Old and New Europe: the Erasmus generation vs an ageing society?

You must remember when in 2003 the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld infuriated France and Germany calling them Old Europe as distinguished from New Europe – the Central-Eastern Europeans willing to support the US in the war on terror.

Rumsfeld didn’t have a happy ending but he had a point. Europe is not an homogeneous block: there is an Old and New Europe but the challenge is drawing the line of separation in the right place and at the right time. Did we move this line, which has separated the West from the East, the North form the South and the left from the right, when the Erasmus programme was launched?

If you are not convinced it means that you have never been on an ‘Erasmus’ – as you say (or see L’auberge espagnole (the Spanish flat) the first film on the above student exchange programme). If you are older than 45 then I’m sorry, you must not have ever ever studied abroad with your peers coming from across Europe. Andso you are Old Europe.

The Erasmus programme has paid bursaries for almost 2 million students and formed the first truly European generation – a generation who don’t really understand the meaning of nation, east and west, right and left and all the other divisions which have marked Europe for the past century.

This generation have also called us the Generation X because they couldn’t put us in their schemes. ‘They’ are old and ‘we’ are new Europe. Even in the European Parliament the MEPs who are under-40 have created an interest group across political parties and nationalities: EU40 led by Alexander Alvaro MEP (I will meet him in November!)

I left Bologna and my family in my early 20s. It wasn’t Erasmus but Leonardo, another student programme of the EU that provides the same opportunity to escape. I moved to Paris and didn’t spend a day at the University. I used the bursary for my own personal research. It was a good investment.

From Paris I moved to Geneva and there i started my first job, taking me across the world and ending up in Sarajevo. From the Balkans back to Italy: Bologna, Rome, Milan, Urbino to realize that country is not my cup of tea. So I moved to London where my good friend Alberto had found intellectual asylum for the last 7 years. I’m still in London.

In London I realized I’m a European in a globalizing world. London has given me all the opportunities to challenge my skills and put in to practice my ideas, working in the most European environment I’ve ever found in Europe. Young enterprising people from across the continent move here because they find opportunities to experiment.

London has given me the opportunity to challenge all the traditional patronages, to break traditional divisions, to be proud to work in the third sector without any political affiliation or begging for a favour from the Papi in charge. Here I have found my way; the third way. A way I share with the Erasmus generation.

However, please don’t take me as a disciple of Tony Blair, although I’d like to have him as President of the EU – as the saga of Lisbon Treaty is almost completed after the positive result of the Irish referendum. He would make the EU relevant globally as any other politician could do.

The third way is still to be paved. I just know that it is beyond the right-left, west-east, and national-European divisions. Those divisions no longer mean anything to us.

Today we had our first meeting with the European Commission and a group of civil society representatives on the review of the European financial regulation. We sat down together at the same table to discuss the problems and find solutions to more effectively spend the roughly 50 bn € given to civil society by the EC. No rows, no shouting, but a partnership to face shared challenges.

Coming back from Brussels on the Eurostar I was reading an article on the EU and G20 in the FT. Gideon Rachman quoted Jean Monnet on the EU as a project not just for the European but as a model for global governance. For a moment I felt deeply connected to the older Europeans, on the other side of line.