Introduction

Citizenship has traditionally been linked with the nation state, a ‘sorting device for allocating human populations to sovereign states’. Historians and romantic writers fostered a nationalism which led to a collective identity central to the citizenship arising in European countries after the French Revolution. Investigating the nature of a particular citizenship as it may be lived out and developed in the context of a particular form of student mobility calls for some observations about student mobility. The chapter also presents some of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book looks at EU citizenship from the perspectives in turn of the Treaties, the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Commission. It focuses on where Erasmus student mobility takes place: universities, historically seen by many nations as the nurseries in which their citizens are cultivated, though long also welcoming citizens from elsewhere.