Multicultural European societies increasingly demand internationally
oriented citizens, who are willing to actively participate in civic life and
able to successfully access the labour market. The European dimension
in education supposedly endows youngsters with civic values,
multiculturalist attitudes and plurilingual competences which ultimately
lead to raising awareness of their Europeanness. Formative years at
university, pivotal to students’ individual life course and projects, are a
decisive stage in the development of supranational, collective identity formation. Similarly, pan-European study programmes are aimed at
inspiring a sense of European citizenship and identity, the most
renowned of which within the Higher Education context is Erasmus+. By
conducting focus group interviews, this paper probes Andalusian
university students’ understanding of their European identity and
verifies the causal dynamics between European identity-taking and
foreign country sojourns, comparing the perceptions expressed by
returnees to those by students who have not had the opportunity to
participate in international study programmes (ISP) at higher education
yet. Results evidence students’ apparent supranational orientation,
general awareness of commonalities across Europe and utilitarian
outlooks on the EU, although not a clear discernment of its institutions
or a marked European identity.