Hello, I'm Timothy Garton Ash, welcome to the Europe Stories podcast.
What the young Europeans want the European Union to do and to be.
Over the last three years,
an amazing group of young Europeans have worked with me here at the European Studies Centre at Oxford University to answer this question.
And this podcast will present their findings.
Host Anna Mackintosh and Lucas say have a series of conversations with the authors of our concluding report and give you their answers.
Know. Hi, Lucas. So we're talking about young Europeans today.
And I just thought back on one of the things I learnt very soon after we started working on this podcast,
which is that one side of your family is from the Azores, which are sort of violence.
Pretty deep into the Atlantic Ocean, and that just makes me think of how Big Europe is.
Young Europeans or Europeans of any age actually come from such different parts,
different places, climates, cuisines, beliefs, and I just thought to ask you,
do you think having that family connexion to a peripheral part of Europe, the Azores shapes how you think about young Europeans?
That's an interesting and unexpected question,
because I think that my good friends from the Azores don't feel perhaps as European as people I grew up with in Portugal and in Lisbon,
and people who I've met from other parts of Europe. And in fact, I would say something similar for the people I grew up with in Lisbon.
In contrast with people who are from more central parts of Europe,
who had the chance to hop on a train very easily and go to the neighbouring country.
And I say this because in the Azores now more specifically,
it is almost literally exactly in the middle of the Atlantic between the United States and continental Europe.
And that means that actually many exonerations have more contact with the United States
and actually have family that immigrated to the United States during the dictatorship.
What perhaps I can say in answer to your question is that despite the fact that this generation grew up interconnected with common references,
cultural references in Portugal, my generation tends to be quite fluent in English as opposed to their parents' generation.
So there is a sense of connexion on the one hand, but on the other hand,
being in that part of the world, I think it's partly because they're growing up on an island,
but also partly because of the distance and how remote it feels to be there that that still has an impact on how they relate to the rest of Europe.
That's really interesting. And that got straight to so many of the themes that were.
Working with in this report, and so really great to hear your own reflection on that.
So I have one for you in return. How did you think of young Europeans before working on this project?
I guess I should start with where I'm living right now, which is in Oxford, in the UK, and that definitely shapes how I see young Europeans.
I moved here in the middle of the Brexit negotiations and I came with a lot of interest in Europe and in young Europeans,
but very quickly had to grapple with some of the questions in Britain about British identity and European identity and how they converge,
as well as diverge. And I think probably looking back, there always have been a set of experiences growing up, mostly outside of Europe.
First in Hong Kong and then living in the US and travelling to parts of Europe that are more marginal.
For example, I think one of my formative experiences in thinking about young Europeans probably is spending two weeks in the
Ukraine and talking to two young journalists there about their experience reporting the events at the Maidan.
So I think that sense of in between this and peripheral in this probably is something that's always
shaped my understanding of Europe and that who's in and who's out is always an open question,
depending on who you ask and what question you're asking. So the chapter that this episode is about is the first chapter of our Europe Stories report,
which is called a young European speak to the EU and was co-written by our colleagues, Mave and Dan.
So Dan is currently studying for a DPhil in sociology at Nuffield College in Oxford,
and he specialises in changing patterns of voting behaviour and attitudes in the British electorate over time.
And he's an enthusiast for quantitative methods and polling methodology.
So our other guest today has a very strong interest in migration.
Her name is Mave, and she has been in Oxford working on graduate studies in migration.
And she actually joined us this time from Denver, where she is now training in law school.
So great to have both done and maybe here today, and maybe we're going to start a little bit with your backgrounds and what brought
you in your work in research to this question of who are young Europeans?
I can take that one if I think back to when I first joined the project, which was in January of 2019,
and it was very much in its early stages and questions are still being formed and the ideas were there.
But obviously of the specific research plan wasn't necessarily in the form that it is now.
And the Darren Knauff conference.
So that would be May a few months later during that conference, this idea of these formative moments came up, I think,
through a Napoleon quote that Anna may remember I don't,
but kind of something along the lines of what was the world like when you were 20 years old or something?
So there's this quote that's attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, but we could not confirm that.
It, in fact, is I goes something like, you can really know what a man is like if you know what the world was like when he was 20 years old.
So there's this idea of basically the generation you belong to having these formative moments that then define how they see the world,
and that ignited our curiosity about this generation. Perfect.
Yes. So that quote precisely, I think, sparks this notion of formative moment, best, worst,
etc. These kind of main questions that we've been asking interviewees ever since that May 2019 conference.
And of course, you never know when you're starting a research project, how people will respond, which is, you know,
part of the excitement and beauty of research, but also part of the the uncertainty that you may not get interesting answers,
but I think we were all thrilled to find out that after that first summer of interviews,
we really did get a very solid notion of young Europeans and this young generation in Europe just by asking these very simple questions.
