Radicalisation to retreat: responses of the young to austerity Europe

Abstract

The prospects for young people in Europe look bleak. The ‘social condition’ of young people is characterised by experiences of exclusion, and a sense of betrayal and anger at having been ‘sacrificed’ by the older generation. Many more young people, from more diverse backgrounds and perspectives, are now exposed to precarious social circumstances. Spontaneous and planned ‘riots’ and urban protest have displayed the anger and the anxieties of youth in Europe. How young people will continue to respond to these conditions is clearly a matter for conjecture and there is a range of possibilities. The democratic imperative is by no means certain. This paper advances a scenario in which historically socially disadvantaged youth may connect with newly intellectually disaffected young people to produce either more toxic or more creative alliances amongst the young.

Keywords::

• youth
• generation
• exclusion
• democracy
• new alliances

Introduction

The immediate future of Europe depends upon the 94 million Europeans aged between 15 and 29. Apart from the challenges that young people for generations have faced as they embark upon adult life, this generation will live in an era of full globalisation and will have to cope with the responsibility of an ageing population. So it is a matter of great concern that these young people have been hit so hard by the economic crisis. Only 34% were employed in 2011, the lowest figure ever recorded by Eurostat. The unemployment figures also testify to an appreciably more difficult labour market for young people; since the start of the recession, youth unemployment has risen by 1.5 million, reaching 5.5 million (or 21%) in 2011. (Eurofound, 2012, p. 1)

How exactly young people in Europe – as well as policy-makers and politicians – will address these and their associated challenges, in the context of the global repositioning of economic power and a ‘crisis’ in Europe that was not of their making, is a matter that is now exercising the minds of politicians, journalists, academics, market analysts and, of course, young people themselves.

At times of such uncertainty, efforts are still constantly being made to work out what is likely to happen next. Approaches to this end command different levels of plausibility as well as being anchored in different forms of ‘science’ (economics, philosophy, sociology) or none at all. Journalists tend to speculate, historians and social and political scientists seek to draw on lessons from the past, while politicians try to temper optimistic perspectives with large doses of arguably conveniently constructed ‘realism’.

This paper, in some respects, is also speculative, gazing into the crystal ball from the perspective of the positions that may be taken by young people. It builds on a contention, following the protests throughout Europe and the ‘riots’ in many parts of England during 2011, that ‘new alliances amongst the young’ may be emerging, on account of the protracted marginalisation and disengagement of the traditionally socially disadvantaged coupled with new forms of disaffection and marginality amongst those who hitherto have not experienced exclusionary processes or conditions. It is also anchored in some rather older theoretical perspectives concerning ‘blocked opportunity structures’ (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960) that were originally applied to analyses of juvenile delinquency but would now seem to have some plausible application to the wider contexts of young people's lives throughout an ever enlarging Europe.

The social condition of young people

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity … Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative? But the alternatives have also been shut down: you are excluded yet you cannot opt out. (Monbiot, 2012)

It has been argued (Lauritzen & Guidikova, 2002) that nation-states can no longer shape and ‘make’ their young people as they desire, on account of factors such as globalisation, mobility, communications technology, social networking and other media. Physical and virtual borders are permeable and futures cannot be predetermined. Young people now have to make their societies, and indeed themselves, their communities and the world around them, now that former regulatory mechanisms and socialising forces have lost their firm, authoritative and at times authoritarian hand.

