Bringing Erasmus home: the European universities initiative as an example of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’

ABSTRACT

In the context of growing nationalisms and Euroscepticism, this paper develops the original concept of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ on a theoretical level, building on related concepts, such as Skey and Antonsich’s ‘Everyday Nationhood’, Billig’s ‘Banal Nationalism’, Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ and Beck’s ‘Cosmopolitan Vision’. It applies the concept to the European Universities Initiative (EUI), seen as a tool to promote European identity, based on a common sense of belonging conveyed through everyday practice, among students and staff in European University Alliances. It is argued that, in the light of previous top-down European initiatives designed to symbolically reinforce a sense of shared European identity, the EUI seems more in phase with bottom-up ‘everyday’ processes of identity development. Taking the European University Alliance ‘FORTHEM’ as an example, core features, aspects, actions and outputs achieved so far within this alliance are categorised in the light of four dimensions of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’: ‘Talking Europe’, ‘Choosing Europe’, ‘Performing Europe’ and ‘Consuming Europe’.

KEYWORDS:

• Everyday Europeanhood
• European identity
• European universities initiative
• practice theory
• Europeanisation

The Erasmus+ programme has constituted a successful area of European action in strengthening common ideals and adhesion to the European political project, among the successive waves of students and other Europeans who have been actively involved in it. It has built upon institutional partnerships and individual experiences through mobility, to reinforce the European ideal among new generations of decision-makers. However, this European ideal currently faces new challenges, in the light of immigration, new nationalisms, Brexit, intra-European Covid-19 travel bans and a temptation to turn inwards and backwards, notably from large parts of the population who do not feel personally concerned or positively impacted by ‘Europe’ in their everyday lives.

On the level of public policy in Higher Education, despite the continuous development and quality of the Erasmus+ programme, further integration is hindered by differences between national frameworks and by percentages of students and staff able to actively participate in traditional forms of mobility. The European Universities Initiative (EUI) can be seen as an attempt to overcome these barriers, encouraging HEIs to go beyond existing forms of cooperation to bring Europe home to the wider higher education community.¹ By developing the idea of a ‘European Campus’ between HEIs, by multiplying the levels and types of cooperation between partner institutions and making this an everyday occurrence throughout the domestic higher education experience, the EUI can be seen as potentially promoting a form of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ as inspired by Skey & Antonsich’s concept of ‘Everyday Nationhood’ (Skey and Antonsich 2017), itself stemming from Michael Billig’s (1995) concept of ‘Banal Nationalism’, followed by Cram’s (2001; 2009), and relating to the ‘Cosmopolitan Vision’ of Ulrich Beck (2006) and Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ (Anderson 1983).

Rooted in scholarship in political science relating to Europeanisation, as well as in communication studies and practice theory, the article first introduces the European Universities Initiative in the context of Europeanisation, as a bid to strengthen European identity by creating shared consciousness and a common sense of belonging among European students, through institutionalised interactions between HEIs. It then develops the original concept of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ on a theoretical level, as a bottom-up social construction rooted in everyday interactions, linked to but contrasted with ‘banal Europeanism’. Finally, this concept is applied to the context of the EUI and illustrated through the example of the European University Alliance FORTHEM,² drawing on the authors’ experience since 2018 as ‘founding thinkers’ and key actors and strategists within one of the first 17 alliances.

1. The European universities initiative in the context of Europeanisation: the latest stage in ‘banal Europeanism’ through higher education?

The term Europeanization ‘has increasingly become a part of the vocabulary of scholars studying the impact of European integration’ (Cram 2001, 233). This is due to the fact that Europeanization is manifested in ‘the processes of construction, diffusion and institutionalization of formal and informal rules, procedures, political paradigms, styles of action and commonly shared norms and beliefs, which are first defined and consolidated in the EU decision-making process and then incorporated into to the logic of internal (national and subnational) discourse, political structures and public policies ‘(Radaelli 2004, 3). It is widely recognized that Europeanization is a two-way process in which ‘two-way pressures operate to produce an interactive dynamic as member states seek to “upload” preferences to the European level, as well as “downloading” European level decisions’ (Corbett 2004, 5). Hence, in research on Europeanization, top-down processes denoting the impact of European integration on the member states, and bottom-up processes that indicate the influence of a member state on European integration are distinguished (Börzel Tanja 2005). Variation is due to the multiplicity and significant degree of differentiation between the member states, as well as the complex structure of the European Union, on different levels and within various integration topics.

In most approaches, Europeanization refers to studying government institutions (polity), decision-making processes (politics) as well as policy outputs (policy) from a classic political science perspective (eg. Olsen 2002). However, the concept should be, and has gradually been, used to analyse ‘how societal actors within member states have adapted in response to European integration or of how this adaptation has impacted upon the individual or collective values and identities of citizens of the EU and ultimately upon the process of European integration’ (Cram 2001, 233). The question of European identity has become a prominent subject of Europeanization studies, extending beyond political science to other fields, including that of sociology (Szalo 1998) and communication studies (Frame 2008). Many of these approaches to European identity were grounded in practice theory, stressing the need to analyse everyday interactions and practices, in the context of European integration, in order to better understand when and how European identities were being constructed and mobilised (Adler-Nissen 2016).