So I think for me, my research was rooted in migration,
and what drew me to the project was freedom of movement and freedom of travel in the EU and obviously
freedom of movement and travel for EU citizens and certain other people with particular privileges.
So that sort of drew me in and then subsequently became quite a significant theme as those who have read the report will see.
So it was really interesting to see how that evolved over time and became the most salient and popular
answer to our question of what the single best thing the EU has done for you personally is almost everyone.
I think our our statistic is somewhere in 60 or 70 percent of people talk about freedom of movement or freedom of travel.
So anyway, I think it was heartening to see that these very simple initial questions more than
two years ago now have led to some really interesting findings on young Europeans.
Dan, tell us a little bit about your background. So what were you studying when you joined the project?
How did you come to write about this particular chapter? Yes.
So I'm joining from Oxford and I'm studying for a defensive ideology.
So I do like a lot of polling research, so I've been working with lots of survey data trying to understand kind of attitudes.
And some of my stuff is also on Europe.
As also, I've done a bit about Brexit, trying to understand some of the reasons behind so many British people voting to leave the European Union.
And I actually joined the project initially just to help a little bit with some of the polling, and then I was asked to kind of take it on.
And I think it's a really interesting project. I find the polling given my background to be really interesting to me as well,
because we're asking 13000 people across Europe 10 questions every few months then that four times now.
And so it gives you a really good insight into the state of public opinion.
And we get to ask some really interesting questions and through some of the stuff that doesn't often get asked.
And the young European chapter in particular does a lot of the stuff that we've polled about.
We split into age categories to have a look at how Europeans differ in their views according to their age,
and linked to that, whether there's maybe some sort of generational effect.
Our interviews with Europeans from different generations are essential component of the Europe Stories project.
You can explore their answers about their formative, best and worst moments on our website.
European Moments Dotcom Several of those moments mentioned throughout this episode are linked in the description.
So what makes young Europeans different from other generations in Europe?
How do you differentiate this generation from others?
I think something that I've noticed through the interviews.
Which I suppose might be a cliche answer, is just the degree of connexion that young Europeans have,
regardless of whether or not they have partaken in Erasmus or living and working in another country.
I think what we've found in our interviews is that those who lived during that period of divided Europe
and experienced 1989 in the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification and all those things for them,
the idea of crossing borders without a passport was revolutionary.
It was huge. There are so many interviewees who were born, you know, 50, 60, 70 years that say, Gosh,
it was amazing when we could go from Spain to France and not wait for four hours at the border.
Whereas if you speak to interviewees born 90s early 2000s, that's just an assumption.
Of course you can travel.
Interestingly, I remember you'll remember this on it, too at the conference that we did in Berlin and November of 2019, just before the pandemic.
In retrospect, really interesting time,
we were talking about roaming charges and someone in the summer interviews had said that her best European moment
was the fact that there's free roaming and you don't have to pay additional fees to go to another country.
Whereas other people had said the end of World War Two or a Schengen agreement or Treaty of Maastricht multiple different things.
And someone at the Berlin conference who I think he was born maybe 70s or 80s, said, How can you say that?
How can you say that roaming is the best moment in recent European history?
And some of the younger folks, this person was by no means old, but the maybe millennial and Gen Z folks kind of said, Well, you know, this is huge.
Like if I had to pay every time I crossed the border, it would be such a nuisance it would really alter my experience of Europe.
So I think for young Europeans, this degree of connexion and ease, to be honest,
and I don't know that their resentment from older Europeans towards younger people, that it is easier for them.
I don't think so. We haven't really found a lot of that in our interviews, but I think they really feel.
European in the sense that they can just travel and move with such ease.
So I think it's that degree of connexion.
I've had many formative European moments having travelled throughout my life in Europe, but a key one, of course, was writing.
When I started travelling, I started to see Europe as a whole to travel abroad using only my idea do something unprecedented.
Still, in the modern world, lots of really vivid memories of those first few experiences,
you know, coming to realise how small the world is, but also how big the world is.
So just to clarify,
what are the age brackets that we are using when we're speaking of young Europeans as opposed to middle Europeans and older Europeans?
It's a surprisingly tricky question actually is how do you divide between the age groups?
So the kind of the standard in access to audience that seems to be somewhat arbitrary and you just kind of split them in five attempts?
But what we did here is we define them by basically what made was talking about there by
trying to group them into the sort of generations who would have shared experiences.
And so we've got 16 to 20 nine year olds is the young category and then 70 to 49
is the middle middle age category and then 50 to 60 nine is the older category.
I say 69 because in the polling data that's available, so you don't have it in the interview.