The fluidity of modern lives for young people is characterised by both opportunity and risk (see Smith, Williamson, & Platt, 1996), and guided and governed by differential access to human, social and identity capital – skills and qualifications, networks and contacts, and capacities for self-presentation to maximise personal advantage (see Bynner, 2005; Côté, 2005; Helve & Bynner, 2007). These, in turn, are shaped by the contexts in which young people live – their own resourcefulness, family circumstances, educational prospects and wider environment. For some 30 years (from Willis, Bekenn, Ellis, & Whitt, 1985, to Arnett, 2004; France, 2007; Furlong & Cartmel, 1997; Jones, 2002), there has been intense academic debate about the nature of fractured or broken transitions, as older certainties about the connections between education and employment as well as between linear sequences in origins and destinations in family life and housing have disintegrated – at least for a far greater number of young people than amongst the preceding generation. Both in the capitalist west of Europe and in the state socialist (communist) east of Europe, there had formerly – at least for a generation following the Second World War – been a strong sense of pathways to adulthood, governed admittedly by different balances of patronage and achievement and shaped by factors such as social class (in the west) and attachment to the party (in the east) (see Walker & Stephenson, 2012; also Parkin, 1971). The seminal text by Furlong and Cartmel (1997), reporting on emergent processes and experiences of individualisation and risk for young people, pointed to the new vulnerabilities in economic (school to work), domestic (family of origin to family of destination) and housing (dependent to independent living) transitions. They also captured, through their concept of the ‘epistemological fallacy’, the tensions and contradictions that now exist between assertions and beliefs that young people now have far greater autonomy and agency in determining their futures, and the persisting influences of the old ‘grand narratives’ (see also Bynner, Chisholm, & Furlong, 1997) of social class, ethnicity and gender in shaping those futures.

Some young people clearly have rather more extended periods of both dependency and autonomy than others, who can often get thrust into self-sufficiency and ‘independence’ prematurely with a host of concomitant vulnerabilities and risk (European Union, 2012). Typically, these are young people who already have a range of challenges in their lives, deriving often from growing up in poverty, weak family support, low personal resilience, offending histories, health risk behaviours, and educational exclusion and underachievement – all of which are, of course, intertwined in a variety of ways.

Moreover, the escape route through the acquisition of human capital (educational and other recognised qualifications) is now less assured, in the sense that it no longer necessarily produces occupational destinations and related life-course security commensurate with levels of competence and achievement. New forms of capital have surfaced as increasingly critical in conferring opportunity within the life course: social capital accruing from networks (Putnam, 2000) and identity capital deriving from individual capacity for self-presentation and self-advocacy (Bynner, 2005). As S. Roberts (2012, p. 394) notes, ‘examples abound of the ways in which those with high levels of various social, economic and cultural capital are able to not only cushion the blow of insecurity (…), but also actually use it to their advantage’.

Though some young people with the right constellation of qualifications, contacts, self-confidence and competencies are, therefore, seizing new opportunities and making effective and successful transitions to adulthood, many more are now struggling to navigate their pathway through. Today's young people in Europe are facing the prospect of worsening futures (K. Roberts, 2012) – certainly worse than those of their parents and most of their grandparents. Those old grand narratives of class, ethnicity, gender and indeed geography and nation, the structural forces that shape young people's destinies, are returning with a vengeance, if they ever really disappeared in the optimism of equalities legislation and the apparent promotion of meritocratic principles in social and economic life. These work, of course, to the advantage of some, and the most privileged of the older generation are likely to confer virtuous circles of opportunity on their offspring. But for many more young people, a more vicious downward cycle is more likely to be in store, unless there is some radical reappraisal and reconstruction of the cultural and political levers to effect more progressive generational transfers of resources and more egalitarian social change, such as that advanced by Allen and Ainley (2010).

Have those within the older generation who largely benefited from, inter alia, peace, relatively stable and secure employment, and affordable (purchased or rented) housing stolen the inheritance of the young? It remains quite unclear who is to blame for the current crisis (as it is commonly described throughout Europe) – incompetent politicians, the banks, global shifts in economic power – but it is certainly not the young. What is clear is that, irrespective of the cause, the ensuing fiscal and economic measures taken to address the crisis – of, for example, austerity packages, the contraction of public services – have had a disproportionately adverse effect on the young. Flemish Belgium may insist that it should not be their young people who should tighten their belts (Pudar, Suurpää, Williamson, & Zentner, 2013), but young people in southern Europe have certainly had to do so, and prospects for a far greater proportion of young people throughout Europe than might have been anticipated just a few years ago now do look extremely bleak. Secure employment, independent living and confident family formation would appear to be elusive. Shattered expectations will have to be revised, one way or another, and it is not clear at all how the young will respond.

