made. Citizenship conceived of as more than a formal status is often delineated, almost equated, with an assumption of the identity relating to the place in question. Examining the potential development of EU citizenship in the context of the EU’s own particular brand of student mobility, the question of the students’ self-identification arises: indeed, EU citizenship was first introduced as part of a wider project to encourage a European identity into existence. However, there have been calls for ‘an academic divorce from an industry which is preoccupied…with the perceptions of individual European citizens of their own identities’.³ The point is that we should look for the way Europeans use their rights and opportunities in their everyday lives: what Everson terms a ‘behaviourally’ rather than an ‘attitudinally’ based approach to European citizenship, underlining the importance of a research agenda which looks at the usage of opportunities afforded by the EU, rather than views of the EU and of the self in relation to the EU. This study adopts a similar pragmatic approach to investigating EU citizenship development amongst Erasmus students, focusing primarily on how they live and the probable or putative effect of their Erasmus period on how they will live in the future. Identity is only part of this story. Rather, what is it about life as an Erasmus student which encourages the EU to perceive Erasmus study mobility as a nursery for its citizenship?

There is nothing new in the idea of travelling far in the quest for knowledge: the University of Timbuktu in Mali claims that in the twelfth century it hosted around 25,000 students from across Africa.⁴ Most of the EU citizen students who study in countries other than their own probably do so, hoping that their experience will enhance their future prospects in some indefinable way; it is to be hoped also because they think that they will enjoy the experience. At EU level, therefore, there are high hopes for the potential of the Erasmus programme to contribute to the development of EU citizenship and to ‘make’ EU citizens: whether these aspirations are met forms the subject of the investigation with the students.

(b) EU citizenship – background and genesis

How does the EU itself conceive of EU citizenship, a particular version of a variably defined phenomenon? If the EU considers that EU citizenship can be developed by a period of Erasmus student mobility, we need to be as clear as we can about the nature of such citizenship. The EU-oriented perspectives which together inform the interviews in this study constitute but one conception of EU citizenship – however, one justified by the implicit and explicit claims made by the EU itself in its various institutional manifestations. The extent to which these perspectives coincide emerges from the rest of this chapter.

The possibility of something like a United States of Europe was mentioned in the nineteenth century by Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo and others. However, it was not until the devastation of the Second World War led to the creation of the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community and then the European Economic Community that the idea was put into effect in limited and specific ways. None of the founding documents of these entities referred to European citizenship. But Heater suggests that it is at least arguable that a ‘thin form of European citizenship’, though not graced with the name, evolved through the establishment of European human rights by the Council of Europe, and the formation of the European Parliament, originally the Common Assembly, as one of the institutions of the European Economic Community.⁵

In the 1970s, European Community politicians began to discuss European identity. One can divine the seeds of European citizenship from such discussions. Initial topics included student mobility. The centrality of the student population to the citizenship project in the forms first tentatively envisaged can be variously explained: young people on the threshold of adult life, minds open to new experiences and adventures, in the process of discovering and formulating their identities, for whom exploration and travel are often more realistic than later in life when roots have been set more deeply and familial obligations bind more tightly.

This may be too romantic a view. Anyone familiar with the currents running in European higher education over the past twenty years might justifiably riposte with derision and point out that students represent the economic potential of the future: educated, skilled, with a will to invest their time and money in the promise of their future; tomorrow’s actors taking the successful European market to the global stage: these are the sort of citizens the EU wishes to tend in the Erasmus nursery. The ways in which these twin strands can be discerned in the lives and perceptions of Erasmus students are issues explored in the interviews with Erasmus students.

Following the tentative considerations of the perennially vexed question of European identity in the 1970s, a broader conception of European citizenship emerged at the 1973 Copenhagen Summit, where the Commission suggested the introduction of a passport union as well as special rights for citizens of Member States.⁶ However, in the 1980s the focus shifted to economic integration and the citizenship proposal was not initially developed. European Community workers were granted economic and social rights in the Community Charter for Fundamental Rights of Workers in 1989 but no wider political rights until 1992. Various directives were introduced, concerning rights of residence for workers and their families and also for students: these are mentioned in the following sections.

(c) EU citizenship – what the Treaties say

(i) Overview

An exploration of EU citizenship and how it is played out and shaped on the stage of Erasmus student mobility must start with the Treaties. It was of course the Maastricht Treaty which oversaw the birth of this new creation, delineated so cryptically that its substance continues to be a matter of debate and concern. The drafters of the Maastricht Treaty were the midwives of the citizen of the Union, and for a long time the jury was out on whether he or she was the creation of Frankenstein or but a pale and insubstantial chimera. Let us consider what the Treaties say.

Citizenship is referred to in both Treaties but defined in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Article 20 TFEU states who are citizens of the Union: those holding the nationality of a Member State, who hold it in addition to, not instead of, their national citizenship: and, though it is not said, whether they want it or not. This essentially replicates Article 9 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The second paragraph of Article 20 TFEU asserts that citizens of the Union enjoy the rights and are subject to the duties provided for in the Treaties, the latter being rather harder to discern. The rights, set out in a non-exclusive list of four, are elaborated on individually in Articles 21–24 TFEU: to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States, to vote and to stand in the European Parliament and municipal elections in their Member State of residence; to diplomatic and consular protection by other Member States; and to petition the European Parliament and to apply to the European Ombudsman and address the institutions of the EU in any of the Treaty languages. Article 25 TFEU, which requires the Commission to report periodically, taking account of the ‘development of the Union’, implicitly recognises the evolving nature of EU citizenship.

(ii) Who are the citizens? Membership, exclusions and limitations

Let us consider the implications of this terse delineation. First of all, EU citizenship has a derivative status: a person is automatically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 EU citizenship – through a glass darkly
• 2 Universities as cradles of citizenship, or, a special sort of public space
• 3 The Erasmus Programme in context
• 4 The Erasmus Programme and the language question
• 5 ‘Truly European citizens?’ students on the move
• 6 Conclusions
• Epilogue: the impact of Brexit
• Appendix
• Index