Paradoxically, such approaches also led to interesting parallels with studies of nationalism, in regard to the mechanisms contributing to setting up or maintaining a collective sense of belonging, such as Michael Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’. In contrast to ‘hot nationalism’, an aggressive form of patriotism, ‘banal nationalism’ is about the way people maintain consciousness of the nation through their conversational use of deixis (‘Us’ and ‘Them’), through flags on public buildings, through the news, the weather map, and all of the references to nation that we commonly encounter in everyday life. In Billig’s words: ‘It is these deep assumptions about belonging and, most importantly, about not-belonging to nations that, in a time of mass-migration, can leave millions in makeshift, exposed camps, unwelcome in the countries to which they have fled and unable to return to their so-called “proper” countries’. (Billig 2017, 317). By analogy, European studies scholars coined and explored the concept of ‘Banal Europeanism’ (Cram 2001) ‘to emphasise that identification frequently lies in non-passionate, ordinary and profane means. Far from the elite discursive struggles, feelings of belonging and loyalty may develop in low-intensity forms anchored in routine’ (Foret and Trino 2022, 2). There low-intensity forms referred mainly to creating and strengthening European identity via EU symbols and their routinization.

Over decades in European integration, the question of European identity was deliberated among many stakeholders to see how far it might be instrumentalised in order to support and complete the integration initially based predominantly on the premises of economic and political elites. In the spirit of Jean Monnet’s phrase, pronounced when establishing the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, ‘we are uniting people, not forming coalitions of states’ (Duchêne 1994, 363), the European Community (EC) introduced series of initiatives aiming firstly to define the ‘banal content’ of European identity. These include, for example, the 1973 Declaration of Heads of State and Government, the 1975 Tindemans Report on European Union, and the 1983 Solemn Declaration on European Union. In order to equip this identity with some visible and ‘touchable’ tools, the Adonnino Committee was established in order to investigate European symbols and the dimensions of European identity, and several EC initiatives were set up to symbolically communicate European identity, including the European flag, a calendar of European events (Europe Day), the European passport, driving licence, etc. Finally, the Maastricht treaty institutionalized European citizenship in 1992 (Calligaro 2013).

The analysis of these flagship European initiatives leads us however to several conclusions. These top-down initiatives aimed at contributing to ‘European identity’ by investing in symbolic manifestations and the EU’s inter-institutional struggle to develop instruments capable of influencing identity processes in member states proved only partly successful. Although the content of these symbols was ‘negotiated’ on the European level (Calligaro 2013), their very conception reflects symbols of national identity.

In this respect, the European Universities Initiative, first launched within the Erasmus+ programme call in 2018, at first appears to be another top-level inspired initiative, in the tradition of such ‘banal Europeanist’ policies. However, it will be argued that the scope of the initiative is such that it can be considered to go beyond top-down banal Europeanism, and instead to foster bottom-up ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ (infra, section 2). Since the launch of European integration, education was perceived as Member State governments' realm of competence, which resulted in fact that this sphere did not develop into EU policy. The significance of education for advancing European integration was however recognised and took the form of many educational initiatives on the European level, such as the Erasmus programme or Bologna process. These examples, though worth praising for the outcomes they produced and thus contributing to European identity (eg. mobilities, joint study programmes), proved to be foremost top-down. For example, the Bologna process is recognized as having transformed education in Europe (Corbett and Henkel 2013), but its weakness is that it is a political process. This means firstly that it does not involve academic communities in a decisive and comprehensive manner, and, secondly, that it is intergovernmental, meaning that decision-making lies with the governments of the member states. In the sphere of education, the latter tend to prefer national solutions (Corbett and Henkel 2013). However, over the years, there has been increased discussion of higher education between member states and EU institutions, leading scholars to note an increasing tendency to perceive higher education as part of European integration (Corbett 2006) or to talk about the ‘Europeanization of higher education’ (Trondal 2002; Corbett and Henkel 2013).

The European Universities Initiative thus appears as the latest step in an ongoing trend. Its novelty is that it goes deeply into the education area which remains part of the ‘national domain’ in the EU, thus controlled by Member States, despite many European-level supporting actions, such as Erasmus+. However, setting up a ‘European University’ requires an unprecedented level of bottom-up actions, including daily communication, coordination and integration between participating parties, which go far beyond regular cooperation between universities. It aims to set up the conditions, institutionally, for various stakeholders to project themselves mentally into a European-level alliance of universities as an imagined community, which they themselves shape and contribute to through their everyday interactions with members of their alliance from all over Europe. The initiative does not foresee the direct influence of national Erasmus+ agencies or other national actors, but invites local stakeholders in each university of the alliance to work together in order to forge their own ‘European University’. These factors thus create a ‘new quality’ not only in the realm of the Higher Education Area in Europe but also in terms of giving a new impulse to bottom-up everyday processes of developing European identity.

As observed by Gunn (2020) ‘The idea of a supranational university is as old as the European political project’ and it rests on a belief already shared at the end of the 1940s that ‘European integration would require “a community of the intelligence” in order to be completed’. As a result of discussions and actions on top political level, some initiatives, such as the European University Institute, flourished, but most failed due to the controversies of their legal and financial status as well as the reluctance of the universities themselves (Gunn 2020).

The idea of the EUI gained political momentum thanks to the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, who, in his 2017 Sorbonne speech entitled New Initiative for Europe, positioned the need for establishing European Universities alongside the core strategic EU challenges like tax convergence, a joint EU budget or a common defence policy. In Macron’s understanding, European universities as ‘a network of universities across Europe with programmes that have all their students study abroad and take classes in at least two languages (…) with real European semesters and real European diplomas’ (Macron 2017) would embody and strengthen key values that bind the European Union together, which are culture and education.

