When I was a kid, no one went anywhere. My parents were born in the early 20th century, a time when France took enormous pride in its provinces, and old people still spoke their regional patois. The bicycle, not the car, was the ticket to freedom. Apart from a few eccentrics—Orientalist painters, travel writers, merry widows—few ordinary French people saw any reason to venture beyond our borders.
    On the eve of World War II, practically the only exposure my parents and their contemporaries had to the outside world came from the immigrants who lived among us: White Russian taxi drivers, Spanish maids, Italian grocers. Portuguese masons helped build the suburbs while farther north, Polish miners dug for coal.
    Even in the early ’60s, when I was just a boy, travel was still an adventure. When we’d vacation on the Atlantic coast, my mother (who’d never taken an airplane in her life) worried about how the “change of air” would affect my health. I had to “acclimate”—that is, wait at least three days before I was allowed to swim in the ocean.
    In the ’70s I attended Paris’s Institut des Sciences Politiques. At that time, the school had a few dozen foreign students. To us, the idea of studying in another country was quite a novelty, and in fact most of those young people were truly exceptional. I recall the Austrian baron, the son of a South Vietnamese military officer, the daughter of a famous Italian industrialist, the son of a German ambassador, the Senegalese student on a scholarship….
    Thirty years later, there’s nothing quite so exceptional about meeting foreign students at Sciences-Po, in large part thanks to Erasmus—a European student-exchange program named after the peripatetic Dutch humanist (1466-1536). Born in Rotterdam, he studied in Paris, traveled in Italy, was a professor at Cambridge, advised the future Charles Quint back in the Netherlands and died in Basel.
    This year the program marks its 20th anniversary, and among those wishing it a happy birthday are Adriano Farano and Nicola dell’Arciprete—just two of tens of thousands of young Europeans who had the opportunity to study in a different EU country. These young Italians got to know students from 12 different European countries while studying in France, and in 2001, they founded what may be the best Webzine devoted to the EU: CaféBabel (cafebabel.com).
    The editors of CaféBabel and their 350,000 readers belong to a new generation whose national origin is no longer a key part of their identity. In 2001, filmmaker Cédric Klapisch painted their portrait in a charming movie, L’Auberge Espagnole, which recounted the adventures of a group of Erasmus students sharing an apartment in Barcelona. Despite their cultural and linguistic differences, these young people understand one another perfectly. They share a language of emotion, laughter, love, dreams and curiosity about life—sometimes grammatically uncertain yet perfectly intelligible. The moral of the story? People can make an effort and learn to adapt to one another. In the end, their differences can fade away.
    And the same thing is true in real life. Erasmus has young people learning other languages, engaging in cross-border love affairs, forming eternal friendships with people from abroad, gaining exposure to foreign newspapers, discovering new music, different cuisines, unknown authors.... Nowadays, more than 21,000 French students each year are experiencing a much headier change of air than the one that so worried my mother when we drove more than four hours from Paris.
    Despite whatever you may have read or heard about Europe—its Europessimism, its derailed constitution, questions about its enlargement—it is alive and well. It remains the way of the future because of our young people, who’ve already embraced it. And once they’re running the country, I predict a major drop-off in the kind of xenophobic, isolationist remarks that are the stock-in-trade of populists in France and elsewhere. My children’s generation will quite naturally embody the dream nurtured by my parents’ generation: the dream of the Jean Monnets and the Robert Schumanns and the founding fathers of Europe who, in the wake of a world war, envisioned a new world rising from the old. It’s taken us some time to open all the doors and windows of this European auberge espagnole, but our children have already moved in. They bring their diversity to the table, yet nobody is a foreigner.