Emerging European geographies: the Erasmus program and Its effect on the east-west divide in a time of economic crisis

This chapter examines the conceptual assumptions that underlie Erasmus: the EU’s most successful student mobility scheme. Originally designed to inspire a new ‘geography of European youth’, Erasmus provides ambiguous outcomes in terms of generating a deepened sense of European identity. A European youth demographic clearly exists, but its ability to support European integration through specific dynamics of identity, association, and skill generation have been undermined internally by a lack of clarity regarding the current purpose of Erasmus, and externally by the upheavals of enlargement and the Eurozone crisis.