The Generation That Actually Feels European
Something happened to Europeans born after 1985 that did not happen to their parents’ generation. They grew up with open borders, budget airlines, and the Erasmus program. They studied in other countries, worked in other countries, formed friendships and relationships across national lines with a casualness that earlier generations had not experienced. They are, empirically, the first generation for whom European identity is not an aspiration or a political project but a lived fact.
The Erasmus program, launched in 1987, has sent over 13 million students across European borders since its inception. Its cultural effects are difficult to quantify and easy to understate. A German student who spends a year in Seville comes back with something more than language skills and a suntan. She comes back with an embodied understanding of how another European culture organizes daily life — meal times, social rhythms, attitudes toward authority, the relationship between public and private space. This is identity formation through experience, not instruction.
The youth European identity is not uncritical. Young Europeans are among the most vocal critics of the EU’s institutional failures — its democratic deficit, its slow crisis response, its tendency to speak the language of values while conducting the business of interests. But criticism from within a frame is different from rejection of the frame. The generation that protests EU climate inaction at Brussels is not the same generation that wants to restore hard borders.
What this generation has that its predecessors lacked is the experiential basis for a European identity that is specific rather than abstract. Not “we share Enlightenment values” — an argument that requires a philosophy degree to fully inhabit — but “I have friends in six countries and I have lived in three.” That specificity is Europe’s most durable asset and its most underexploited political resource.