Strengthening Europe from the ground up? Students’ perspectives on the European Universities Initiative

• This study focusses on students involved in EUI alliances, revealing divergent understandings of the Initiative’s purpose and its role in European integration. • Engagement in EUI activities appears to involve a relatively small and self-selecting group of students typically already committed to Europe or with prior international experience, signalling limited impact of the EUI on their identities in relation to Europe. • Focus groups with students identified key obstacles to the Initiative’s success, including perceived elitism, institutional disparities, logistical problems, and broader political forces like nationalism and Euroscepticism. • Using a constructivist approach to space, the study highlights how students’ varied engagements with European higher education initiatives reflect divergent spatial imaginaries and interpretations of the EUI’s role in region-building. European higher education has long served as a key component for advancing Europeanisation, most recognisably through initiatives like Erasmus, the Bologna Process, and the creation of the European Higher Education Area. The European Universities Initiative (EUI), launched in 2019, builds on this trajectory by fostering transnational alliances of universities across Europe to deepen international cooperation in education, research, and innovation. While previous scholarship on the EUI has examined the contested understandings of its scope and purpose among policy stakeholders, this study explores the perspectives of students engaged in EUI alliances. Informed by conceptual work on spatial imaginaries and space as produced through everyday social practices, the article examines how students variously perceive and enact the Initiative’s aims through their engagement with their alliances. We draw on focus group data with students across three of the now 65 alliances, finding considerably diverse interpretations of the EUI, its impact, and its impediments, reflecting broader tensions around its role in consolidating a European higher education space. By centring student voices, this study contributes to understanding specifically how the EUI furthers European cooperation in higher education and how Europeanisation is experienced from below.