35 Years of the Erasmus Programme

A blend of two core elements of the Erasmus programme: its original intellectual inspiration — Erasmus himself — and an allegory of his influence across Europe. The former is represented by one of the most familiar portraits of Erasmus; the latter by a beam of connections crossing the coin from beacon to beacon, evoking the countless intellectual and human exchanges between European students. Some of these connections form additional stars, symbolising the synergies arising from collaboration between countries.

Fifth European Union joint issue. All 19 eurozone states are issuing a coin with the same design on various dates. The coins differ only in their inscriptions, which appear in the respective national language.

When the European Community launched the Erasmus programme in 1987, it was intended to support just a few thousand students — an exchange that most universities at the time still regarded as an organisational footnote. Its namesake, the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, had lived a similar idea four centuries earlier: that knowledge could only truly deepen through direct encounters with other cultures and scholarly circles. He travelled to cities from Paris to Basel, from Oxford to Rome, and his thinking — shaped by critical philology, religious tolerance and dialogue across borders — became a foundation of European humanism. That the EU chose him of all people as the namesake for a mobility programme was no arbitrary symbolism, but a programmatic statement about education as a cross-border practice.

What started as a pilot with around 3,200 grant recipients had, by 2022, grown into a programme that has supported more than twelve million people in over thirty countries. France has been among the most active participating countries from the start, both in sending and hosting students. Erasmus has harmonised curricula at European universities, advanced the mutual recognition of academic credits, and — as long-term studies show — measurably strengthened participants' sense of European belonging. The European joint issue of 2022, in which all euro states took part with an identical design, honours this 35th anniversary as a moment in which the political idea of a united Europe found perhaps its most tangible everyday form: as the lived experience of young people at foreign universities.