Two particular threats to the expectations of the young are very present. First, there is unemployment, precarious employment in terms of the quality of work and latterly underemployment – the burden of which is experienced disproportionately by the young (see Eurofound, 2012). Throughout Europe, research points to the lifetime scarring effects of this experience (see Bell & Blanchflower, 2010a, 2010b).

Second, the massive demographic shifts in Europe mean that the young will have to pick up the financial and social responsibilities for the care of an ageing population. Economists constantly invoke the fiscal burden that will have to be placed on those of working age if there is to be adequate care for those beyond working age who are living longer and longer.

And this is taking place within other circumstances that also exacerbate the threat to young people's possibilities of replicating the life opportunities and conditions of the previous generation (see K. Roberts, 2012):

• the slowing of economic growth rates;

• any economic growth is likely to benefit capital increasingly, rather than labour;

• the rising costs of energy, commodities and food;

• other demands on household incomes (paying for education and raising children);

• downward pressures on salaries, as a result of the over-supply of competent people and ‘digital Taylorism’;

• class demographics – the incremental expansion of the middle class, through social mobility over the past 50 years, has reached saturation point; as a result, the only way is down.

The British universities minister David Willetts has argued that the older generation that ‘had it all’ has patently failed to transfer resources and opportunity to the next generation (Willetts, 2010). Metaphorically, they have pulled the drawbridge up behind their own package of free education, secure employment, home ownership, pension rights, peace and a quality of life unknown to any generation before them. Even in those European societies where there has, arguably, been more of a tradition of generational solidarity and support (the Balkans and the Mediterranean countries, for example), the capacity to maintain such transfers in austere times has been firmly curtailed. So, for a variety of reasons, those now in or rapidly approaching retirement age have saddled future generations with untold debt and declining standards of living. The current generation is told that they will have to work – if they get work – harder, longer and for fewer benefits, in part to pay for the aging costs (pensions and care) of the previous generation.

Throughout 2012, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) debated a paper on The Young Generation Sacrificed:

The persisting economic instability across Europe has exposed young people to unprecedented hardship. Unemployment, underemployment, socio-economic inequalities, poverty and exclusion disproportionately affect the young generation, whose autonomy, dignity, well-being and access to rights are rapidly eroding. As a result, Europe risks not only producing a ‘lost generation’ of disillusioned young people, but also undermining its political stability and social cohesion, justice and peace, as well as its long-term competitiveness and development prospects in the global context. (PACE, 2012)

These opening lines prefaced an analysis of generational, geographical and economic disadvantages experienced and faced by young people, and paved the way for a resolution committed to ‘building a better future together’ through investing in youth, strengthening youth voice and access to socio-economic rights, and moving from words to deeds.

This analysis also included an expression of concern about the shifts from social protest to political confrontation, with its concomitant threat to democracy, and advocated the renewal of more intergenerational solidarity and policies that ‘pay adequate attention to the needs of all generations’ (emphasis original). But the words of the young apparently command a limited audience even from those who promulgate such ideas. The World Forum for Democracy, convened in Strasbourg in October 2012, was preceded by a Youth Assembly promoted by the PACE. Yet, only a handful of the Parliamentarians of Europe made the time to attend the debate on democracy with a selected gathering of just under 200 of the most motivated, committed youth activists in Europe, from across the mainstream political spectrum and beyond. Those young people were despondent as to whether anyone was listening and forthright about the messages they would convey to the youth organisations and youthful communities to which they would return. Most were disappointed and frustrated; some were angry.

Some of the brightest, best educated, though not necessarily the most privileged, young people in Europe attended the European Forum Alpbach, a kind of social Davos that has taken place in the Alps since 1945, where big issues of the day are debated annually through an engagement between young people and political, academic and professional elites. The 2012 theme was the Expectations – The Future of the Young – and invariably the young people there described themselves as having been ‘betrayed’ by the older generation, as they pursued their third higher degree or sought yet another internship where they would have to work for nothing and there would be no guarantees. The strength of the word betrayal (rather than the more gentle being ‘let down’) is testimony to the depth of angst and alienation – and sometimes anger – even amongst those with theoretically the most competitive advantage.

