If we follow the Humboldtian ideal, then teaching should derive from research. Our chapter argues that one of the reasons that Europe and the EU are hard to communicate to students is that we have a violation of this Humboldtian ideal. We have a mismatch between teaching and research in European studies, especially as concerns the role of culture. We take the notion of culture as our starting point, because it is a “softer” notion than, for example, economic or political institutions. While there are ample debates about the working of European economic or political institutions, at least for the most part, scholars agree on their basic properties. Not so with culture. Culture is an interdisciplinary topic that attracts many students to European studies programs, but it is even harder to pinpoint and research than economic or political institutions. Culture has long been understood as a difficult phenomenon. Some scholars understand culture to be made, claimed for political reasons, changing, and hybridized. Others consider it as fixed, or at least as a common basis for actions, motivation, and communication.

We argue that in European studies teaching, culture is often used to denote commonalities among European societies. Many master's programs emphasize (and advertise) that they teach a “common European culture”. European studies scholarship, however, often emphasizes and researches variation between different national cultures. Our chapter explores this phenomenon and offers advice on how to deal with the paradoxical mismatch between teaching and research.

Teaching: one European culture, source of unity

Many European studies programs have the idea of one European culture in their title or in their teaching program. A quick browsing of the relevant websites is instructive: The Ruhr-Universität Bochum offers the Master's in European Culture and Economy that sees Europe “as a cultural space”. Similarly, the Master's of European Culture at Kent University “makes it possible to study the history, literature, and political philosophies of the continent” and has modules like “The Idea of Europe”. The Master's in Cultural History of Modern Europe at Utrecht University conceptualizes European history as one shared cultural history. The Erasmus mundus Master's in European Literary Cultures at Bologna has a unit called “European History and Civilization” and one of the program's main educational goals is that a graduate “know[s] the history and culture of Europe in order to contextualize the literary production in the broader context of European cultural history”.