This vision of deepened everyday educational cooperation, as a new multifaceted initiative in the European Education Area, was adopted and developed by the European Commission. The document Strengthening European Identity through Education and Culture, published in 2017, recommended that Member States invest in European education, in a drive, among other things, to remove obstacles to the recognition of qualifications, both on the level of schools and higher education, to make learning mobility a reality, to modernise the development of curricula, to boost language learning, to improve education, training and lifelong learning, and to drive innovation in education in the digital era (EU Commission 2017). The report particularly highlighted the aim of ‘creating world-class European universities that can work seamlessly together across borders’, and frequently emphasized the continuous and undisputed potential of such developments in helping to foster the sense of common European identity.

Bearing in mind that education lies predominantly in the domain of competence of Member States, after getting positive feedback from the Council, the European Commission went a long way to define a set of ambitious criteria for establishing such ‘European Universities’, going beyond traditional forms of cooperation in academia and translating into emerging forms of ‘supranational European Universities’. In the European Commission’s call, European Universities were to consist of ‘bottom-up networks of universities across the EU which will enable students to obtain a degree by combining studies in several EU countries and contribute to the international competitiveness of European universities’ (EU Commission 2019, 125). One key feature which was to distinguish ‘European Universities’ from other forms of cooperation was their objective to ‘test different innovative and structural models’ and ‘design relevant and efficient common management structures’ by ‘setting up joint boards, developing a common pool of physical and virtual intellectual and administrative resources, distributing shared resources, common provision of infrastructure, data and services’ (EU Commission 2019, 127) Following this logic, ‘European Universities’ were to function on supranational premises while following the objectives of the call which stressed the need to ‘to reach a substantial leap in quality, performance, attractiveness and international competitiveness of European higher education institutions and contributing to the European knowledge economy, employment, culture, civic engagement and welfare by making best use of innovative pedagogies and striving to make the “knowledge triangle” a reality’. By doing this, European Universities were to ‘transform the institutional cooperation between higher education institutions and bring it to the next level’. In the context of these overall objectives, the European Commission prioritized a number of actions to be implemented in the Alliances:

• To share an integrated, long-term joint strategy for education with, where possible, links to research and innovation and society at large, that goes beyond any potential existing bilateral and multilateral cooperation;

• To establish a European higher education inter-university campus offering curricula where students, doctoral candidates and staff can experience mobility at all study levels;

• To build European knowledge-creating teams (‘challenge-based approach’) of students and academics, possibly together with researchers, businesses, regional actors and civil society actors – depending on the overall strategy and vision of the alliance – to address together societal and other challenges of their choice in a multi-disciplinary approach;

• To act as models of good practice to further increase the quality, international competitiveness and attractiveness of the European higher education landscape

(EU Commission 2019, 125-126).

A brief glance both at these objectives and priorities can lead us to the conclusion that ‘European Universities’ were to establish a novelty in the educational landscape in Europe by implementing common actions both on local and alliance level, designed and agreed upon within the framework of commonly shared governance structures. This unprecedented form of academic cooperation, functioning at every possible level within partner universities of the alliance and engaging every possible stakeholder at the university (students and staff) and beyond it (external partners in business, society, etc.) was to serve a higher and overall objective set by the European Commission for ‘European Universities’ which is ‘promoting common European values and a strengthened European identity by bringing together a new generation of Europeans, who are able to cooperate and work within different European and global cultures, in different languages, and across borders, sectors and academic disciplines’ (EU Commission 2019, 125).

In this sense, ‘European Universities’ seem designed to reinforce the sense of European belonging and identity by provoking regular, spontaneous and structured social interactions between multiple stakeholders from different countries, linked through their universities. This article will now go on to discuss whether such a ‘banal Europeanist’ objective can actually translate into ‘Everyday Europeanhood’, and how we might go about characterising and measuring this.

2. Conceptualising ‘Everyday Europeanhood’: Europe through praxis

The notion of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’, which we are introducing in this article, is modelled on that of ‘Everyday Nationhood’ (Skey and Antonsich 2017), itself part of the wider debate between scholars of nationalism about the nature of the feeling of national-group belonging today. Early scholarship on nationalism, mainly focusing on questions of nation-building and their geopolitical consequences (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1992; Renan (1887) 1996) adopted an elitist, top-down approach to the formation of these ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). Billig’s Banal Nationalism (Billig 1995) then shifted the emphasis away from the conditions of the emergence of nationalism to the way that a collective sense of belonging to the nation is maintained through everyday discourse (supra). However, subsequent scholarship sometimes goes further in differentiating between the ‘banal’ and the ‘everyday’, with some scholars arguing that national consciousness is not part of everybody’s everyday consciousness. A distinction was made between normalising top-down elitist discourse constructing and maintaining the idea of the nation (the ‘banal’) and the bottom-up way in which ‘ordinary people’ engage with the concept in their everyday discourse (the ‘everyday’), which may include rejecting it. ‘What they create and maintain may not be congruent with what the elite is trying to propagate but this is not the primary focus of research [on the everyday]; it is on the ways in which ordinary people subjectively create and attach meaning to a “nation” in their everyday life’ (Ichijo 2017, 261).

Everyday nationhood is thus a social constructionist approach deeply rooted in the ‘conversational maintenance of reality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 172), to be found in ‘the realm of the unselfconscious, the unreflexive: nationhood not as an object of purposeful manipulation, but as an underlying and unspoken set of assumptions about the way things are’ (Fox 2017, 29). Along with banal nationalism, it is epistemologically rooted in practice theory, looking at the way everyday practices (De Certeau 1980; Bourdieu 2000) are performed through conversation and the exchange of ‘common sense knowledge’ as studied by ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel 1967), but also communication scholars interested in cultures and identities (Frame 2014, 2016).