Some of those from both the Youth Assembly and the European Forum had been actively involved in Occupy and other protests that had emerged in 2011 and continued throughout the following year.

A year (and more) of protest and riot

The tumultuous events in North Africa and the Middle East, the street disturbances in Greece, Spain and Portugal (and elsewhere) during 2011/2012 and anti-austerity rallies throughout Europe were but the latest in a long line of protests where young people have often been at the forefront, seeking social change on matters as diverse, but interconnected, as governance, jobs, human rights and democracy. Historically, we can trace similar moments in Western Europe (1968), Eastern Europe (1989) and south-east Europe (during the 1990s) – and, most recently, at the southern end of Europe's borders and in the south of Europe itself. Such events invariably produce different outcomes, not necessarily those that were originally intended, but they are all founded on young people seeking to express their voice on the contemporary issues that affect or afflict them.

Indeed, reviewing a year of protest under the headline ‘Age of uncertainty stirs the lost generation into finding its voice’, the British newspaper The Guardian (17 December 2011) noted that ‘At the heart of this most potent insurrection since 1968 is an expression of the deep uncertainty about how the future will pan out’. It was suggested that now, with the ability to build horizontal links using new technologies,

a generation decided this year not to passively embark on a pre-programmed conveyor belt of life under austerity, oppression – or both – but instead opted to come together and attempt an audacious reclamation of autonomy.

From a very different position, the influential International Labour Organisation has also warned of the risk of social unrest deriving from labour market developments and perceptions that the burden of the crisis is not shared in a fair manner (International Labour Organisation/International Institute for Labour Studies, 2011). Throughout Europe, there is unequivocally a deep sense of disillusionment amongst the young.

The Guardian article concluded that ‘the generation that grew up being told they were the heirs to Francis Fukuyama's (1992) end of history and victory of a liberal capital society, is now working its damnedest to prove how untrue this is’. Protest movements such as UK Uncut, the transnational Occupy protests, the Spanish Indignados camp movement and student marches in Britain, France and Austria are but some examples of this.

The uncertainty and sense of social dislocation engendered in contemporary times amongst the young is not, however, especially new for some groups of young people, although responses to it may today take different forms and be more widespread – permeating both the ‘socially disadvantaged’ (who have experienced it for well over three decades) and now what might be termed the ‘intellectually disaffected’– those who have been sold the twenty-first century European equivalent of the American dream, to achieve the educational qualifications required for a competitive knowledge-based economy, and now find the steps on that ladder are illusory.

It was very different only a few years ago, when marketing and media analysts were talking about the new generation of young people: confident, techno-savvy, multiply capable and going places. Their future was bright. The protagonists for Generation Y, as it was sometimes called, or the ‘smart, social and super-fast’ Generation Einstein (Boschma & Groen, 2006) paid little attention to those who were in what had been called Generation X in the recession-hit 1980s – the socially excluded and marginalised. Buoyant economies meant that Generation X was a thing of the past.

Yet, Generation X resurfaced with a vengeance in England's riots of August 2011. Questions were asked where Generation Y has gone. It might be postulated that, as the bright future for Generation Y has receded, there has been some fusion with Generation X. In other words, the English ‘riots’ were, possibly, an early manifestation of some level of solidarity within what has been portrayed generically as the IPOD generation – the insecure, pressurised, overtaxed and debt-ridden. Material disadvantage, dashed expectations and democratic disenfranchisement collided, and then colluded in spectacular urban unrest. Though little discernible social change has yet to materialise from those events, some analysts have continued to suggest that, across the constituent groups of the young generation, for different substantive reasons, there is such collective disquiet with the older generation that ‘a showdown between the generations may be inevitable’ (The Economist, 2012).

Responding to austerity – new alliances amongst the young?

