Content area
Abstract
The long awaited, yet largely postponed, dream for a united Europe has never been more at stake than in the past seven years. From the deep recession of 2009 to the mid 2015 refugee crisis and the fast approaching exodus of the United Kingdom from the European Union, all have taken their toll on the Union itself. In the midst of all those historic events for the future of the continent, European Identity has become either an obscure thematic or is being held as increasingly irrelevant as the European Integration is at a halt. Europe stands at an impasse in its 70 year- old existence. The dream of a united continent is thought to be in danger.
An aspect of European Union’s collective, but recently fractured, political will to advance towards a more cohesive and coherent supranational society and polity, has been Student Mobility, an undertaking currently being carried out primarily by the Erasmus student exchange Programme.Its existence and operation rests firmly on the Schengen Treaty’s1 spirit and legislative freedoms. The Programme has come a long way since its launch in 1987, having already sent abroad more than 3 million students and its great success, as well as its implications on the individual's political sense of one's national and supranational political surroundings, especially in such uncertain times for the Union, are in dire need of careful investigation as they may indicate where the European Union is headed as a Political Community in the near future.
Consequently, the time is more than ripe to ask the following questions: Does the Erasmus experience create or influence the political views, stances and agencies of European youths on the crucial issue of their European Identity in a positive and lasting manner? In other words, does the ERASMUS Experience politicize the students’ European Identities and to what degree? This is the question this Master Thesis aims to answer.
My over- encompassing argument is that it matters little, if at all, whether the Erasmus Generationachieves a sense of European Identity through the Erasmus Experience if the students themselves, as citizens of the Union, do not see it as a community that binds them in all and are not willing to defend it through their respective political agencies. Collective Identities are not one- dimensional, empty of meaning, statements of belonging that can simply be announced by either the political actors that relate to them (for example the European Union publics) or the concerned parties (the elites of the Union and of the Member States) and automatically exist. In actuality they are intimate, extremely complex dynamic realities that develop and exist -internalized- in their holders as well as in their social interactions occurring between them, as members of their common group. They define and contain everything the individual will ever be aware of and act upon as a member of one’s group. They, in extremes, demand protection and survival from their holders, even at the cost of those individuals’ lives.
This nature of Collective Identity, I argue, makes it a de facto dependent variable of politicsthe aspect of social life where all cultural and social coordinates of a given community are debated in order to adapt to an ever- changing social reality.