Obviously, it's just upwards of 50. And we've done that sort of the 16 29 has done so that we're trying to kind of capture the group
who aren't quite old enough to really have the Berlin Wall as their formative experience.
And that's the group that we're trying to understand when we say about young
Europeans and exactly as many of our data suggests that basically this group,
they don't have one formative moment that they can remember as a collective, but rather lots of kind of individual personal conveniences.
And I think it's easy to dismiss that and say, well, you could less time at the airport.
It doesn't matter. But it the other way of thinking about it is if you have like an amazing trip around Europe or if you've gone on Erasmus,
the three months or all of these things that are really most experienced by our generation now.
Those could be really formative in your own life and change how you think about Europe.
And so, yeah, that's how we define them. So the roaming charges can come across as a very superficial concern,
but I think it speaks to a very tangible experience of moving in this continent and having
our experience be in the continent as as opposed to just specifically in your country,
with your own language, with people, with the traditions that you come from.
And so feeling having this cosmopolitan experience seems to define this generation very clearly,
as we will discuss throughout our conversations today.
A good example of this is Anthony, a Polish communications consultant who was in Belgium at the time we interviewed him.
Listen to what he had to say when asked how he personally benefited from the EU.
I think that the most important thing that the EU has done for me is giving me the ability to work and live in different countries very easily.
That meant that I was very easily able to get a degree in the UK and move there,
which opened up so many opportunities for me academically and professionally that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
So I've got another slightly tricky question, which has to do with the age period and cohort model that we're using,
at least as an inspiration for some of the analysis. So just to be frank, before working on this report, I had never heard of this model.
And I suppose we're employing it to try to make some sense of the different variables and processes that are shaping young Europeans experiences.
Can we just get a basic introduction to what this model is and what we're trying to do to this aggregate these factors?
Yes, sir. So the age period kind of model comes from demography, and it's also often referred to as the APC problem.
The three different ways you can see differences between age groups over time.
And there are three possible ways in which opinions can change over time.
So the first and the simplest is just it's called a period effect,
and it basically means that in a specific period of time, everyone might change their opinion by a little bit.
So maybe everyone becomes a bit left wing and over time.
And I think that you can definitely see this.
So you see, like every single person in Britain today on average, is a bit more liberal than they would have been in 1950.
Second thing you can have and you can have an age effect, and so over the course of your life, your opinions can change.
So this would be kind of the classic idea that you become more conservative as you get older.
And then the third possible option is a cohort effect. And this is the one that I think a lot of people most interested in, which is the idea.
And this limits to what was said earlier about defining a generation that your
cohort is obviously the people who were born around the same time as you,
that you might all share something that you carry through for your life.
And so you might think that if you're in the cohort that grew up and then we're coming
of age at the time of the Berlin Wall that might shape your attitudes for life.
And so it's I call it a problem. It can be a problem because it's actually surprisingly difficult to disentangle these because what you
can end up with is maybe an age and a period effect can actually look like a cohort effect in the data,
but we're not convinced that too much. I think we use them, at least in this report and in our chapter,
more to try and like we don't try and disentangle them in the sense of statistically pulling these apart,
but rather as ideas for what could be happening.
And so when we find, for example, the across the board, everyone seems to be pretty concerned about climate change,
we're describing that is more of a period effect in the sense that it's clearly not just the case,
that young people are being socialised to be concerned about it,
but rather this seems to have been a shift in the last 50 years towards some serious
concern about climate change and towards privatisation of tackling climate change.
And so that can't just be explained by a simple change as you get older or change because your generation,
but that's something that's happening across the board.
When we look at something like the freedom of movement and the fact that young people are much more likely to have benefited,
I mean, we can't say yet whether that's an age or a cohort effect,
but we can say that it's one of those because it's not across the board and that maybe 50 years from now,
we'll see that young people look more like our older generations do now.
Or maybe they'll actually carry that with them as a cohort effect and will actually be defined by
freedom of movement and their relationship to the EU will be defined by their experiences now and then.
One final example could be COVID pandemic, and we talk a bit about this in the chapter as well that it does seem to have affected different
generations differently by its very nature and by the response that governments have offered.
It affects you differently based on the stage of life, you ask.
So if you're already retired, the whole concern about the loss of income is going to be a lot less than if you're maybe a middle aged adult.
If you're just starting out as a student, you might just have lost a lot of experience at university.
There are also the health effects of COVID and massively specified by age.
And so we we wonder, and this is really not going to become clear for a while,
but we do wonder whether this will have some generational effects that we're going to see going forward a decade from now,
a few decades from now and how different generations think about the EU? That's wonderfully clear.
Thanks. Then I'm already learning things early on in our conversation.
