GlobThink

The other day, a French friend of mine told me: “Nobody who made an Erasmus will ever make a war”

This is a brig truth. The Erasmus program is a European student exchange program established 1987, which allows european students to study one year in a foreign country in Europe. For me, this has been on of the biggest success of the European Union in terms of education.

The Erasmus program is the guarantee that there will never again be any  war in Europe. Those who made the last big war in Europe (1939-45) used to say that the easiest way to convince people to go on war was to tell them that another country was manacing us. This was also the argument used by the Bush administration to attack Irak. Will this argument convince people who have lived abroad in that or another country, who have made friends abroad, who have got in love abroad, who have shared a flat abroad with other international students, who have felt accepted and loved in a foreign country? Of course not.

If you want to know more about the Erasmus experience, I recommend you to watch this French film: l’auberge espagnol

Image: The mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. Taken from wikipedia.