In today’s mediatized societies, everyday sociability is overwhelmingly mediated by technology, which is a key factor in understanding everyday practices (Couldry and Hepp 2016). The ubiquity of hand-held media devices such as smartphones, connected objects, and an increasing reliance on all things digital, lead to ‘deterritorialized’ and ‘reterritorialized’ social practices and ‘shared frames of reference’ which extend well beyond social groups drawn along traditional lines of kinship, age, social class and geographical proximity (Hepp 2015). These media contribute to reshaping the ‘communicative figurations’ in modern-day societies: the patterns of sociability and socialisation which contribute to shaping individuals’ everyday consciousness (Hepp, Breiter, and Hasebrink 2018). This is especially true in European Universities where many interactions are technology-based.

In an article from 2008, Jonathan Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss describe ‘four ways in which nationhood is produced and reproduced in everyday life’. These include discourse, and notably routine talk in conversations (‘talking the nation’), but also actions. ‘Choosing the nation’ considers the way that everyday choices (friendship groups, choices of schools, universities, careers, etc.) also seem to implicitly support the sense of national belonging, while noting that such choices are often not in fact open choices. The use of or interaction with national symbols or ritualised behaviour is at the root of ‘performing the nation’, while our everyday consumption habits (food choices, media consumption …) are part of ‘consuming the nation’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 537).

Building on this, we seek to outline how we might apply the logic of everyday, socially constructed and conversationally-maintained nationhood to the European level. In what conditions might we be able to talk about ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ and how could the European Universities Initiative be a part of this? Going beyond the ideological stance of the European Commission, seeking to promote European identity through the universities in a ‘banal Europeanist’ manner, the question is how individuals (students, staff, or other stakeholders) might go about making sense of ‘Europeanhood’ through their everyday practices, through the new ‘communicative figurations’ afforded by the university alliances.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, several voices questioned the possible arrival of a ‘post-national’ era, notably in the European context (Ferry 1992; Habermas 1992, 2006). Pointing to increased flows of people and goods around the world, the digital revolution and the cosmopolitan nature of virtually all late modern societies, they suggested that the power of nation states was on the decline, in favour of multinational or supranational organisations. However, the early twenty-first century was to tell a different story, with increasing religious and social tensions in many ‘open’ societies and the successes of nationalist political parties in many countries not only in Europe but around the world. The social and political factors leading up to Brexit suggested that one possible reaction to a globalised risk society is nostalgic localism, appealing to a national consciousness that continues to run deep, and the idea that the world is and should be a world of nations.

Ulrich Beck denounces such ‘methodological nationalism’ while capturing this dual aspiration to opening and closure in reaction to globalisation in his ‘cosmopolitan vision’ of society (Beck 2006). While the pro-cosmopolitan ‘globalist elite’ stands to gain from international trade, freedom of movement, and circulation of goods and services, other parts of society see this as a threat and adopt a more defensive nationalist or other identity-based stance. The defensive backlash (see more on this phenomenon: Norris and Inglehart 2019) is considered to stem from the perceived loss of boundaries and a growing consciousness of various social identities. According to Beck’s cosmopolitan outlook, these two opposing movements represent two sides of the same coin. Cosmopolitanization (meaning a process of mixing cultures on a global level) has always existed, writes Beck, and indeed ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ has long coexisted with banal nationalism. With reference to Billig’s concept, Beck argues that our everyday consumption practices project us into a globalised, cosmopolitan reality.

Just as cosmopolitanism (pro-globalism) can be distinguished from cosmopolitanization (the fact of becoming more cosmopolitan), so can (ideological pro-)Europeanism be distinguished from banal Europeanism (symbolic measures put in place by European institutions) and from Europeanisation of identities (as an ongoing process). Everyday Europeanhood in turn refers to the sense of belonging and reality maintenance expressed and performed through everyday symbolic acts on the microsocial level. Following the earlier discussion of the European Universities Initiative in the context of the EU’s policies relating to banal Europeanisation, this article will move on to examine some forms which Everyday Europeanhood may take for stakeholders within such European University alliances.

Nationhood operates as an unselfconscious disposition: it underwrites people’s choices without becoming a self-conscious determinant of those choices […]. To conceal nationhood in this way, however, is not to enfeeble it. Rather, institutions powerfully reinforce their national logics by reproducing nationhood as a taken-for-granted fixture of the social world (Billig 1995, 37–42). Nationhood defines the parameters, but not the content, of people’s choices.

(Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 544)

The reasoning of Fox and Miller-Idriss can be transposed to Everyday Europeanhood through the idea that the European Universities Initiative will define the parameters and set up the unselfconscious conditions for people to make choices which underscore (or not) their European identity. In this way, as well as being an embodiment of institutionally-led ‘banal Europeanist’ policy, the EUI can constitute a testing-ground from which to try and establish the ‘edges’ of embodied conceptions of European identities.³

If it is true that ‘[i]n nationally defined institutions, people don’t have to choose friends on the basis of national affinity because the institutions, in effect, do it for them’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 544–545), within European university alliances friendship groups may well go beyond national lines. For example, in a ‘team-teaching virtual exchange’ activity between 2 partner universities within FORTHEM, co-organised by the first author in 2021, participating students recorded in their learning diaries that they were extremely happy to have ‘made friends’ with foreign students. They wrote about the similarities between themselves and their foreign counterparts, who shared many of the same codes, suggesting that their common ‘generational identity’ put them closer to one another in terms of shared references than they were to older people from their respective home countries. While such anecdotal evidence can only be used to open lines of investigation, an in-depth study of the students’ sociability and their representations of one another, using the techniques referred to above, might shed further light on the ways in which they construct or deconstruct European and national identities through this shared experience.

