“The youth of Europe hopes for our continent to unite, so that all youths can live fraternally and that a united Europe, through the strength it will represent in the near future, will become a powerful catalyst for peace.” At theCamp Meeting of European youth held at the Lorely in 1951 at the Lorely, one of the fathers of Europe, Paul-Henri Spaak (1899-1972), summarized in those words the tight, yet paradoxical bond that bound youth and the European idea over the course of the 20th century. The appeal to youth and to future generations was actually something of a cliché in Europeanist rhetoric, one that was imbued with sometimes utopian youthful imagery and steeped in progressive, pacifist ideals. That century was in fact both when youth came to be seen as a specific social category and when the European idea was concretized as the European project. That being said, both the conceptualization of the European idea and its realization in the construction of a unified Europe – projects that were prepared and implemented essentially by older men – rarely mobilized young people. So in concrete terms, although young people were not actually very involved in the European project, they came to a growing focus of European policies.
Young People’s commitment in Service of the European ideal
When it first began to flourish, in the 1920s, the European idea was fully in line with the projects aimed at regenerating an “old continent” in decline. Nonetheless, the unification of Europe in order to serve peace was less attractive to younger generations than the nationalist ideas that were in vogue after the first world war. Although the European idea was not very militant then, it was beginning to spread through the earliest pro-European youth groups (La Jeune Europe (Young Europe), Groupement universitaire pour la Société des Nations (University Group for the League of Nations) and the Young Europe Union, which took off during the 1930s. Europe also appealed to some young intellectuals (Klaus Mann, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Bertrand de Jouvenel, André Chamson, André Malraux, Jean Luchaire), particular non-conformist ones, who saw themselves as the “successors” to outdated national elites. Thus the European idea was at the core of a modernizing idealism that was fundamentally rooted in both pacifism and federalism.
Yet it wasn’t until the post-war years and the implementation of the earliest Community treaties that it was possible to see pro-European activism truly catching on amongst youth. The rejection of nationalism and the internationalist spirit then led most political movements, particularly pro-European ones, to provide youths with structures both in Europe and internationally. That is how many pro-European movements came into existence: the Jeunes équipes internationales (Young International Teams) founded the International Union of Young Christian Democrats (IUYCD); the Union of European Federalists created the Young European Federalists. In that early Cold War period, mobilizing youth in favor of the nascent European project constituted a key political goal in the West; in response to the World Federation of Democratic Youth’s systematic organization of young people in the Soviet camp. In the 1950s and 1960s the CIA funneled funds through the American Committee on United Europe to the European Youth Campaign, as well as other parties, gatherings and numerous pro-European youth organizations. In addition, the Council of European National Youth Committees (CENYC) was founded within the framework of the World Assembly of Youth (WAY).
Above and beyond organized youth groups, the 1950s and 1960s were the apex of young people’s interest in the European project. Before 1968, Europe, which was still in its infancy, was more strongly associated with peace and overcoming nationalism than with politics or an economic model. On the contrary, the concretization of the Common Market and the implementation of specific policies gradually led to Europe, the community model, and the EEC’s policies all being seen in the same light. For younger generations, those policies fueled criticism and a politicization of European construction – i.e. seeking a more direct connection between Europeans’ votes and Community institutions’ decisions – before eventually leading to growing indifference towards projects that were seen as technocratic.
European Policies and Youth’s Growing Indifference
Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of European youth-oriented policies intended to promote pro-European sentiment and the sense of being European citizens began to be paired with youthful pro-European activism. The Council of Europe encouraged international exchanges for young people by financing the European Youth Foundation, which was created in 1972. Shared cultural and athletic pursuits were soon added to pro-European and pacifist youth gatherings. Increased mobility for European youth was also promoted by the network of youth hostels launched between the two world wars by the Franco-German Youth Office, founded in the 1963.
After the 1968 youth movements, the European revival in The Hague sought to encourage young people to become more politically engaged in building and running the European community. The economic crisis and the rise in the youth unemployment rate in the 1980s put youth firmly back at the center of European policies. Those policies evolved resolutely from support for young people’s political participation to developing their mobility (with the Yes for Europe and Erasmus programs) and social integration as a means of promoting the European idea, first in the west and soon after, in the east of the continent too, during the unification period in the 1990s-2000s. The fact that a legal foundation for those policies was written into the Maastricht Treaty (art. 235), in 1992, contributed to their development by the Commission over the following years: establishing a European Voluntary Service (1996), a White Paper (2001), the European Youth Pact (2005) and the EU Strategy for Youth (2009).
Currently, the main objective of those various policies and programs is to fight the relative indifference towards the European Union that has affected a large share of the continent’s youth since the 1980s. Yet the ebbing of youthful enthusiasm for the European idea can be explained quite simply by the fact that it was concretized at the turn of the 1950s-1960s. What used to be a pacifist ideal for younger generations to build, carried by an enlightened elite, turned into a concrete political reality. Mundane and easy to criticize though it may be, more than half of all young Europeans now consider themselves citizens of Europe as much as of their country of birth. While youth remains a key focus of European policy, the European idea is no longer a utopia; having evolved into part of everyday life, it also lost its youthful dimension along the way.
Translated by Regan Kramer
