The freedom to move between different countries for work, study or other purposes is one of the definitional features of life in the European Union . This personal and professional liberty explains why, alongside ensuring the circulation of goods, capital and services, the European Commission has engaged in a sustained process of opening-up the internal borders of the EU. Free movement is expected to take place on a fairly regular basis among relatively large sections of the European population rather than being restricted to a small minority of privileged citizens, a practice helped by a removal of bureaucratic barriers and the building of social, economic and cultural ties between individuals from different societies. Added to this development is a concerted effort to educate young Europeans about the life possibilities created by mobility, including the provision of exchange platforms that enable circulation to take place within education and training systems.
Through such means it is hoped that intercultural understanding between people from different countries can be created, in addition to moving towards intensified forms of political unity and shared economic prosperity. In practice, this has involved the investment of billions of euros in programmes designed to create more, and better quality, intra-European mobility, with particular emphasis on the youth population. The impact to date has been considerable, with millions of young European citizens supported through the maintenance of mobility platforms and funding of projects. In this book, we will take a close look at the most high profile framework designed to support this nascent mobility culture, Erasmus, with a view to understanding how different forms of Erasmus mobility are practiced among difference sections of the European youth population.
Despite having attained a high level of visibility, building Europe through Erasmus mobility is not a straightforward task. The programme, especially in its current expanded format of Erasmus+ , is in fact a complex initiative. While student exchanges may be the most well-known examples of intra-European circulation from the point of view of EU policymakers (Brooks and Waters 2011, pp. 69–76), the present iteration of Erasmus also seeks to support mobility in other sections of the youth population, including young people interested in civic engagement projects or voluntary work placements . Ensuring that all these actions work together and function effectively, and maintaining quality within exchanges, is a major challenge. There is also the controversial issue of who funds Erasmus. While the key actions of the programme are ostensibly financed by the Commission, resources are allocated to intermediaries rather than awarded directly to citizens. Any understanding of Erasmus must therefore consider what goes on within intermediary institutions as well as looking at what takes place in the lives of individual programme and project participants.
In identifying a rationale behind the Commission’s approach to what is its flagship mobility programme, it can also be argued that there is basic multiplier principle underlying investment in Erasmus, with emphasis on stakeholders within tertiary education and the youth sector, who are required to include a sufficiently large and diverse range of young people in the various actions that comprise the programme. This position puts these stakeholders in a powerful position, as they effectively get to decide who become mobile and define what takes place during exchange visits. In the course of this book, we will meet some of these key figures, including a number of the of the people who manage incoming and outgoing exchanges within universities (Chap. 4), alongside examining perspectives from participating students (Chaps. 3, 5 and 6). We also engage with young people involved in forms of exchange that contribute to another core youth policy objective at European level, namely active citizenship (Chap. 7), followed by an assessment of the management of ‘quality’ within Erasmus+ mobility projects (Chap. 8).
Learning and Mobility
A common feature of these different forms of Erasmus mobility is that they need to be appreciated as a platform for the learning of mobility, implying a strong link between education and intra-European circulation. This book is not, we should add, an orthodox account of how universities and training organisations work; we will not, for instance, focus on relationships between teachers and students, curriculum development or the acquisition of recognised credentials. Significant though these issues are, our discussion highlights the perhaps unique to Europe opportunities for learning that are created in the course of the international exchange visits Erasmus supports. But in keeping with the expanded scope of the current Erasmus+ initiative, we do consider learning within both formal and informal learning environments, with students and mobility project participants respectively.
Despite the diversity of Erasmus actions now in place, there are common programmatic elements. During a fixed period of time spent abroad, it is expected that the mover will engage in learning processes related to enhancement of their employability, linking learners with the labour market, and the strengthening of what is sometimes termed ‘interculturality’ in reference to interactions within a group of people from a diverse range of national backgrounds that lead to mutual respect for each other’s differences. In simple terms, to become more employable and be more culturally aware of diverse aspects of citizenship in Europe are what all Erasmus participants should be learning.
The emergence of these faculties is accomplished through concurrently bringing together groups of international students, project participants and volunteers via Erasmus. While diverse, these modalities share a common approach in bringing together peers from different countries and regions and encouraging them to educationally mingle. In doing so, each participant acquires an international point of reference, or range of different national points of reference, that enables a more spatially expansive view of future possibilities in life to emerge. This includes learning about the possibilities of working and studying in different European societies and meeting with people from a range of cultural backgrounds to learn more about their lives. The international learning habitus is hence a site in which a spatially reflexive form of learning can emerge; a locale that is both created by mobility and extols the virtues of intra-European circulation as a means to realize personal and professional development (see also Cairns 2014; Cairns et al. 2017).
In more prosaic terms it is anticipated that during an exchange visit by a student, trainee or volunteer, there will be not only be formal education within the classroom or laboratory but also informal or non-formal learning among peers, and perhaps also with members of the host community. Additionally, the possibility exists for knowhow in respect to how to live and work in another country being generated. It may be that through a study visit or work placement an Erasmus student acquires the skills and capacities that open up access to the next stage in an education or work trajectory, with their field of opportunities widened to encompass not only home-based jobs with an international dimension but also working and studying abroad. For this reason, we believe that participating in Erasmus involves thinking more expansively about future possibilities, whether this involves physical relocation to another European country or becoming aware of how to conduct business with people from other nations. It is through this means that Erasmus participants obtain a better understanding of the potentialities of life in a European community characterised by spatial openness, something we regard as the programme’s greatest contribution to social, political and economic stability in the region.
With Erasmus+ , we now have more explicit recognition of the potential value of non-formal learning, with particular emphasis on the use of mobility projects . In regard to application, we can detect a desire to address the social agenda of Erasmus, with emphasis on issues relating to active citizenship , extending to encouraging civic engagement and enhancing youth-appropriate political participation. These projects, as we shall discover in Chap. 7, have at least one major limitation, in the participant base tending to consist of young people who are already civic-minded and politically engaged. Such individuals may strengthen and better focus their political conscientiousness through Erasmus, but we cannot say that joining a mobility project is a point of inception for participation. For this reason, the ability of Erasmus+ to reach a more diverse range of European young people is limited, ironically, by the lack of appeal of the values which the European institutions extol, such as respect for diversity and tolerance, and the strength of other European values noticeably absent from EC policy discourse: materialism, individualism and outright hedonism.
The Erasmus Ethos
While we do wish to stress its contribution to supporting ties between European citizens of different nations and the symbolic strengthening of the EU, one thing we will not do in this book is provide an extensive account of the history of the Erasmus programme. This is due to the fact that this task has already been undertaken with the help of one of the authors of th...
