Learning to be(come) a good European : a critical analysis of the official European Union discourse on European identity and higher education

During the year 2007, when this thesis was completed, the European Union could look back at fifty years of collaboration, which began with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and which has developed from being mainly economic in character to incorporating a political as well as a social dimension at the European level. In 2007 the European Union also commemorated the twentieth anniversary of Erasmus, its higher education mobility programme. It is this relatively new political dimension which I have been interested in investigating in this thesis. More precisely it is the political construction of a common European identity which is analysed using a critical discourse analysis approach.The major aim of this thesis has been two-fold. The first aim has been to investigate how the European is constructed in the discourse contained within the official European Union policy documents. I have been interested in analysing the various structures, in the form of ideas and norms which are used in order to construct 'the European'. The second aim has been to explore whether the role of higher education, as constructed in the official European Union discourse, is given a similar identity-making role as education is argued to have in the nation-state according to the theory on national identity. I argue that there are three versions of European identity construction, i.e. cultural, civic, and neo-liberal, with their own relationship to higher education, present in the empirical material analysed, consisting of official European Union documents. Further, this thesis is also a study of the power of modern government. I argue that there is an increase in normative soft power where 'The Good European' is not