What kind of showdown might this be? The possibilities I advance below should not be particularly surprising, for they derive from older theories of deviance, drift and marginality. In particular, the work of criminologists Cloward and Ohlin (1960) is instructive. Their seminal theory of ‘blocked opportunity structures’ pointed to different responses according to perceptions and perspectives on prevailing societal aspirations and the means (or not) to achieve them. Those embracing societal goals but without the legitimate means for achieving them, they argued, would exploit illegitimate means for their realisation; these were characterised as criminal subcultures. Those rejecting the ends but possessing the means to achieve them were characterised as rebels, and those neither subscribing to the ends nor possessing the means were portrayed as in retreat.

A similar speculative classification of potential responses by the young to their current predicaments can be advanced here. First, there is the possibility of reaction. There have already been the tragic events in Norway in July 2011 when the perpetrator Breivik, declared sane by a Norwegian court, murdered largely young activists from socialist politics, allegedly on the grounds that he was ridding the world of those who were promoting a multicultural Europe. Breivik, in the manifesto he posted on the Internet, presented himself as a latter-day Christian crusader, fighting against what he perceived as the Islamic takeover of Europe that was undermining everything that ‘his’ Europe stood for in terms of traditions, values and culture. His actions may have been extreme but in his ideas he is far from alone (see Townsend, 2012). The political far right has achieved some level of respectability even in countries traditionally famed for their tolerance, such as Denmark and the Netherlands (where Geert Wilders' Freedom Party has commanded considerable support and influence), and now in countries facing the greatest impact of austerity. Golden Dawn in Greece now act with virtual impunity against immigrants, and campaigns publicly against homosexuals, artists, leftists and ‘anyone who is not deemed to be 100% Aryan and totally Greek’ (Campbell & Pangalos, 2012). Golden Dawn commands a ‘respectable’ minority in the Greek Parliament, having secured 18 seats and approaching 7% of the national vote in the second round of elections in 2012.

On a parallel, though contrasting, track, and perhaps even in response to the rise of the ‘white’ political right, there is the issue of the radicalisation of young Muslims. This has, of course, been a political and policy concern ever since 9/11 and the declaration, by the USA, of a ‘war on terror’. There is clearly evidence of the radicalisation of some young Muslims, and the perpetration of terror acts in European cities such as London and Madrid bears witness to this. The sources of radicalisation are complex and many – institutional racism, ghettoisation and exclusion, perceived victimisation of the Islamic community since 9/11, exhortations by some Muslim clerics to fight back: all may have contributed. There were serious riots in 2005 in the north Parisian banlieue (suburb) of Clichy-sous-Bois, attributed to ‘immigrants’, many of whom were Muslim; yet distinguishing between their faith and their poverty and marginality is important, however much radicalisation may have been in the mix that might have spread to other parts of Europe (see Wallerstein, 2005). The English riots were not associated in the same way with faith or immigrant groups (Waddington, Jobard, & King, 2009), yet both episodes were triggered by similar events – proclaimed unprovoked attacks on individuals from minority ethnic groups by the authorities. There is little doubt that a deep sense of alienation amongst the young within some minority groups, compounded by such experiences, may have propelled them to engage with radicalisation and undergo terrorist training both at home and abroad. And though this assertion needs to be kept firmly in perspective, young people from some ethnic minorities could become increasingly fertile recruiting ground for violent extremist causes, as both material conditions and the experience of racism worsen in the current economic and political climate.

Third, there is some prospect of revolt, manifested to date by rather creative approaches to subversion, through the activities of UK Uncut, Occupy and the Indignados, as well as more classical urban protests. There is, no doubt, a deep sense of indignation about the rescue of financial institutions and markets at the expense of the human condition, through the imposition of draconian austerity measures. In Greece, in direct opposition to Golden Dawn, the left-wing party Syriza also commanded unexpected support in the elections of 2012 – calling explicitly for opposition to the externally imposed bailout conditions and new political and economic arrangements. Its youthful and charismatic leader Alexis Tsipras attracted enormous attention throughout Europe. However, elsewhere, the question is where the dynamic of the street protests will lead, in terms of concrete social, economic and political plans. Will protest fizzle out as the young try to get by and grow up, or will the baton be passed to those with more sustained determination to implement alternative plans? Coupled to this question is that of the response of the authorities – the extent to which public protest will be met with new public order legislation, heavier policing and authoritarian clampdowns or, alternatively, with a willingness to engage in democratic dialogue beyond existing conventions.

