Step forward the 22ers...

+ Europe in a post-Western world + D-Day in Nova Kakhovka

History of the Present (week ending 10 June 2023)

Will the 22ers become a new political generation?

The war in Ukraine has the potential to define a European cohort but it’s not yet clear whether it will

‘Europe leading the people in a time of Covid’ (with apologies to Eugene Delacroix). Tableau vivant created by the Europe’s Stories team of young Europeans at Oxford…

“Do you think there’ll be a generation of 22ers?” a student asked me recently in the German university town of Göttingen. A cohort of Europeans, that is, for whom the full-scale war in Ukraine that began with Russia’s invasion in February 2022 shapes the way they think and act politically for the rest of their lives. It is an important question.

Today’s Europe has been shaped by four key political generations: the 14ers (with their life-changing youthful experience of the first world war), the 39ers (the second world war), the 68ers (1968, in all its different manifestations) and the 89ers (influenced by then Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and the end of the cold war).

In each case the formative moment comes early in adult life, so there is a significant time lag before the cohort affected comes to power. Sixty-eighters such as Germany’s Joschka Fischer, the United Kingdom’s Jack Straw, and France’s Lionel Jospin played a leading role in European politics well into the 2000s. Eighty-niners such as the Czech prime minister, Petr Fiala, and the German economy minister, Robert Habeck, are now at the helm.

A few years ago, our “Europe’s Stories” project at Oxford University investigated formative moments for today’s young Europeans. Then, there seemed to be no single moment comparable with 1989, 1968, or the two world wars. Instead, we found a shared experience, that of freedom of movement across Europe, and a dominant concern: climate change. There were, however, some specific moments for geographical subgroups: the wars in the former Yugoslavia for south-east Europeans; the Eurozone crisis for young Greeks, Spaniards, and Portuguese; Brexit for Brits and Irish. 

Surely, though, Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine must galvanise a new pan-European political generation. If the largest war in Europe since 1945 doesn’t do it, then what? 

People often respond enthusiastically to this idea. I, too, would love to see a new political generation with a sense of shared purpose to drive the European project forward. But neither opinion polls nor my conversations with young Europeans offer any strong evidence that it yet exists.

In Ukraine, I have met many young people for whom the war obviously will be the defining moment of their political lives: a cross between 1939 and 1989. In Poland and Estonia I have seen a similar effect, although less strongly. It is far less visible, however, in western Europe. Here there is huge sympathy for Ukraine, enhanced by personal encounters with Ukrainian refugees, but the war has become one news story among many. 

There are large differences in attitude even between those central and east European countries closer to the warzone. In recent polling done for the GLOBSEC think-tank, roughly one third of Bulgarian and Slovak respondents say the West is primarily responsible for the war in Ukraine. A shocking 50 per cent of Slovaks agree with the statement that “the US poses a security threat to my country.”

The generational breakdown is even less clear-cut. In-depth analysis of polling done for our research project and the European Council on Foreign Relations shows that just 46 per cent of 18-29 year olds describe Russia as an adversary, compared with more than 60 per cent of those aged over 60.

In some of the ten European countries we polled, young people seem pro-Western; in others they were more critical of the west. Only in support of Ukraine’s prospective EU membership are young Europeans generally more positive than the old. GLOBSEC’s analysts tell me they find an equally chequered pattern. 

Moreover, these polls do not establish the relative salience of the issue. My conversations with young Europeans suggest that subjects such as climate change, socio-economic inequality, and what they see as their blighted life chances are at least as important to them as this war.

Does this mean the 22ers are just a vape-dream of old 89ers? Or at best, another of those geographical subgroups? Perhaps, but not necessarily. For obvious reasons, 1989 was experienced more intensely in eastern than in western Europe, yet it still shaped an entire cohort of future leaders. The liberation and subsequent democratisation of eastern Europe gave them a lifetime commitment to advancing the goal of a “Europe whole and free”.

Political generations are not born but made. So, the question must really be put back to that Göttingen student and her peers. Are you going to create a political class of 22ers, combining the defence of freedom and restoration of peace in Europe with your own generation’s concerns such as intersectional equality and a green energy transition? Old 89ers and 68ers certainly hope so; but it’s up to you.

This article was first published in the Financial Times on 6 June.

…and this is how it was done….the tableau being created in the seminar room at the European Studies Centre at Oxford University….

Europe in a post-Western world

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) is an organisation I'm proud to have been involved with since before its birth. In 17 years it has grown from an idea a few of us had over a kitchen table in 2006 to the most influential pan-European think tank on foreign policy, with a fantastic staff of more than 80 people located in seven different European capitals and more than 300 members of the eponymous Council.

We just had our annual council meeting in Stockholm, one of the best I have attended. You can watch some of the sessions here.

For me, the leitmotif of the conference was the shift of power to countries beyond the global West. A Turkish speaker talked about Erdoǧan's victory (in an election that was free but definitely not fair) as Turkey's 'post-West moment'. At a riveting session on the future of world order, I asked the Chinese, Russian and Pakistani speakers on stage what were the minimal rules or norms on which their countries do agree; for such minimal agreement, after all, is what distinguishes order from disorder. Pakistan's eloquent minister of state for foreign affairs, Hina Rabanni Khar, said the problem is that every powerful country makes its own exceptions, for example treating friend and foe very differently when it comes to issues of respect for human rights. Dong Wang, a professor of international relations at Peking University, hinted at what seems to me the most promising answer, which is that it might still be possible to (re?)create agreement on some minimal shared norms. ECFR's director and founding genius Mark Leonard, who was chairing the session, mercifully spared Alexander Gabuev, a leading Russian thinktanker now in exile, the task of saying what norms Putin's Russia still respects.

D-Day and Adeline from Nova Kakhovka

The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, 79 years almost to the day after D-Day, 6 June. And Russia has marked that anniversary, 6 June 2023, by another act of barbarism. Although at this writing there is no definite proof, the evidence is mounting that – whether as deliberate strategy or cock-up, or some combination of the two – Russia was responsible for an explosion that led to a full-scale breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam, flooding some 600 km² of land downstream from it.

Six months ago, in Lviv, I met Adeline, an art student from Nova Kakhovka. ‘I was a Russian-speaker until 24 February,’ she memorably observed.

She described her experience under Russian occupation. The occupiers seemed more scared than the occupied, she told me. Eventually, she escaped across the river. She showed me the location of her house on Google maps ('here's my home!'), and spoke with tears in her eyes about how all her family were just waiting for Ukrainian victory in order to go home. The landscape around there was so beautiful, she said. She wanted to set up an art gallery in Nova Kakhovka. And she warned me already back then of the danger of the dam being breached.

Now it's happened. The whole area is flooded. I don't know whether her house is underwater, although I'm trying to get a message through to her to find out.

I would like all those people around the world (in West, part-West and non-West) who talk blithely of the need for Ukraine sacrifice territory for 'peace' to sit down for half an hour across the table from Adeline. It's her home you're talking about. Maybe you’d like to give up yours instead?

Adeline, an art student from Nova Kakhovka, site of the breached dam. (Photographed in Lviv, December 2022.)