Young people, future hopes and concerns in Finland and the European Union: classed and gendered expectations in policy documents

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the ways in which governing bodies at the Finnish national and also European Union levels talk about young people and our shared future in Finland. I use their youth policy documents as material for critical discourse analysis. My argument is that, besides presenting visions of a desired future, these papers also produce and reproduce divisions between young people that reflect gender and class positions. Young people are divided into those who have potential, those who will take care of others’ needs, and those who are at risk of marginalisation. I also argue that the Nordic policy tendency to conceive of youth as a resource rather than as a problem is not consistent. Finnish youth policy has changed, firstly because of the changing economic environment – the politics of austerity – and secondly because of Europeanisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth politics
• futurity
• austerity
• mobility
• marginalisation
• class
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Austerity measures are directed to the public sector, while the hope of the economic growth and confidence towards the future is placed in the private sector. This creates the ‘new landscapes of inequality’ since cuts are unevenly distributed. For instance, female unemployment is affected by the cuts on the public sector (Clarke and Newman 2012). However, I am not in this paper examining the direct effects of the cuts but only the reflections of these ideas on expectations surrounding young people and youth policies.

2. This focus on employment and education gives the EU a somewhat more neoliberal voice than would be the case if the issues of human rights were being inspected. The documents of the Commission’s youth unit are not included in the data, since they deal with youth issues on a more general level than those selected.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 2501137968] and the Kone Foundation / Korvajärvi [grant number 250210561].