There is another possibility – retreat. Cloward and Ohlin (1960) identified retreatist subcultures governed largely by introspection and substance use. Those who seemingly give up may seek to pursue alternative lifestyles but they may also give up more dramatically. Mental health problems amongst the young are on the increase, corroborating research knowledge that psycho-social disorders in young people tend to increase under conditions of social dislocation rather than social disadvantage (Rutter & Smith, 1995). Greece, once more, is arguably the litmus paper, where – albeit from a traditionally very low prevalence rate that was once the lowest in Europe – there has been a huge rise in suicide rates (some 40% between 2010 and 2011, which represents the highest rate of increase in Europe), including amongst the young, whose mental disorders are also becoming more pronounced. Official statistics for suicide in Greece are notoriously unreliable, on account of attempts at cover-ups, because the Greek Orthodox Church refuses to officiate at burials of those who commit suicide. The World Health Organisation, however, has warned that ‘the economic crisis and uncertainty caused by it can lead to an increase in suicides, which usually are recorded more frequently when a person is unemployed rather than employed’ (GR Reporter, 2012). Indeed, it is now well established that increasing suicide rates amongst the young tend to derive from a loss of social cohesion, the breakdown of traditional family structures, economic instability and unemployment, and related depressive disorders (Wasserman, Cheng, & Jiang, 2005).

These potential responses of the young to new, hard times are, of course, ideal types. There is also a fifth, indeed the most likely, scenario – that of the majority of young people engaging in a process of realignment, through adapting their horizons to contemporary realities. This is the classic story of the ‘ordinary kids’, those routinely ignored in most youth research and debate (though see Roberts & MacDonald, 2013), for whom reaction, radicalisation, revolt or retreat is beyond their imagination or contemplation. They simply get on with things, as best they can. What is being argued here, however, is the possibility or prospect of a more significant number of young people, from backgrounds that have historically produced division, coming together on account of their shared predicament.

What was particularly interesting about the English riots1 was the diversity of young people – in terms of both background and motivation – who took part: from the ‘gang’ members and the socially disadvantaged, to those more professional and employed, anti-cuts campaigners and self-declared anarchists (Lewis et al., 2011; Morrell, Scott, McNeish, & Webster, 2011). It is rare that such disparate groups operate together. The extent to which they did operate together remains uncertain, but certainly social media anchored a capability for planning and organisation. The core contention of this paper is that the organising capacity and capability of the intellectually disaffected, in collaboration with the more disorganised character but sheer numbers of the socially disadvantaged (something hitherto witnessed only at the margins on the political right), might shift the response of the young into uncharted territory.

An early sign of this apparent solidarity in the UK, some time before England's riots, was when student protests expressed opposition not just to the hiking of student fees but also to the withdrawal, in England, of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, an initiative targeted at quite a different group of young people. One interpretation of this is the witnessing, whether in peaceful protest or violent riots, of an increasingly shared anger and frustration amongst young people with very different, though sometimes perhaps critically, shared histories.

These new alliances concern the convergence of two conceptually distinct but empirically overlapping groups of young people. First, there is the group that is all too familiar within the public policy debate – the socially disadvantaged and unqualified, coming from areas of significant social deprivation, sometimes from households of intergenerational unemployment, occasionally affiliated to real or more mythical gangs, and excluded from the labour market.