Let's get a quick question on your own response to kind of applying the APC model to
our findings and whether there were specific suggestions coming out of our interviews
in our polls that surprised you in terms of assumptions about the relative weight of
these three factors that might not actually appear on the surface as they actually are.
It may be just because I'm not familiar with climate change data is debut the phone's data,
but I was really quite surprised by how many of the older generations seemed actually to be
quite in line with the younger generations and recognising that climate change is a threat.
But also the thing I really found surprising with some of the questions where we tried to probe sacrifices and we tried to say,
you know, would you be willing to have a ban on short haul flights or something like that?
And you still get like really quite surprising levels of support from people who are 50 and over?
And I think that this somewhat contradicts the narrative that you sometimes see in the media that this is sort of a young person's,
you know, it's just these kind of millennials who are following Greta Thunberg.
I think that actually, if you look at the data, I mean,
it is true there are some generational differences and young people are sometimes more concerned,
but it's really not as stratified by age as I thought it would have been.
I would say similar strands come out of our interviews. I was just looking at our statistics, so we've.
On over 200 interviews since we started in May of 2019 and 29 percent,
almost a third of the interviewees lists climate policy or climate action as kind of their main priority for Europe in 2030.
And just as Dan has spoken about in the opinion polls, but similar in the interviews.
So regardless of age, everyone is concerned about this. And I mean, you know, just a few days ago, we're in mid-August here.
So whenever this podcast is published, but early August,
the IPCC report that was released that once again drives home that climate change is a huge, huge issue that is driven by humans.
And you know, things need to be done to use passive voice and young Europeans want to know who is going to do those things.
But I think also it's Dave has mentioned middle aged and older Europeans also want to know.
So I think people that are considered, quote unquote middle aged or old now,
they were the ones in the 60s and 70s that were changing so many aspects of our society.
So I do think Dan makes a really good point that in the media, you know, that's not typically talked about.
I think the young get this reputation of activism, but I think that.
A lot of middle aged and older people, particularly in Europe,
are very concerned about climate change and I think also about, you know, keeping the EU together.
So I think it'll be interesting to see how those things evolve as we continue in the pandemic world and hopefully eventually post-pandemic world.
Yes, hopefully a very close post-pandemic world.
Yeah. The point about activism in different generations, actually so nicely into the next question I have for you.
It's kind of also goes back to something that maybe has already touched on, which is the formative moment differences between generations.
So there seems to be a period effect that helps define older generations prior to 1989.
And then the definition of the younger generations experience is much more based on the cohort effect, the personal experiences they have growing up.
Did this surprise you in any way?
For instance, did you expect that something like the financial crisis would have been more formative for this generation?
I think particularly with our interviews. I was frankly shocked that the financial crisis didn't come into play more.
And I think obviously, you know, that can speak to to some of the weaknesses in our research,
which obviously this selection of interviewees is by no means a representative sample.
You know, it's 200 people that are predominantly highly educated, pro-EU.
That's obviously a very specific subset of society.
So I think that's a really important thing to to keep in mind when reading the report and when thinking about the research findings.
But I think it's interesting to see over time, you know, three years ago, would the financial crisis have been more of a salient moment?
But now that the pandemic has created this other financial crisis, do people talk about that more?
Interestingly, COVID has been listed for us as a formative moment, a best moment and worst moment.
I think everyone has a different perspective on it, which goes back to Dan's point about how COVID will be perceived.
And indeed, a demographer who spoke with us on a webinar, John Dowd talks about how uncertain it is.
You know, how will COVID impacts different groups, different generations, different slices of life?
Again, this notion that we briefly talk about in our chapter, I think,
but people will say it's the best moment because it brought everyone to attention and we realised,
you know, how many privileges we have and how, you know, solidarity can can really come into play someone.
I think it was a Portuguese law professor that you may be interviewed said despite all the problems, the vaccine rollout was incredible.
You know, they made this vaccine to deal with this virus in a very short period of time in comparison with other places.
And even though obviously you had all kinds of problems, what would it have looked like if it were national governments managing that?
You know, would it have been even worse? Who's to know?
Right, we can't predict these things, but I think on the other hand, people obviously mentioned COVID as a worst moment.
I think it echoed a lot of the financial crisis with Italy and then later on Spain in the early days of the pandemic, suffering disproportionately.
And I think some people viewed the EU's response to that as lacklustre.
It's been interesting to see different elements coming out. And you know, we've done these interviews over two years.
Obviously, in May of 2019, we're not talking about COVID.
So seeing how answers have evolved, even just in the time that we've done the interviews, it's particularly interesting.
That law professor who may've was referring to is Miguel Politis Maduro,
a former minister for regional development in Portugal and former advocate general at the European Court of Justice.
