In the past two decades, the international mobility of students has increasingly gained ground as a major policy objective at the European level, and came to be listed as a core feature of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The Bologna Declaration (1999) calls for a number of structural changes to enhance intra-European student mobility, as well as to increase "the international competitiveness of the European system of higher education". The Education and Training 2010 Work programme, sets "increasing mobility and exchange" as a distinct policy objective. The successor ET 2020 strategic framework further upgrades the issue - "making lifelong learning and mobility a reality" as one among only four strategic objectives. There is thus very strong political commitment at the EU and wider European level to "make mobility the rule rather than the exception". In parallel, significant amounts are distributed through different EU programmes to this end. This is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the success of these initiatives. Achievement of the latter depends significantly on developments and proper implementation at the national, and even further, at institutional level. To date, however, no empirical findings have been put together, to the knowledge of the applicant organisations, to show if policy discourse and practices at the national level have been aligned to or are at least compatible with the supranationally-set objectives, i.e. have been to an extent 'Europeanised'. Nor is there any evidence of convergence amongst European countries on national mobility policies and practices.Nevertheless, the project consortium finds such research results essential, in particular for the preparation of future national and European-level mobility actions, as well as for designing the successor programme of LLP, which is now under making. To fill in this knowledge gap and to bring a valuable contribution to current debates, the applicants hereby propose to undertake a cross-country analysis of the national strategies, policies and practices on student and academic staff mobility of the 32 countries participating in the LLP, along the reasoning and lines presented above. The ultimate result of this project will be a comparative study to be published and extensively disseminated through various channels (see work package 4), including an international high-level seminar, organised by the project coordinator with own funding.