But there is now another group, hitherto relatively invisible as they got on with their lives: those who have absorbed the messages about the ‘knowledge society’ and worked for higher qualifications as access to higher education has been widened. Increasingly, this group only get jobs commensurate with those qualifications if other factors are also in play: family resources to provide extra support, social networks to provide volunteering and work experience, and, more and more, unpaid internships. Many other equally well formally qualified young people, often first-generation learners in higher education, those who might still be in the manual or service occupations in which their fathers and mothers worked (had those businesses not closed down), do not have these supplementary advantages and so find themselves beached on the margins: overqualified with new aspirations, yet struggling to get even a low-level job. Some individuals within this group were once members of the socially disadvantaged group outlined above, but have made the effort to seize new opportunities that they now discover are not really leading anywhere. It is that overlap which prospectively produces additional bonds between the socially disadvantaged and the intellectually disaffected.

The bigger picture: no end to history but democracy in retreat?

Fukuyama's (1992) proclamation of the final triumph of liberal free market capitalism has certainly now been undermined, albeit in different ways in different contexts. Yet, there appears to be little contemplation of alternatives – old or new. The democratic response to the plight of the young in many parts of Europe has been sparse. Banks and international capital have been bailed out, while public services – including those for young people – have been decimated. There are recurrent stories of suspect, often corrupt, financial arrangements and money laundering by big business, vast bonuses paid to senior executives out of all proportion with performance and emergent accounts of morally repugnant tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion (Harris, 2012). But there is virtually no debate about promoting more equalities or access to opportunities, within or across the generations. As Melkert (2012) put it in his keynote speech to the Council of Europe conference of Ministers responsible for youth that considered access to social rights for young people: ‘isn't it time to provide a safe haven for human capital?’

Progressive perspectives appear to fall on deaf ears within the political establishment. Milne (2012) cites the late Eric Hobsbaum's view that the crash of 2008 was ‘a sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall’, and goes on to assert the need for the reconstruction of a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis. Nothing is ever settled, Milne maintains, as the communists had to learn in 1989 and the capitalists have to learn now. But the views held by Breivik, the London bombers or Golden Dawn should not lull such progressive thought into premature complacency. Indeed, there are those who argue that European democracy is now in retreat (Crouch, 2012) – which some forms of realignment amongst the young may compound rather than reverse. There will always be numerous factors, deriving from background, experience and current circumstances, that continue to divide the young rather than unite them. Any shared agenda around democracy, equality and broadening entitlements for young people, in response to current levels of exclusion, will have to be developed in the context of the wider geopolitical fault lines of contemporary Europe.

Modern Europe is experiencing a decline of the labour movement and the growth of global corporate power that now define too many societies: rising inequalities within and between societies, the demise of redistributive taxation, weak trade unions and politicians across the spectrum still eager to speak for and respond to the special interests of business leaders. There is now resistance and resentment within more affluent parts of Europe to both inter-national and intra-national ‘solidarity transfers’ – the Germans (and other northern Europeans) scapegoat the Greeks (and other southern Europeans), the Bavarians increasingly oppose supporting the former communist east, Greater London does not want to provide aid to the poorer north of England and the same antipathy prevails in Lombardia in northern Italy to supporting regions such as Calabria in the south. The regional wealth disparities within all the higher-income countries of Europe are increasing, especially as formerly strong industrial regions – such as the English West Midlands and Walloon Belgium – are in decline. Internal transfers are no longer plugging the gap – and a new regional nationalism, neither European nor nation-state, is becoming prominent all over Europe (see Williams, 2012). To counter such trends, the most recent call has been through a manifesto led by Beck and Cohn-Bendit (2012) to rebuild Europe from the bottom up:

The young people of Europe may be better educated than ever before but they still feel powerless in the face of the looming bankruptcy of nation-states and the terminal decline of labor markets … Anger is mounting over a political system that rescues banks with eye-watering mountains of debt but squanders the future of young people in the process

Beck and Cohn-Bendit have produced their ‘We are Europe!’ exhortation in order to provide the conditions for a European Year of Volunteering for Everyone. Certainly, greater social solidarity between the generations, to engage the diversity of young people throughout Europe positively and purposefully in the resolution of current challenges and the shaping of future directions, is a matter of some urgency, if other more corrosive scenarios for both young people and society are to be averted.