We interviewed him during the second wave of the pandemic in early 2021.
Here is his comment on the vaccine rollout in Europe.
With all the difficulties, with all the time delay, the answer that the European Union has been able to provide to the pandemic.
If you think about the European Union has no competence in the health area and still it has managed to
provide vaccines and to support its member states in acquiring vaccines and to do it in a way that is fair,
balanced and is equal to all the member states.
We are having more access and more easier access because of the European Union, and we are being more equal,
balanced and fair accidents to citizens in all member states because we have the European Union.
Then were you surprised by the fact that what defined this generation ended up being much more personal experiences than actually a period effect?
I don't find it that surprising because as swear, there's two parts to it.
One is whether because you have to distinguish between informative and worst moments.
I mean, we ask both of those questions in interviews. And so it would be quite a bleak response to suggest that your formative moment
in the European Union was like the near collapse of the economic sector.
So I think for me, if you remove the bad stuff that hit all of Europe, there's not really a sort of fall of the Berlin Wall moment for our generation.
It's just lots of small or large conveniences.
And even with something like the financial crisis.
Your experience is quite country level, same with COVID, I mean, the restrictions vary between countries.
The vaccine rates also varied even though the procurement programme was EU wide.
And so I suppose it's maybe a surprise when the face of it, when you really think about it.
What else could that be? I mean, if climate change, if it was a real concerted effort by the EU, I could completely see that being a formative moment.
But yeah, I think the next big, formative moment that hit everyone across a generation is maybe yet to come.
And just one last question about how we define this generation.
Did it surprise you at all? Or how do you explain that this seems to be the first generation that has
formative moments is more defining than collective and historical experiences?
I think that in the sense of a collective experience, if you think about that generation that did experience 1989,
and I'm sure that people would would argue with me on this,
which is obviously welcome, but you know, is there anything in the past 30 years on an international or at least EU level that had the same impact?
I would personally argue that, probably not. And maybe that's because I'm biased by these interviews that we've had and that I've listened to.
But I think that if you look at the timing of that in the 90s was when all of the Erasmus programmes
really gained traction and people began to take advantage of freedom of movement and free travel.
So I think even just a historic sense or in a historic sense, pardon me,
it really makes sense that about 34 percent around a third similar to the climate question
less travel or Erasmus as their formative moment on the front in the fall of the Berlin Wall,
comes in after that at a much lower. I think that's from 10 percent of people list that, but I think that if you think about the past 30 years,
it's hard to identify such a drastic and common historic moment where so many people have been able to partake in travel and Erasmus.
And maybe that's the comment about the EU being able to democratise travel.
Not to say that it's accessible to everyone, but I think Erasmus made it accessible to so many more people,
whereas if you didn't exist, you'd be paying exorbitant fees to study in other countries.
And I think people are realising that now, obviously with Brexit, we've had a lot of interviewees talk about that.
So I think it is helpful to think about it also in a historic sense, if you think about the timeline of the past few years and sadly,
I think it would be so beautiful if COVID had a November 1989 moment when everyone finally could take a deep breath and say, Oh my gosh, this is over.
But obviously, as we're seeing now, that that is very unlikely to happen.
And also, I think we are something like, have you personally benefited from free movement?
And it was something like over 50 percent of people who are over 50 said no and then uses the young think the young people with something like 20,
30 percent or something said no. And there's two readings of that.
One reading is that older people just haven't had the chance to benefit, and I think that's probably feeding into that.
Partly, as you've mentioned, Erasmus also just better off today than we were 40 years ago.
So, you know, getting on a plane and going to Spain or something, is it more feasible for more young people?
Speaking countries are going to have to fight to keep it and that sort of thing.
But the second part of that is whether there's maybe also just like the older people have benefited but just haven't realised it because, you know,
it's kind of crazy that if you are like 55 and living in Europe,
if you haven't benefited from a person at all, have you just not travelled in Europe too?
Or do you just not view the ease with which you can do that as a benefit?
Or is it actually that you just didn't even count that as a personal benefit?
And that's just a different threshold? And so that might also feed in to this generational divide.
And maybe also because the ease with which you can travel in Europe has come in gradually and it's changed piece by piece.
If you're older and you've seen what's happening over time, you might not attribute the end product to the freedom of movement within Europe.
But if you're young and you try travelling to the US.
As opposed to just going and studying in a city, in a country next door, the difference is really quite stark.
One thing to add quickly, as well as the and I'm sure they'll speak about this and they do write about it in that freedom of movement chapter.
But the difference between freedom of movement and freedom of travel.
So those that have taken part in being able to go on a city break to Prague for the weekend versus young people that have been
able to work in their industry and a key area of their industry because they're able to work in Brussels or Paris or whatever.