3. Studying Everyday Europeanhood in practice: the example of the FORTHEM European university alliance

The FORTHEM Alliance brings together over 200000 students and staff from regional public universities based in initially seven, subsequently nine European cities.⁴ Its main objectives, as listed on its website, are to⁵:

1. Adopt a transnational higher education strategy enforcing innovative student-centred pedagogy and multilingualism.

2. Strengthen linkage between education, research and innovation.

3. Bring Europe home to all Alliance’s students and amplify the wish for an industrious culture, where young people can develop their desire to be citizens of the world.

4. Increase media literacy and combat xenophobia in Europe.

5. Foster critical thinking, problem-solving skills, digital media competences, data literacy and multicultural team-working skills.

6. Activate students’ civic engagement.

7. Contribute to social, economic and educational development of our regions.

The scope of the alliance thus embraces all students and staff, across all faculties, in order to reach the ambitious goal set by the European Commission of 50% participation of the community in alliance activities in 2025. In order to reach this goal, the team working on the initial funding application approved an internal policy paper with the title ‘Bringing Europe home’, aiming to go beyond the 5–10% of students and staff who were already the most internationally minded, and aim to attract as many as possible of the remaining 90% of the community.

During the first three years of the alliance’s activity, the objectives listed above were the focus of three missions: Mobility (including innovative forms of physical mobility, online collaboration and hybrid forms of cooperation, and an online ‘Digital Academy’); Labs (co-creation projects bringing together academics, students and external stakeholders); and Outreach (developing relationships with local partners in the public and private sectors and helping create synergies internationally with local partners in other alliance regions).⁶ Each mission is coordinated by a dedicated mission board, reporting to the steering committee, which is the highest decision-making body in the alliance, composed of 4 representatives per university. Figure 1 represents the organisational structure of the alliance at the beginning of 2022.

Figure 1. The organisational structure of the FORTHEM alliance⁷.

One of the challenges of setting up the alliance was to create a governance structure in order to coordinate actions on various sites, facilitate communication, allow decision-making and ensure that alliance policy remains in line with that of its member universities. To this end, the ‘Coordination and Communication Board’ was added to the initial organisational structure, as a more agile body than the Steering Committee, able to prepare decisions for the latter, notably on transversal issues concerning communication, governance and overall project management. In the initial structure of the alliance, several individuals, notably those involved from the outset in the EUI funding application, ended up occupying multiple roles. Thus the first author was institutional coordinator for the University of Burgundy, Chair of the Mobility Mission Board and work package leader for the ‘innovative forms of mobility’ work package. The second author was institutional coordinator for the University of Opole, leader of the work package on governance structure, and subsequently one of three co-chairs of the Coordination and Communication Board. It is this experience in establishing and developing the alliance which has led the authors to question the ways in which the European Universities initiative, as enacted in FORTHEM, sets up the conditions for stakeholders to experience European identity in their everyday practices, thus contributing to emerging forms of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’.

Based on the categories proposed by Jonathan Fox’s and Cynthia Miller-Idriss’s ‘four ways in which nationhood is produced and reproduced in everyday life’ (supra, Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008), we have sought to transpose these categories to the European level, as: ‘Talking Europe’, ‘Choosing Europe’, ‘Performing Europe’ and ‘Consuming Europe’. Each of these categories brings together particular actions or artefacts associated with FORTHEM, either brought about through formal institutionally-driven policies or initiatives in the top-down ‘banal Europeanist’ manner or resulting from bottom-up appropriation by stakeholders of the ‘communicative figurations’ afforded by the alliance, as examples of ‘everyday Europeanhood’. The following sections show how these categories might be seen as operational in the context of the FORTHEM.

It should be noted that these sections are written from the insiders’ perspective of the authors, rather than from an outside position, and based on largely unstructured and informal observation and participation in day-to-day organisation of the alliance’s activities. The partial and subjective character of their focus thus appears unavoidable, given the authors’ roles and the temptation of self-censorship and self-legitimisation (Adler-Nissen 2016). However, their key position in the alliance also gives the authors an overview of the activity of the European University that allows them to identify examples of where ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ might be developing. It should further be stressed that the ambition of the current text is simply to illustrate how such categories might be constructed and observed when studying ‘Everyday Europeanhood’, with possible indicators for each category. The aim is not, at this stage, to make any claims as to whether or not ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ can actually be observed in this particular alliance, which would necessitate a full-scale empirical survey, and for which the authors would legitimately not be considered as reliable witnesses. When such a survey is set up, in the future, questions relating to individual objectivity, detachment and critical distance of the observers/investigators will naturally need to be addressed, and the necessary empirical safeguards put in place.

