COMUNICACIÓN

The event, organised by the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation with the Office of the European Parliament in Italy and the Spanish Embassy in Italy, is included in the presentation of a book that encompasses the research works derived from the Sofia Corradi- Carlos V European Award Research and Mobility Grants for European Studies.

The European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation, based at the Royal Monastery of Yuste (Cáceres-Extremadura-Spain), Mérida (Badajoz-Extremadura-Spain) and Brussels, in collaboration with the Spanish Embassy in Italy and the Information Office of the European Parliament in Italy, presents the book Peace and European values as a potential model for integration and progress in a global world, on 30 January at 16:00 pm at the building of the European Parliament in Rome. The event will be attended by Sofia Corradi, Mamma Erasmus, who was awarded de Carlos V European Award in a ceremony presided over by His Majesty King Felipe VI on 9 May 2019, at the Royal Monastery of Yuste.

This event has been organised with the aim to place value on the Erasmus Programme –now Erasmus Plus- and on the European values it transmits among its beneficiaries. According to Sofia Corradi, initiator of this initiative, “Erasmus is meant to be a working instrument of peace, a small pre-emptive contribution”. In this sense, she explained during the Carlos V European Award ceremony that from her point of view, the Erasmus Programme “fosters in the individual students such precious qualities as wisdom, personal growth, maturity, creativity in problem solving, autonomy in decision making, both in life’s daily and important decisions”, adding that, “these positive little steps certainly go towards the promotion of an integrated and better Europe as well as peace among the members of our global human family”.

This publication, which will be presented during the event, is included in the book collection “Cuadernos de Yuste”, published by Yuste Foundation, and is the result of the research works carried out by the researchers awarded the Sofia Corradi Research and Mobility Grants for European Studies, which are in turn linked to the Carlos V European Award. These were exposed and discussed at the doctoral seminar organised by the Foundation from 24 to 26 July 2017, at the Royal Monastery of Yuste.

The Director of the Office of the European Parliament in Italy, Carlo Corazza; the Spanish Ambassador in Italy, Alfonso Dastis; Professor and winner of the Carlos V European Award, Sofia Corradi; the President of the Foundation’s Executive Committee and Director General of External Action, Rosa Balas; the coordinator of the publication, Jesús Baigorri and two of the researchers who are responsible of the contents of the book, Bettina Steible and Luigi Cino, will take part in the presentation. Following the institutional remarks and the presentation of the book, diplomas will be given to the authors of the works included in the book. The event is supported by Alimentos de Extremadura and Extremadura Avante, the Regional Government of Extremadura’s group of public entities.

In the preface of the book, Sofia Corradi reviews the most notable milestones of the Erasmus Programme, giving special emphasis to those who she has collaborated with, contributing with her knowledge and personal experience. In this sense, she recalls that ever since the Erasmus Programme was launched in 1987 it has made the exchange of approximately five million students from around five thousand higher education European institutions possible. She, furthermore, points out that since 2014 the Erasmus Programme –now Erasmus Plus- has a broader scope to include other programmes, institutions and pre-existing European organisations of all sort in order to offer young managers and workers similar opportunities and involve all the Continents.

The winner of the Carlos V European Award explains that the programme’s budget has reached 16.454 million Euro for the period from 2014 to 2020 in her text, a figure that only includes the European Union’s contribution.

Finally, Corradi affirms that ever since she began her research on the Erasmus Programme, she has systematically observed that “young adults who spend a period of their lives fully immersed in a different culture develop precious personal traits” and adds that the Erasmus Programme “creates a dialogical mindset. This mindset becomes a very general and permanent characteristic of the individual and works with regard to any culture, that is to say the effect is general and lasting, and it influences all future relationships the individual will have when encountering new people”.

The book, published by the prestigious scientific publisher Peter Lang, includes different research works on subjects, such as: border management; the importance of peripheries as opposed to Eurocentrism; the construction of European citizenship; foreign policy of the European Union in the Mediterranean; the role of women in the process of European construction, as the cases of Simone Veil, the first woman President of the European Parliament, and Sofia Corradi in the defence of European values and religious laws –both winners of the Carlos V European Award-, among others.

The works published in this book have had the support of the Regional Government of Extremadura; the Agency for International Development Cooperation (AEXCID); the Italian Embassy in Spain; the Italian Government through the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research; the Assembly of Extremadura; the City Council of Cáceres; the City Council of Badajoz; the University of Extremadura; National Heritage; and the Socio Economic Governance and European Identity Network (SEGEI).