So I think thinking about that for for older people as well that prior to to the freedom of movement, it was incredibly laborious.
And Dan makes an excellent point. I think so many of our interviewees have talked about travel not only with the EU as their formative moment,
but travelling outside of the EU and realising how frustrating it is.
We interviewed Esther Nova, a Hungarian lecturer and a writer, while she was spending a month in Portugal.
Incidentally, Esther perfectly epitomised the sentiment and freedom of movement opening up the borders.
If if you are from a country that has a recollection of closed borders, the Iron Curtain for all these visa requirements,
then you know the difference between having closed borders or open borders, isn't it Washington's zone?
And it's not just about whether your passport gets charged, it's that you're allowed to go.
You have to move somewhere, you're allowed to work there, you're allowed to experience that.
Then you don't have to tell anyone, then report to any authorities and they don't get to harass you.
So I've got a. Reflective question on what we really can say about young Europeans just to
push you both a little bit on this question of the generational differences.
So you begin this chapter with a very well-written, I must say,
historical sweep of the idea of a united Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and then these epochal events of the Berlin Wall, et cetera.
And I just can't help but wonder how much of this can really only be captured in hindsight.
Even though obviously people were experiencing those events in the moment,
but that sweep really is something that perhaps is best captured 70 years, for example, after the Second World War.
And I wonder when we're discussing the relative weight of collective versus personal experiences,
whether young Europeans might now respond that the personal weighs more heavily.
But perhaps when they are no longer young Europeans,
they will realise that what made them young Europeans was perhaps a shared experience of financial crises and austerity,
or perhaps generations see with COVID. Not that we will be able to figure that out today,
but I'm just wondering what your perspective is on that question of what we can really say
when we are young versus what we know about young people when they are no longer young,
which might be too late? Yeah, no. That's a good question.
I mean, as you say, there's a limit to what we can say because we also don't know what our older generation would have answered.
In 1950, I have a hunch that in 1950, World War Two would have been more on people's minds than personal travel experiences.
I do take the point that our young generation is definitely looking back on it.
That's a bit idealistic if there's a narrative afterwards as well. If a myth grows up about the EU working for their vaccines, I say myth.
I mean, that's true. Don't get me wrong. But if that turns into the narrative that people really imbibe,
I can definitely see that happening with the I push back slightly to the premise because there's
a sort of premise in what you said that if people are just remembering and remembering it,
in hindsight, it doesn't matter. And I think that's not true. I mean, if you have a really proud European and you identify as European,
which like 70 percent of the sample, did a thing great some or maybe even higher.
And if you if that needs you to be supportive of the European Union and its institutions, et cetera, et cetera,
it sort of doesn't matter if that's because you've got a formative moment that you've
thought about the entire time or if that moment has grown up later as part of the narrative.
But my understanding is that one of the motivators behind the whole Europe Stories project was to
try and get the kind of narratives that surround the European Union in a more Bottom-Up approach,
rather than trying to describe what the European Union is asking, how people feel about it.
And so it may well be true that in 1950, World War Two was not fought by the majority as a European moment.
But I wonder how much that makes the difference. Really interesting question, Lucas,
and I think I would bring up the idea of looking back at the past through rose coloured
glasses and remembering perhaps the very best and the very worst of the past,
however many years or in your recent memory or recent European history. As we talk about in these questions and so,
so many people in our interviews talk about either post-World War Two or post 1989 as the time when Europe was peaceful after that,
like, we don't have any memory of any conflicts in Europe. After that was clearly we passed the Yugoslav wars.
We have the troubles in Northern Ireland, like there have been plenty of instances of violence and division,
plenty of instances of, I would say, the exact opposite of peace.
In historic terms, I will say the most important moments for the European Union was the fall of the Berlin Wall,
when the Wall came down and when the challenge was how do we unite the existing western part with the eastern part?
That was for me the moment where Europe really mattered, witnessing those events and seeing young people there my age who had lived in an entirely
different world and had all these aspirations and hopes and were making change.
It was really full of hope to the youth.
Obviously, I think there's a national element to that if you weren't in Northern Ireland in the 60s,
70s, 80s, you may not have cared or known so much about what was going on.
Similar for a lot of other conflicts, if you weren't in that area at that time, social media didn't exist.
We weren't all talking about the same thing at the same time.
But I think that that is an interesting thing to consider when we think about young Europeans now.
So in 20 years, I would argue that Brexit, depending on how that works out, I'm sure in the podcast notes,
we can include the The Darren Dorf lecture from Catherine DeVries and this last May
more she talks about Brexit benchmarking and how will we know what impact Brexit had?
How can we see if they had stayed in? What would it have looked like versus, OK, be left thinking about young Europeans in 20 30 years?
