The EU’s Education Policy Abroad: The ‘Power of Attraction’ and the Case of Moldova

Abstract

This chapter has two roots: on the one hand, it is rooted in a research project dealing with the local effects the ENP is unfolding and the perception thereof in the countries directly neighboring the EU. Part of that research focuses on projects in the field of education politics and, especially, on the exchange scheme Erasmus Mundus (EM). The other root of the chapter is the collaboration between the two authors who had a similar research interest and undertook similar research in Moldova. While, from the very start, Vlad embedded the topic Erasmus Mundus into the context of Moldovan emigration, Helga initially focused more on the processes that take place on the level of individuals and their perceptions. Both of us, however, inevitably came across the phenomenon of brain drain and, thus, to a problem that is affecting the country as a whole. In the case of external education policy, the notion of extra-territoriality takes another interesting turn: it shares as a common feature with other policies addressed to the outside that it aims at influencing and aligning domestic policies in a certain domain (here, education) but, at the heart of the exchange scheme we analyze here, lies the individual mobility of academics. On the basis of Erasmus Mundus scholarships, academics leave their country for a certain amount of time—that is, they go extra-territorial and become insiders of an EU educational system for this period of time. The extra-territorial space for these individuals is, then, the EU. On their return, they are supposed to bring home certain insights or particular knowledge. This can be interpreted as a kind of additional promotion of the EU’s external education policy from within, through the medium of non-extra-territorial actors—such as, for example, professors and students. Instead of analyzing the extent to which the EU is successful in following this strategy of public diplomacy, we want to combine in this chapter two perspectives on the Erasmus Mundus program: first, is that we see it in the light of the pressing problem of emigration from Moldova in more general terms and, second, in the light of the assessments of Erasmus Mundus given by ‘practitioners’ who are in charge of coordinating it at Moldovan universities. The underlying question both of us are concerned with is the extent to which an initiative such as EM potentially contributes to the emigration of the highly skilled and thus to the problem of brain drain. And to make it clear from the start, we are not able to answer this question, because emigration patterns so far are not sufficiently well-researched.