To complete this discussion of the context, it should be underlined that levels of participation in alliance activities have only slowly risen over the first three years, meaning that FORTHEM is still catering more for the internationally-minded ‘early adopters’ than truly ‘Bringing Europe home” to the masses. Practice-based identification and organic community growth need time to develop, once the institutional conditions necessary for them to evolve are in place, meaning that for the vast majority of students and staff, ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ is not yet a reality. Whether those conditions are set up and remain in place, and the degree to which some students and staff might reject the alliance is unclear, if they associate it with imposed English, see it as an unnecessary distraction or constraint, for example. The following sections are thus devoted to identifying indicators which could be used to study the possible development of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ in the future, which would be in line with the alliance’s objectives though it is far from a guaranteed result. The same indicators could also show that this objective is not being met.

3.1. Talking Europe

For Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008, 540–542), ‘talking the nation’ covers instances of discourse, notably deictics and routine talk in conversations, referring to the nation as an explicit or implicit collective entity. Transposed to the level of Europe through the European Universities Initiative, the category of ‘talking Europe’ brings together both institutional forms of talk produced by FORTHEM to justify and publicise its existence, and the more spontaneous, everyday discussions in which stakeholders refer to a collective entity as ‘us’. From the more top-down perspective, communication tools such as the FORTHEM website or other communication materials aimed at internal or external stakeholders, the mission statement and the statutes of the alliance can all be seen as instances of key actors trying to bring the European University into existence through discourse, aiming to make it a taken-for granted entity in a banal Europeanist sense.

Whether or not this policy is successful can be measured by looking at bottom-up occurrences of discourse produced by the staff and students who constitute the bulk of ‘end users’ of the alliance. For example, messages posted on social media about alliance activities, especially where they use languages other than the native tongue and/or explicitly identify with the FORTHEM ‘community’, can be seen as evidence that the identification is operational on the level of everyday practices. Awareness of the alliance is a first step to such identification, but arguably not sufficient to qualify as ‘Everyday Europeanhood’. The terms in which staff choose to refer to the alliance can, for example, be telling on this level. On the one hand, it might be presented as a ‘project’, vaguely attached to the ‘international office’, in which the staff member does not appear to feel particularly engaged, arguably not attaining the necessary level of relevance to be seen as part of the person’s everyday experience. On the other hand, someone speaking of what ‘we’ are doing or trying to achieve, in a group implicitly involving colleagues and/or students from partner universities, is much more likely to have integrated the alliance into their vision of who ‘they’ are.

Language use is itself interesting in this respect: most alliance-level activity within FORTHEM takes place in English, rather than in partner university languages, and this can be either a motivating element for people wishing to put into practice or improve their English language skills, or a significant barrier for those who consider that they do not master a sufficient level of competence to allow them to envisage interactions in that language. Although the alliance discursively embraces multilingualism as a principle, it is currently rare for individuals to be able to use their native languages in meetings or activities involving multiple European partners. ‘Talking Europe’ within FORTHEM seems to involve accepting English as a lingua franca.

It is important to note here that it is doubtless insufficient to impose top-down the European University as a discursive category in order to provoke massive identification among staff and students. These may have very mixed feelings towards such an endeavour, which can be framed as an elitist project, an unwelcome injunction from the institution to contribute precious time to participate in superfluous activities, a daunting challenge in terms of foreign language competence, etc. Thus, studies looking for Everyday Europeanhood through the category of ‘talking Europe’ need to be very attentive to the terms in which the European University is being discussed.

3.2. Choosing Europe

Analysis conducted on this first category can be comforted or underpinned by further exploration in terms of the place of the alliance in the choices made by target groups. Fox and Miller-Idriss observe individuals ‘choosing the nation’ in terms of their friendship groups, the schools to which they send their children, the universities which the latter then choose to attend, their preferences regarding where they move on to conduct their careers, and so on. As the authors point out, often these ‘choices’ can be more passive than active, since they are made in the light of possibilities which are afforded by national institutions (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 544–5).

In the case of a European University, these categories can easily be transposed from the national to the European level. From the top-down perspective, the institution is looking to reframe the possibilities reserved for students and staff, in order to include, or even impose, the European dimension, by making possible communicative figurations (friendship or working groups, project teams, course companions, study paths, etc.) which transcend national boundaries. Even if the choice of university may still initially be national, one of the aims of the alliance is to encourage as many students as possible to become active internationally, by choosing to take part in various activities involving online collaboration or physical mobility, for example through calls for participation in mobility actions, civic engagement or research projects. The FORTHEM Digital Academy, a shared online platform accessible from all universities with an offer of online courses open to all, is another instance set up to make such choices possible. The alliance is active in bringing about institutional change within partner universities to allow widespread credit recognition for courses followed via the Digital Academy at other institutions, and has similarly produced a ‘Barriers to Mobility’ report and a ‘Mobility Charter’, signed by all partners, to try to remove technical, administrative and psychological barriers to ‘choices’ involving student and staff mobility within the alliance. The ‘FORTHEM buddy programme’, launched in September 2021, gives first-year students from around the alliance the possibility to sign up to be put in touch with a ‘buddy’ in each partner university, and to potentially build transnational friendship groups. In order to reinforce such transnational communicative figurations, the alliance encourages them to take part in online challenges as a buddy group, in order to win prizes, and to make the most of the opportunities offered by the alliance to travel and meet each other in person.

From a bottom-up perspective, the ‘choices’ of individual students and staff to partake in various activities, to get involved in transnational working or friendship groups, can be measured and taken as a reflection of the degree to which the alliance is indeed successful in promoting ‘Everyday Europeanhood’. Many academics are already used to working transnationally for the purposes of research projects, and many of these go beyond the boundaries of the European Union, but the degree to which researchers use the alliance as a source of partners for future research projects could be a partial indicator of this. Similarly, students choosing to follow online courses through the Digital Academy or partaking in mobility activities would seem to reflect positively a perception of the university which does not stop at national borders.

