When Sofia Corradi died on October 17th, the press was full of obituaries for the spiritual mother of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme, or, in the words of Umberto Eco, “that thing where a Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, meets a Flemish girl, falls in love with her, marries her, and starts a European family.”

Yet none of the obituaries I’ve seen stressed the most important and interesting aspect of the project: its unprecedented scale.

The second-largest comparable programme, the Fulbright in the United States, sends around nine thousand students abroad each year. Erasmus sends 1.3 million.

So far, approximately sixteen million people have taken part in the exchanges. That amounts to roughly 3% or the European population. And with the ever growing participation rates the ratio is going to get even gradually even higher.

Is short, this thing is HUGE.

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As with many other international projects conceived in Europe in the latter half of the XX. century, it is ostensibly about a technical matter — scholarships and the recognition of credits from foreign universities — but at its heart, it is a peace project.

Corradi recounts a story from [...]

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