“I refer to myself as half-Indian, half-German,” says Manisha Bieber, “but before too long, I want it to be half-Indian, half-European.” She hopes that the European project will one day be able to provide that sense of identity. A few weeks ago, the second-year European Studies undergraduate was elected vice-president of the Young Universities for the Future of Europe (YUFE) Student Forum.

India and Europe: impractically, thrillingly heterogeneous

Manisha was educated in India, in Kendriya Vidyalaya, a network of schools under the central government for the children of military and government personnel who are relocated every few years.. “You get a real feeling of belonging to this greater identity, but at the same time you experience the regional differences.” According to her, India is a lot like the EU: it has 28 states, many different official languages, and many different identities, sometimes uneasily united. 

“It made me conscious of certain social problems: gender, caste, class, religion and so on.” These issues inspired Manisha to study law, which she did for three years at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. “I wanted to approach things from a broader perspective, so I decided to come to Maastricht. European Studies covered everything I wanted, including European law.”

The opportunity to study in English certainly was a draw. Manisha had grown up speaking four languages and her education was in English. Only after relocating to Germany did she start to study German seriously. “Apart from the interdisciplinary approach – and the greater freedom and skill-set that comes with that – I was also attracted by the network my study programme has to European institutions.”