Finally, it is important to note in this category devoted to ‘choosing Europe’, that ‘imposed choices’ would appear potentially counterproductive. Even if the European university, like national institutions, is legitimate in setting up the structures to encourage particular choices, it would arguably seem self-defeating, at least in terms of encouraging a ‘spontaneous’ uptake of European sociability, to impose such participation, either on students or staff. As opposed to the psychological mechanism of ‘freely-consented submission’ (Joule 2000), imposed participation can lead to resistance and rejection. Thus, the degree to which it might seem opportune to ‘force’ students to take part in international activities organised by their teachers (e.g. group assignments, common classes) needs careful consideration. In some cases, this could constitute a first step which builds necessary confidence and motivation for the student to then move on to ‘choose’ to participate subsequently in other actions on a voluntary basis. But for other students, who experience this more negatively, it could contribute to a rejection of the international level, reinforcing identification with the national group and defeating the objective of promoting ‘Everyday Europeanhood’.

3.3. Performing Europe

The category ‘performing the nation’ concerns the use of national symbols or ritualised behaviour associated symbolically with the nation. It is not so much about heartily singing patriotic chants, as simply waking up every morning to see the national borders outlined on the TV weather map. ‘Flags hanging limply from buildings and monuments as inconspicuous as trees or lampposts are effective not because they attract attention but because they don’t attract attention. These symbols stealthily concoct and legitimate a world of nations without inviting critical engagement’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 548–9). Transposed to the European level through FORTHEM, this staging or ‘flagging’ of European identity is organised institutionally through the obligation to use the European flag logo on all documentation associated with actions funded by the Erasmus+ programme. The alliance itself had adopted a logo based on a map of Europe (cf. Figure 2), with points representing each of the partner universities, a visual reminder of the European character of FORTHEM.

Figure 2. The original FORTHEM logo.

This logo, designed by a communication agency, is widely used and declined in various communication tools (banners, brochures, videos, etc.). It is also present on the home pages of all partner university websites. FORTHEM merchandising has also begun to be produced for events, and will be given away or offered for sale alongside sweatshirts or tote bags carrying the name and colours of partner universities.

Physical events, such as ‘collective short-term mobilities’ or the ‘FORTHEM Campus’, bringing together groups of students from all partner universities for a period of physical mobility on another campus, also serve to ‘perform’ the alliance, making it a visible and tangible part of university life for those staff and students who travel abroad, or those who come into contact with the visitors on their home campus. By extension, the presence of other European students on campus through ‘internationalisation@home’ can also strengthen the sense of common belonging, though, in the light of Allport, Gordon’s (1954) ‘Contact Hypothesis’, it is clear that (imposed) contact can, in some cases, instead reinforce perceived differences and barriers (Paluck, Green, and Green 2018).

From the point of view of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’, then, the relative success of the ‘banal Europeanist’ measures will depend on the uptake of European or alliance symbols by students and staff of the partner universities, and their attitudes (of pride, indifference, rejection, etc.) towards them. Their willingness to adapt their behaviour and mindset to the European ambitions of FORTHEM will be a key indicator, as observed, for example, through the bottom-up emergence of student-led initiatives involving other members of the alliance, or teachers who travel around the European campus to give classes in different countries and to work with their colleagues. Symbolically, the University of Burgundy has made it possible for a certain number of teaching hours, given in any of the FORTHEM partner universities, to be taken into account as part of the statutory teaching obligations of its permanent teaching staff.

3.4. Consuming Europe

‘Consuming the nation’ is possibly one of the clearest examples of everyday nationhood, illustrated by the mantra to ‘buy national’, when it comes to cars, clothes, or other consumer goods, or reflected in other everyday consumption habits such as food choices or media use. However, this category appears the most difficult to transpose to the European level, partly because of a lack of ‘European’ options when it comes to everyday consumer practices. Despite some marginal attempts at creating European media, most citizens, even in the age of the internet, tend to favour national information sources, or at least those in their national language(s). The use of social media constitutes a partial exception to this, especially among young people (Solmaz 2018) and FORTHEM caters for this through alliance-wide social media accounts in English and a monthly electronic newsletter, which may or may not be translated into the national language, depending on the partner university.

Although they are not central to FORTHEM activity, when it comes to food consumption or other lifestyle choices embodied in alliance practices, for example through their depiction in media texts or the way that they are approached during activities, ‘consuming Europe’ seems to reflect a resolutely cosmopolitan, folklorist stance. True to the European Union motto of ‘richness in diversity’, what are generally presented as exotic lifestyle differences (gastronomy, local traditions, etc.) are framed as motivating factors for travelling to other European countries. For example, the ‘FORTHEM Mosaic’ has been designed as a series of online presentations, introducing different partner university cities and regions from the angle of what makes them ‘specific’, in a bid to ‘get to know one another better’ and to attract foreign students and staff.

However, universities are mainly in the business of education and research, and so European consumption in this area is related to the decision to participate in alliance-level activities rather than (solely) national ones. Once again, the key indicator here seems to be the level of adoption of teaching modules and research activities by students and staff, as well as their integration into the ‘everyday’ practices of the university, so that they become ‘taken-for-granted’ options, rather than being perceived as exceptional activities bundled under the label of international cooperation. Such a possibility would be in line with the ambitious transformative character of the vision of the European Universities Initiative promoted by the European Commission and adhered to by the partner university decision-makers within FORTHEM. But it has yet to filter down to the community of over 200000 staff and students who represent the ‘beneficiaries’ of this policy. Time will tell whether such ambition becomes reality, as reflected in everyday practices.

