Many experiences have so far confirmed my belief that we - Europeans - are not really strangers and that for each difference you can find, there is something we share: the Erasmus+ programme is the glue that holds them together.
When I chose to apply to the Erasmus Call of my University, I was genuinely surprised to learn that I could pursue this experience in a non-EU member state. At the time, I had just turned 21, my hair was dyed, I had never travelled outside the EU, and I had no idea what it would mean in practice. Yet, I just had to slightly bring my sight towards the east to cross the Union borders. This is how I ended up spending one semester in Belgrade, causing my relatives’ astonishment, who could not recall anything about the country but its socialist past and the war in the 90s. Four years later, my Erasmus experience in Serbia did mark not only a step outside the EU but also a renewed sense of European belonging stemming from one simple thought: we are more similar than we like to think.
Kalemegdan Fortress, with a view of the Sava and Danube rivers’ crossing point. Belgrade, 2018
Sharing means caring, and care is about understanding. In Serbia, I met many young people curious about Italy and my Sardinian origins, enthusiastic about introducing me to their culture and explaining jokes I could not get. By engaging in endless discussions, always accompanied by coffee or rakija, I realised that, although contexts were quite different, we shared interests, hardships, worries and goals. Besides love dramas and movies, we talked about reconciliation, peace, inequalities, youth unemployment and our vision for Europe. I also discovered that I was not the only one having a lot of “first times”: together with my Serbian colleagues, we made a trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where none of my friends had been. Dealing with the past and diversity was often a painful topic, which I also started rethinking in relation to my country and Europe as a whole. Eventually, I brought new perspectives and considerations back home, sharing them with my peers and friends, making something meaningful out of them.
“Once Erasmus, always Erasmus”, they said. Not surprisingly, one year after my Serbian journey, thanks to the Erasmus International Mobility Programme of my University, I could spend one academic year in Sarajevo. Holding the lessons from Belgrade and a new sense of curiosity, I started the new mobility with an overwhelming need to search for Europe and our shared identity. In Serbia and Bosnia, the EU was quite present but not necessarily as visible as I expected. Yet, it takes me no effort to recall the chats with my friends and colleagues while talking about the state of European Integration. I remember overlapping ambitions and frustration, the anxiety of getting stuck in the past and a great desire for the future. Sometimes, when referring to the EU, people would call it Europe. “Isn’t strange” – I thought to myself – “that they refer to Europe as placed outside of their country?”
First time in Bosnia and Herzegovina with my colleagues from Belgrade. Sebilj Fountain, Sarajevo, 2018.
And that’s how I started questioning one of the basics of geography, at least how I learned it in primary school: being part of Eurasia, Europe is considered a continent due to specific historical, cultural, and political developments. At the core of my confusion was the twofold realisation. For some reason, the EU became synonymous with Europe, which shapes people’s identities and belonging. While I never questioned the idea of my friends from Belgrade and Sarajevo being European, spending my time in this region made me reflect on what renders us Europeans.
What started as an academic journey soon became a life experience, which eventually helped me define my interests and shape my professional path accordingly. Devoting my time to studying human rights and democracy in South East Europe was critically important to grasp what I was observing out there. Yet, theory cannot reach its full potential if detached from reality. This is the reason why, two years later from my Erasmus in BiH, I warmly welcomed the opportunity to come back to Sarajevo and start volunteering in a youth NGO called PRONI through the European Solidarity Corps. Having the chance to work first-hand with youth for youth in a local environment, while keeping the link with Aicem’s work and academia, made me more aware of the importance of what young people here and there do on a daily basis, striving for an impact and envisioning a change in our communities, and multiplying the latter all over. Volunteering in BiH not only made me closer to this part of the world, but it is also allowing me to bridge what I do and see here with my own country: a clear example is that a new partnership between Aicem and PRONI has been created and, with it, another ground to be together in the name of a common goal.
It is not a banal task to sit down at a table with a bunch of friends from different parts of Europe and agree on a single thing upon which we can all rely to define ourselves. The attempts to find common ground were quite bonding and funny: people would present many disparate answers, varying from human rights and democratic values to shared history, pub culture and football. None of them was right or wrong or incompatible with the others, yet all of them were built on the premise that we feel united by the desire to make sense of our diversity and commonality. In this context, I also realised how complex the way we form our identities is and how many overlapping dimensions are involved in a process constantly in the making. Far from keeping the discourse out of the contexts where it is formed and acted, looking at the EU-Balkans relations proved very insightful. Thanks to my experience here, I could deconstruct the often-emphasised demarcation line between the EU and “the Balkans”, thinking of Europe without necessarily thinking solely of the EU, and equip myself with new pair of lenses to envision the future.
While repeated and disenchanted invitations to join the so-called “European family” take place, by living in the Balkans, I realised that it is time for us to look at each other’s and think together about what kind of family we want to have. As the integration process acquires new meanings and scopes in a fast-changing Europe, it is crucial to learn to know each other better and join a dialogue about Europe rather than conceiving the Balkans as a passive constituent part of it. In this sense, having had the chance to study and live in the region through the Erasmus mobility program allowed me to approach Europe from a different angle – perhaps more similar than I expected – which proved to be essential to understand what is going on “back home”. Eventually, I found out that it is precisely by asking ourselves what we mean by being, or feeling, European that we can start working on common goals stemming from shared understandings. This is what I mean when I say that the Erasmus in the Balkans made me European.
Chiara Maria Murgia