I do think Brexit will be salient,
and I do think that travel will be feeling and I think because if nothing else provides a common thing to talk about.
So if you put a bunch of Europeans in a room in a bar beyond, what's the weather like, you know, what are they going to talk about?
And I think for older Europeans, and I think even in our chapter, we have a quote from a man who talks about,
you know, for my generation, a fall of the Berlin Wall is this huge, huge thing.
And I think if you put a bunch of young Europeans in a room in 20 years,
I do think that they will talk about travel if even during COVID, it was taken away.
So perhaps COVID in a way has brought to light the incredible privilege that Europeans do have in terms of movement.
When all of a sudden borders are closed and you can't go to your hometown in Italy for the weekend from your job in Brussels or Madrid or whatever.
So I think it's interesting to think about how memory works and the politics of memory.
And why do we talk about what we talk about?
Is it because it's in the media or is it because it's written in textbooks more and who are writing those textbooks and those kinds of questions?
I think that'll be interesting to see. How is the history of this moment written?
Who is it written by? And again, what will Europeans talk about in a bar in 20 years?
This is an interesting point. How do we look back on a historical moment versus the experience of living through it when it happens?
Listen to Carl Hines S.A., an Austrian composer and university professor living in Vienna.
Looking back on one of the most formative moments for Europeans who lived through the Cold War in my childhood,
Europe ended its 50 kilometres away from Vienna.
So I had that feeling I was really living at the dream of the world,
and I remember when my father made some excursions with us where he showed us the Iron Curtain and the watchtowers and the soldiers with the guns.
And if it would move too closely towards the border, they would start directing their weapons towards us.
So this was quite scary. And when the Iron Curtain fell in nineteen eighty nine,
you can't remember how relieved there was a feeling that now the road opens and the SS to reach.
It's beyond my horizon that I was not able to visit before.
I think in general, for my generation, I haven't come to this thing because this gave us the promise of a new freedom.
So far, we've talked about how this younger generation of Europeans is defined in terms of their formative moments,
the shared experiences that they have now. I think it's time to move on to what young Europeans want.
And perhaps the question I put to you at this point is how does the experiences
that apparently define this generation influence the causes they care about?
I would say it's definitely true that young Europeans seem to want action on climate change.
It also seems to be true that they want freedom of movement to remain.
And so this is from pre-COVID, so logically we would assume that they'd like it reinstated at some point fairly soon when feasible,
regardless of the climate change puts a specific one on one of the specific age differences.
The specific policies of what would you sacrifice? Tackle climate change is often where you get something more interesting,
because if you just say, should we tackle climate change, you tend to get a lot of yeses.
If you say, would you like us to ban petrol cars in the next 10 years, then you start to get some differences.
Yeah, I think actually the tension between formative moments and hopes and policy priorities for the future is really interesting for us.
I think the intersection of freedom of movement slash free travel, climate change and COVID is really interesting.
So plenty of interviewees lists experiences of travel, Erasmus, et cetera,
as their formative European moment, which we can assume involves some kind of transportation.
Hopefully, it'll be a train. Realistically, it's probably via plane, and it's probably for most a short haul flight.
So I think it's interesting to see for young Europeans, they've had this formative moment that revolves around carbon emissions, unfortunately.
And we do have a number of results on the sacrifices that they're willing to make in terms of eating meat, car usage, et cetera.
And I think COVID comes into that in understanding what the world is like without free movement.
So obviously different experiences. But going from Ireland to France, I don't know what the current regulations are,
but 1970 versus now, it would have been far easier three years ago now.
Do you need to get a negative COVID test? Do you need to quarantine for five days, et cetera, et cetera?
But I think young Europeans want to take action or on climate change,
but we haven't necessarily acknowledged the impacts that we are having on the climate.
Again, I think interviewees talk about how happy they are that they can work in Amsterdam,
even though they're from small town Spain and they can go back and forth and have that opportunity,
but still get to be with their family and then may list the climate as a main priority.
But then you think about the impact of that in terms of carbon emissions.
I'm not sure that we, as young Europeans say for the people who obviously are going to extreme and very admirable measures to address the climate.
But I don't think that we have come to terms with how to deal with that. I think a lot of young Europeans would not be willing to give up a lot of the
privileges that we have that have an incredibly bad impact on the climate.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I also I can just add in a couple of just had a quick look and I'd say to listeners,
if this is something that you find interesting about the age difference, this is definitely worth checking out reports.
And as a general rule of thumb, if we've not really talked about age differences, they weren't very big because,
you know, we're really interested in age differences that if there are big age differences, you tend to see it.
And if it's not, normally, that's because there wasn't one, but just a seven and seven examples.
The biggest difference I could find in terms of what people were willing to sacrifice was the vegetarian diets,
as you might expect, but actually quite split by age groups.
