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Soft Power in the European Union’s Strategic Partnership Diplomacy: The Erasmus Plus Programme

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The European Union's Strategic Partnerships

Part of the book series: The European Union in International Affairs ((EUIA))

Abstract

This chapter attempts to fill part of a gap in the literature by exploring the EU’s soft power in connection to the area of higher education and more specifically to the communities of alumni built around the Erasmus+ Programme. Its focus is on a ‘bottom up’ rather than the ‘top down’ view of the Strategic Partnerships (SP); and its underlying argument is about the persistence and even strengthening of the educational links and networks set against the stagnation and erosion of the SPs in the broader sense. For this reason, the chapter examines the life beyond summitry generated by the Erasmus+ Programme in the cases of Brazil and Russia, which are illustrative because since the outset their SPs with the EU included support for people-to-people connections based on academic exchanges with the goal of increasing mutual trust and understanding. This study’s conclusion points out the growing role of higher education in sustaining the EU’s relations with its strategic partners, especially those relations that have ended up ‘suspended’ and even ‘frozen’ at the highest political level as a result of a combination of exogenous and endogenous factors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Personal email sent by EEAS/DG EAC to João Pinto, 22/04/2016.

  2. 2.

    For example, in the two-volumes of the SAGE Handbook of European Foreign Policy (2015), there is no single chapter devoted to this educational dimension of European foreign policy. The same applies to the book The Foreign Policy of the European Union by Stephan Keukelaire and Tom Delreux (2014).

  3. 3.

    Data retrieved from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Table “Education: Outbound Internationally Mobile Students by Host Region”.

  4. 4.

    This includes the special administrative regions of Macao and Hong Kong, nearly 930,000 without them.

  5. 5.

    The term “Erasmus Generation” does not have a clear definition, but it is widely used by the educational sectors of the European Union to describe a loose group of people, mostly alumni of the programme, who share a common and rather progressive vision for the European project.

  6. 6.

    Both numbers are a sum of the participants of the Erasmus+ Programme and its predecessor programmes.

  7. 7.

    Interview with Viviane Reding, Brussels, 2019.

  8. 8.

    Interview with DG EAC official in Brussels, 05/11/2019.

  9. 9.

    The other countries are the following: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Uruguay and the special Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao.

  10. 10.

    Interview with DG EAC official, Brussels, 05/11/2019.

  11. 11.

    Interview with EEAS official, Brussels, 28/10/2019.

  12. 12.

    Here we refer to Erasmus+, Jean Monnet, Schuman-Fulbright, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, European Union Visitors Programme, Global Cultural Leadership Programme, EU-China interpreters programme, EU Voluntary Service, and EU Solidarity Corps.

  13. 13.

    Interview with EEAS official, Brussels, 28/10/2019.

  14. 14.

    Interview with EEAS official, Brussels, 28/10/2019.

  15. 15.

    The Bologna Policy Forum is an event gathering the EU, UNESCO, ministerial representatives, higher education experts and other stakeholders to discuss the development of the higher education sector.

  16. 16.

    Retrieved from the website of the Sectoral Dialogues European Union Brazil (2020) “Background”.

  17. 17.

    Interview with Viviane Reding, Brussels, 2019.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge that this study was conducted at the Research Center in Political Science (UIDB/CPO/00758/2020), University of Minho/University of Évora, and was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and Research Center in Political Science (CICP-UMinho), University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira

  2. Research Center in Political Science (CICP-UMinho), University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    João Mourato Pinto

Authors
  1. Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira
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  2. João Mourato Pinto
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Correspondence to Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and Research Center in Political Science (CICP-UMinho), University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira

  2. PAIS, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Michael Smith

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Ferreira-Pereira, L.C., Mourato Pinto, J. (2021). Soft Power in the European Union’s Strategic Partnership Diplomacy: The Erasmus Plus Programme. In: Ferreira-Pereira, L.C., Smith, M. (eds) The European Union's Strategic Partnerships. The European Union in International Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66061-1_4

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