Forming EU-professionals : Geopolitical and Symbolic Hierarchies at the College of Europe

Abstract: The aim of the thesis is to understand how international educational processes and practices enable the formation of student dispositions related to Europe and the EU labour market. The College of Europe, located in Bruges, Belgium, is a postgraduate independent private institution. It is a board­ing school with approximately 350 students representing around 50 nationalities. It was created in the aftermath of the Second World War by European federalists and has a political mission of contributing to European integration. The method consisted of ethnographic fieldwork combining participant observations with semi-structured interviews (27 with students and 11 with the school administration). I mainly interviewed students from Scandinavian and Central and Eastern Euro­pean Countries. In addition, informal interviews were conducted with faculty, students, school administration, alumni, and EU officials. Contextual information and data were collected from the school website, school brochures between 1953–2017, the Student Yearbook, and students LinkedIn profiles. Departing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, I constructed the College of Europe as a social space in the intersections of various fields at the national, European, and global level. Rather than making a field analysis of the school, the intersection across fields was used as an ana­lytical prism when making sense of what was taking place within the school. To grasp the structure of such a space I investigated the distribution of different assets and resources that the students possess before arriving in Bruges as well as accumulated during the school year. The College of Europe is a social space positioned towards the EU and Europe yet where the national is continuously present. It is aiming to contribute to European integration through the formation of EU-professionals for both the public and the private sector. It is a social space where the objective is to overcome national barriers and acquire a European outlook through diversity, yet it is marked by geopolitical and symbolic hierarchies that relate to students previously inherited and acquired national, international, and linguistic capital and social class as well as macrolevel structures and social order such as European social inequalities and EU member states hierarchies. The students, endowed with large amounts of international capital, come from middle and upper middle class, acquire social distinction through the College of Europe and while striving to build Europe, they continuously also build themselves. The academic year, through the forging of dispo­sitions such as valuing social dispositions over academic excellence, professionalism, being at ease with people in positions of power, understanding EU geopolitical and symbolic hierarchies and situating oneself within them, largely reproduces the existing European social order.