This accompanies Elisabeth Marie Piller Contemporary European History article ‘The Transatlantic Dynamics of European Cultural Diplomacy: Germany, France and the Battle for US Affections in the 1920s‘

As the United Kingdom left the European Union on 1 January 2021, few Brexit treaty provisions met with as much regret and incomprehension as the decision to leave Erasmus, the EU’s expansive student mobility programme. Since its founding in 1987 the Erasmus programme has seen nearly four million student exchanges among EU and EU-affiliated countries. In a European Union that is often experienced as remote and bureaucratic, the popular programme has allowed youth to experience and to ‘live’ Europe. If the memories of former British Erasmus students are anything to go by, the student mobility programme has been a powerful, bottom-up force for integrating Europe. One 2018 study even estimated that over one million babies have been born to couples who met on Erasmus; an impressive living monument to the ideals of the programme, even if unintended and unforeseen.[1]

Recent debates about the United Kingdom leaving the Erasmus programme show how accustomed we have grown to understanding student mobility predominantly in terms of fostering understanding and ever closer cooperation. Yet, in their earliest days in the 1920s and 1930s, student exchanges were more a product of European competition than cooperation. In the age of great power rivalry, European states recognised their cultural capital as a foreign policy asset and began to sponsor the exchange of students – a decidedly elite group – to expand their nation’s cultural and, by extension, political influence abroad.

France and Germany – antagonists in one of the most fateful rivalries in modern European history – encapsulated this approach to academic exchanges. Following the Great War, both countries tapped into their academic capital to pursue very different visions of the post-war order; that is either to enforce (in the case of France) or undo (in the case of Germany) the provisions of the Versailles peace settlement. To this end they relied heavily on a cultural strategy. This is especially notable with respect to the United States, the world’s new creditor nation and the subject of determined courting campaigns by both countries. In the very early 1920s, the French (in cooperation with US Francophiles) established numerous academic programmes, which sought to use the momentum of the war to redirect Americans from German universities, their traditional destination, towards their French counterparts.

Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s successful programmes like the Junior Year Abroad brought approximately 2,000 American students to French universities. Alarmed by French successes, Germany followed suit almost immediately, sparking similar initiatives like the German Academic Exchange Service (1925) and the Junior Year in Munich (1929). These efforts aimed to draw Americans back into Germany’s academic domain – or at the very least away from France (see the image which accompanies this blog post). Such cultural diplomacy was at times quite effective. As one American student wrote to his parents from Berlin in 1927: ‘our alliance with France in the war was only temporary and accidental, whereas with Germany we have a much closer actual connection and kinship’.[2]

The Franco-German case explains how student mobility became an important and dynamic component of international politics in the interwar period. French and German initiatives established a model for student-centred cultural diplomacy that was soon emulated elsewhere in Europe and the world. In a time of intense national rivalries, such new forms of international outreach spread quickly as nations feared falling behind their rivals. In the 1930s Germany’s aggressive cultural policies in South Eastern Europe and Latin America prompted the British and US governments to adopt their own student exchange programmes specifically to counter the Nazis’ efforts.

To be sure, these developments were also aided by internationalist sentiment and institutions. Organisations like the League of Nations and the International Confederation of Students actively promoted student mobility and circulated information about the different types of programmes offered by various nations. From the very beginning, cooperation, alongside competition, defined the rise of student mobility programmes and explain their rapid development in the interwar period. This is important, because the institutions and initiatives of this era continue to shape student mobility to this day. Following the Second World War, they were recast – not least in the Franco-German case – as a powerful instrument for the promotion of European integration and reconciliation, even as elements of international competition always remained.

In light of this history of European student mobility, the British decision to the leave the Erasmus programme is nothing short of baffling. The greater national sovereignty that many Brexiteers desire for their country is not only fully compatible with international student exchanges, it is, indeed, built into their very DNA. Then as now, successful student exchange rests on both cooperation and competition. After all, the fact that student mobility is a playing field for internationalist as well as nationalist ambitions explains its enduring popularity among peoples and governments.

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[1] https://www.european-views.com/2018/04/erasmus-impact-study-reveals-1-million-babies-born-to-erasmus-couples-since-1987/
[2] Quoted from Elisabeth Piller, Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, 2021).

The Transatlantic Dynamics of European Cultural Diplomacy: Germany, France and the Battle for US Affections in the 1920s by Elisabeth Marie Piller