Perhaps, the new social movements that have sprung up during the crisis – 38 Degrees, UK Uncut, the Indignados and the rest of the Occupy movement – will persuade those in more conventional politics to take more risks and to step outside of tested and failed economic and social orthodoxies.

Towards the end of 2012, in yet another newspaper analysis of the anti-austerity protests at the time, the following observation was advanced:

Recent events raise a very serious question about the nature of European politics. What has been happening in Europe is nothing short of a complete rewriting of the implicit social contracts that have existed since WW2 – through the back door.

The dismembering of the welfare state [that guarantees minimum provision for all those burdens that most citizens have to contend with throughout their lives – childcare, education, health, unemployment, disability and old age] is presented as a technocratic exercise of ‘balancing the books’. Democracy is neutered in the process and the protests against the cuts are dismissed.

The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies – not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor re-writing of the social contract. (Chang, 2012)

The demise of that social contract has seriously damaged the life chances, throughout Europe, of all but a relatively small minority of the younger generation. Whether or not this will produce new alliances and a realignment of young people, comprising both the socially disadvantaged and the intellectually disaffected, is still a matter of conjecture but, if it does, it could be a very toxic or alternatively a very healthy mix.

Conclusion

In all policy domains – education, the labour market, health, housing, criminal justice – there is manifest inequality between nations across Europe and between and within the generations. For more and more young people throughout Europe, support and opportunities are diminishing, especially for those most on the edge (see Bell & Blanchflower, 2010a, 2010b). The ACEVO/Miliband Commission (2012) on youth unemployment in Britain points to a 10% level of structural youth unemployment, but it is four or five times greater in southern Europe. There is a worsening scenario of youth social exclusion, though of course its scale, nature and complexity vary from place to place.

What distinguishes the current crisis from its predecessors is both its scale and the anticipation that it will visit on the young generation a worse set of life-course prospects than was experienced by the previous generation. Those young people – with some privileged exceptions – are both more excluded and marginalised and more educated and informed than ever before. Their responses to denied opportunities and dampened expectations could take many forms. It is at least plausible, however, to suggest that, inside the political extremes of reaction and radicalisation, or the personal extremes of retreat, young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and those who are depicted in this paper as ‘intellectually disaffected’ may form greater common cause than ever before – engaging in protest that may range from the nihilistic to the idealistic. Within this range, there is the prospect that more creative and alternative forms of economic, social and political organisation may be considered and developed. It is, admittedly, an optimistic scenario and one that may be easily undermined by other more fragmented or extreme possibilities. Youth policy frameworks will certainly need to engage more proactively, purposefully and responsively with both groups of young people and support their aspirations.

Youth policy is the most neglected subject in politics today. Yet it is vital for politicians to address themselves to this problem with the utmost urgency. If we do not, we face the frightening prospect of creating a generation … which will be alienated from our society to an extent never before witnessed. This could produce great dangers for the stability of our system and the survival of our democracy. We should read the danger signs now. (Conservative Party Study Group on Youth Policy, 1978)

That was a message from the political right in the UK more than 30 years ago during the start of the last significant recession. Now with the Great Depression, as it is sometimes being described, and despite (ironically) the recent proclamation by England's education minister that youth policy should be a municipal responsibility and not a matter for national government (see Joswiak, 2013; Williamson, 2013), the message is arguably more acute than ever.

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Notes on contributors

Howard Williamson

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales, affiliate professor of youth and community studies at the University of Malta, and visiting fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Zagreb, Croatia. He is closely connected to youth policy development within both the European Commission and the Council of Europe.

Notes

1. Early in August 2011, ‘riots’ across England flared up, starting in London, following the killing by police of a young black man. Violent clashes with the police subsequently took place across London and elsewhere, accompanied by looting and arson, as shops and cars were set alight. Such disturbances were not restricted to the large English cities; there were episodes in relatively rural areas. Arrests and subsequent prosecutions (and punitive sentences imposed) revealed that the rioters came from a ‘complex mix of social and racial backgrounds’ (Lewis & Harkin, 2011).