Table 1 resumes the principal illustrations of top-down institutional policy and possible indicators of bottom-up adoption of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’, in the four categories discussed in this section:

Table 1. Instances of performed European identity in the FORTHEM alliance.

Banal Europeanism	Category	Everyday Europeanhood
FORTHEM Mission Statement, Statutes & Objectives, website …	‘Talking Europe’	Staff working for the alliance, Student ambassadors on social media, relating to a collective ‘We’
FORTHEM Mobility Charter, internal calls for projects (mobility, research, civic engagement), online course modules in FORTHEM Digital Academy	‘Choosing Europe’	Student & staff mobility, buddying, research collaborations, choosing to follow FORTHEM modules
FORTHEM logo and style book, communication strategy	‘Performing Europe’	Appropriation of FORTHEM symbols, bottom-up actions engaging with the alliance as a whole
Communication tools and opportunities provided by FORTHEM	‘Consuming Europe’	FORTHEM stakeholders’ use of common tools and workspaces, integration of courses into regular curricula

4. Conclusions

This article has introduced the new concept of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’, modelled on Skey and Antonsich’s (2017) concept of ‘everyday nationhood’, in order to examine the creation and maintenance of European consciousness and collective identity through everyday social practices and interactions. This bottom-up process is anchored in practice theory and can be contrasted with more institutionalised, top-down approaches aiming to encourage forms of ‘banal Europeanism’, often reflected in pro-European policies adopted by EU governance and other bodies. The ‘European Universities Initiative’ is an example of banal Europeanism implemented in EU policy, but is also presented here as a testing ground for the notion of Everyday Europeanhood as it is enacted by students, staff and other stakeholders within European university alliances, when they ‘talk Europe’, ‘choose Europe’, ‘perform Europe’ and ‘consume Europe’.

The extent to which such ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ may be observed within alliances depends on several factors. An overly top-down approach to Europeanism, ignoring the element of choice, would run the risk of encouraging rejection and (silent) resistance, favouring what Ulrich Beck (2006) describes as ‘defensive nationalism’ (vs. ‘hot’ nationalism). Likewise, exposure to a perceived ‘Other’ is not guaranteed to foster shared identities, depending on the dominant perceptions, motivation and behaviours of those involved. In different contexts, online collaborations between students or physical mobility may reinforce perceived national barriers rather than overcome them (Holmes and O’Neill 2012). It follows that, in the age of cosmopolitanization, ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ is by no means a direct result of institutional policies aiming at ‘banal Europeanism’. Studies focusing on the former need to take into account the mediatized ‘communicative figurations’ (Hepp, Breiter, and Hasebrink 2018) which may underpin the sociability of possible emerging everyday (mediated) practices of Europeanhood. Such studies could consider various indicators, including those identified in this article, although the authors also firmly believe that an ethnographic approach is particularly relevant to studying everyday practice, possibly using ‘breaching’ techniques to study the ‘edges’ of expressions of European identity (Fox 2017).

As a European University alliance set up in 2019, FORTHEM is still in its early stages of existence. It may seem premature to begin looking for evidence of Everyday Europeanhood in the practices of its stakeholders, despite the activities and forms of communication which have been set up in what can be qualified as a ‘banal Europeanist’ stance. However, European universities such as FORTHEM represent a potentially rich object of study in order to explore these questions. As new ‘objects’ in the European Higher Education landscape, they are likely to mobilise researchers in political science, in communication studies and in sociology, as well as in education science and related disciplines (Gunn 2020). We hope that this article will be one of the first or many contributions to scholarship in this area, and that the concept of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ will find an echo in both theory and practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. https://education.ec.europa.eu/european-universities-initiative. Page accessed on 31/12/2021.

^2. https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/. Page accessed on 31/12/2021.

^3. When it comes to studying the bottom-up process of Everyday Europeanhood, which, unlike banal Europeanism, may include conceptions of European identity which are not aligned with institutional forms, it is important to focus not only on discourse produced by institutions, but in particular on the way that individuals interact with such discourse and with one another. In an article published in 2017, Jonathan Fox discusses the methodological challenges of trying to establish subjects’ taken-for-granted everyday representations. If these are unconscious and not necessarily salient in a given situation, it would be artificial and counterproductive to place the focus directly upon them through questionnaires or interviews, for example (Fox 2017, 41 et seq.). Ethnography could be a less denaturalising method, giving the researcher access to social activity in almost ‘natural’ conditions (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). On top of participant observation and possibly the subsequent use of informants, Fox suggests that the ‘breaching’ techniques used in ethnomethodology can be used to reveal underlying representations, by implicitly confronting them through deviant behaviour. One way to do this would be to aim to work at ‘the edges’ of the phenomenon under study (Fox 2017), for example by aiming to observe situations which challenge the European ideal in order to elicit discourse and behaviour in which subjects position themselves symbolically in reaction to this.

4. https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/alliance/members/. Page accessed on 07/07/2022.

5. https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/objectives/. Page accessed on 07/07/2022.

6. The research dimension of the alliance was also strengthened in 2020, when it was awarded further project funding from the Horizon 2020 programme (cf. https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/fit-forthem/, page accessed on 07/07/2022), in order to strengthen collaboration in this area.

7. Source: https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/alliance/organisational-structure/. Page accessed on 07/07/2022.