The notion of social inclusion has as its corollary the notion of social exclusion, which was considered as early as the 1970s to designate a multidimensional phenomenon that concerns but more generally participation in society (Barrère & Mairesse, 2015). In the field of education, the Salamanca Declaration (UNESCO 1994) embraces the notion of inclusion as a means to reaffirm the right of children with "special educational needs" to basic education. If this notion first meant people with disabilities, today it encompasses all pupils who differ relatively significantly in any way from educational norms. Schools are requested to respond to these differences in a way that keeps these pupils in the mainstream education system (Ebersold & Armagnague-Roucher 2017). Mainstream education must be accessible to all, precisely because it is considered as one of the essential factors of social inclusion (European Commission 2000). From inclusive education, we moved to social inclusion in and through education.

The issue of the accessibility of education concerns also higher education. Indeed, for the European Union, the main factor contributing to social inclusion is employment (European Commission, 2000). Educational systems, specifically higher education, have as their mission to train a highly qualified workforce capable of continuously adapting to rapid changes in the labour market qualifications needed for a knowledge based economy in which the engine for growth is technological innovation, crucial for competitiveness (Souto Lopez, 2016). Europe has set the goal of achieving a higher education’s graduation rate of 40% in its territory (European Commission, 2010). This means that higher education systems must implement policies to ensure access to the most deprived persons order to ensure their contribution to building a "smart, sustainable and inclusive Europe" (European Commission, 2010), they must take the initiative  to organize an "smart, sustainable and inclusive European higher education" (European Commission, 2011).

The notion of inclusion is thus included in a European "narrative" (Radaelli, 2000) that combines education, employment, social cohesion, economic growth and citizenship. This paper proposes, firstly, to draw from an analysis of European discourses and mobilize the model of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), in order to reconstruct the European narrative in which the notion of inclusion is considered (Mazereau, 2015), the logic that underpins it and its articulation. As a second step, the narrative will be put into perspective with data collected during the Erasmus + Project HE4U2 aiming at ‘Integrating cultural diversity in Higher Education’ (HE4u2,
http://he4u2.eucen.eu). This still ongoing project, which involves 7 European partners, aims to make recommendations for the promotion of a more diversified, responsive and higher education system in Europe. The approach of this project is, first, to involve the integration of inclusive pedagogy into existing curricula to mediate obstacles for learners from migrant and culturally diverse backgrounds, and second, to develop a generic course aiming at sensitizing or training the higher education’s staff to this intercultural dimension.

The data we will analyse for this study concern (1) European documents about inclusion, (2) the institutional policy actions or decisions undertaken by the partner countries in some higher education institutions to promote the reception and cultural integration of students from diverse backgrounds, (3) the justifications for these actions. The justifications of the partners of the project will be put into perspective through the European narrative of inclusion. The datas will be analyzed by a discourse analysis method using the TXM lexicometric software in order to interpret the logics of discourses and their articulation (Souto Lopez, 2016).

We hypothesize that (1) there are tensions and possible contradictions between the justifications of the partners and their actions, (2) the tensions and contradictions do not matter because the variety of actions carried out by the different partners of the HE4U2 project can be attributed to the logic which underlies one or another dimension of the European narrative.

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