Published by International Association of Social Science Research – IASSR © iassr.org European Journal of Research on Social Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 16-21, June 2014 ISSN: 2148-6018 – DOI 10.15526/ejrss.201416199 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 16 New European citizens? The Erasmus generation between awareness and scepticism Francesca Ieracitano 1 Abstract - A recurring criticism of the European Union is that it focuses mainly on political and economic factors while neglecting the development of a common European culture and sense of European citizenship. However we can find signs of cultural transformation in the way that Europeans use their borders as a physical, social and symbolic space. Usually nowadays, the term ―frontier‖ is replaced by ―boundary‖ as an elastic and extendible meeting space. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the conce pts of boundaries, mobility and integration and the notions of European identity and citizenship. To understand the meaning these concepts have for people who live in the trans-national European dimension, opinions of Italian and foreign students who took part in the Erasmus exchange programme were gathered. The in-depth interviews were focused on the meanings, the expectations and the real experiences that the concept of European citizenship presents for Erasmus students and also whether European citizenship really exists for them. The opinions of the respondents helped highlight the symbolic potential for European citizenship rights to serve as a vehicle of new integration strategies. The way Erasmus students reinterpret the concept of European citizenship and how its symbolic potential could help the European integration process was also analysed. Keywords – European citizenship, integration, mobility, boundaries, identity. ——————————  —————————— 1. Introduction Among its various consequences, the introduction of European citizenship has produced three useful effects to highlight in this analysis. Firstly it has redefined and reshaped the concept of ―foreign‖ with regard to the citizens of the European Union (EU) (Carens, 1987; Tri ggiani, 2006: 438). Second- ly, it has eliminated the association between citizenship and nationality caused by the fact that rights of citizenship could only be recognized within na- tion states (Barber, 2002; Bulvinaite, 2003). This has led to a third interesting consequence: European citizenship is a set of rights that transcend the bor- ders of the nation state and include the right to circulate freely, promoting the extension of what Green calls ―the sense of home space from national to continental boundaries" (Green, 2007: 48). Nevertheless the expansion of territorial boundaries within which the same rights are guaranteed does not necessarily imply the extension of a sense of belonging to a supranational reality and as a consequence the affirmation of European identity. Therefore the relationship that links the concepts of boundaries, mobility, integration, identity and European citizenship must be researched within the context of this enlargement of the ―home space‖ outside of national boundaries. The free circulation of citizens, which evolved into a right of European citizenship, has in fact encouraged the emergence of forms of mobility that are less structured than tourism or migration (Urry, 2007; Favell and Recchi, 2011; Recchi, 2013). These forms of mobility have fostered a sense of fami- liarity with moving between cultures and boundaries of a transnational reality, like that of Europe. For the EU, therefore, recognising the rights of those who move and in fact ―live‖ between borders represents an important tool for encouraging integration. Those who benefit the most from these developments are the so-called ―new Europeans― (Eurobarometer, 2011) or ―mobile Europeans‖. Many st u- dies use these terms to describe a privileged minority making up only about 2-3 percent of Europeans, which are nevertheless a valid group (Rogers & Scannel, 2005; Recchi & Favell, 2009; Rother & Nebe, 2009). Beyond this experience of flexible mobility there are also forms that are more structured and in some ways more ―protected‖ because they have a limited time frame and are planned within programmes recognised and supported by the EU and educational institutions, such as the Erasmus, Leonardo and Socrates programmes. These exchanges are an opportunity to experience living like the ―new Europeans‖ or ―mobile Europeans‖ for young generations who are expected to de velop a sense of belonging and a natural tendency towards inte- gration, aside from benefiting from the rights connected to European citizenship (Maas, 2007). 2. The cultural dimension of European identity and European citizenship Several studies in different disciplines have focused on the impact of the Erasmus programme on the education and development of young people (EU, 1987a, 1987b, 1997, 1998). Nevertheless, as Wilson (2011) underlines, it is not easy to measure the impact and efficiency of this pro- gramme because over the years the aims the EU has hoped to achieve through it have changed repeatedly (Papatsiba, 2006). Beyond the purely educational goals of the programme, European institutions have started to pay close attention to the secondary a nd cultural consequences that it can generate to construct a sense of communal belonging (Figel, 2006; Figel, 2007). These have included the idea that the Era smus programme could represent a "civic experience" (Papatsiba, 2006; Mitchell, 2012; Karolewski and Kaina, 2012). As asserted by Mitchell (2012), "The idea is that intermixing students of different nationalities (Erasmus programme) instils or enhance a sense of European identity amon g participants and serve as a path to creating truly European citizens" (Mitchell, 2012: 491) aimed at forging a European consciousness. 1 Lecturer in Media Theories in the Department of Human Sciences, Lumsa University of Rome, Italy – f.ieracitano@lumsa.it