And so for people with just much less willing to accept.
I think really something like we do accept vegetarian diets being imposed in schools, the workplace or restaurants.
And over half of the old people were like, No, I had them, which I can sort of see.
But like then,
there were some surprising ones where it's really I just looked up the original graph because I couldn't believe there was no difference.
So when should the EU go carbon neutral?
So 59 percent of young Europeans said no excess emissions by 2030, and 60 percent of all Europeans said no excess emissions by 2030.
So that can not create difference. And that's basically replicated across each of the different options we gave.
And so there's just like real cross generational consensus on this major question.
And like I say, I had to stop because I was pretty sure that would have been the difference.
This seems like a simple question that we divide by age group, but really,
we're finding a lot of agreement and where we see the differences tend to be more the questions about freedom of movement.
Immigration brings out some differences personal benefits, climate change.
We really find a fair degree of consensus across age groups.
Andreas Graff, in his mid-thirties, is one of the many Europeans who expressed his concern in our interviews.
He's a German think tank manager focussed on energy transition in Europe.
When we asked what he wants the EU to have achieved by 2030. Here's what he said.
This is easy because it's the message I'm telling everyone at the moment, which is that we must rise to the challenge on climate.
And currently the European Union is being asked and the new commission elected president was up on.
The line has proposed that Europe that European Union adopts a not only the goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050,
but also increasing its ambition on 2030 to show leadership in global climate negotiations.
And we must rise to this challenge.
Just to throw some of these findings about generational common ground amongst young Europeans in the context of European institutions.
This chapter points out a number of very interesting things about how young Europeans might
relate to the EU in terms of the level of trust to combat specific issues on climate,
for example, you suggest that it's a priority.
But whether they trust the EU as an actor capable of tackling this challenge is not necessarily the case.
You also point to our March 2021 poll, in which 45 percent of respondents believe that the vaccine rollout had been handled badly.
So we have these.
I think this chapter gave me a sense of these different policy areas in which there are differential rates of trust in Europe's institutions.
But if I could kind of push you a little bit outside of what the chapter said.
Something I was left wondering at the end of it was how these different policy areas relate to each other in terms of
does your trust or mistrust of your institutions in one area affect your overall trust or your trust in other areas?
Everyone has some kind of policy priority, but most people aren't necessarily keeping tabs on all of their numbers on a checklist.
So obviously, this falls a bit outside of what we've done empirical research on.
But do you have a view on how these factors might relate?
And if not, is there interesting research that we could do in the future to get a better sense of how these different
areas relate to each other to form an overall picture of European institutions for young people?
I mean, I would definitely say so. Trust, as you point out, is not something we've really looked into.
We have to put in a fair amount to preferences about the institutions.
My conclusion from that is basically that most people don't really know or care.
Now that's that's maybe a slightly controversial thing.
But I mean, for example, we asked consecutive questions like, do you think the European Parliament's really important?
Everyone's like, Yeah, and then you say, Well, is it all secondary endpoints, the results?
And everyone's like, Yeah, I mean, I interpret that roughly as I think most people don't really know a lot about sample.
Don't know who. Actually, I have to admit I didn't know how they're embarrassing me, who gives the State of the Union address.
And I think this is part of the problem with how we approach it so far when the delimitation is,
I think at times been slightly optimistic about how much your average European.
It's going to be interested in the workings of Europe as opposed to just something very visible or just outcomes,
even if they're not that clear outcomes of a process I think is going to it's probably where most Europeans stand.
And I think there is stuff in the data say that even something like young people in
particular think that authoritarian regimes are better equipped to tackle climate change,
which I find quite shocking. But I think that suggests people are not that worried about institutions.
I think trust is a very different ballpark because when you start talking about trust,
you're talking about more of the sort of black box like, OK, you don't know what's going on and you don't really care.
But do you trust that the outcome is going to be brought about by this black box?
I think an element that comes up to when you present that image of the black box is your communications and transparency.
So I think it's it's a question of trust,
but it's also a question of understanding that if the EU isn't providing information about what it's doing for you in your own language,
are you going to trust it? Doubtful.
Or if they're not providing the same kind of information, whether we think about social media or news or whatever?
I think the relationship there with your scepticism as well.
I think that you one of their main weaknesses and perhaps from the perspective of growing up in the US,
that I didn't have you politics in my school, which I'm sure a lot of Europeans perhaps don't have either.
But to learn about you processes and how the EU functions is a task.
It's not easy to say I am a fisherman and I have a particular query to figure out what
policies are relevant to me or who I'm supposed to reach out to to speak about that.
Again, at least to me, is not clear for everyone. Obviously in certain countries, it's a different story.
But I think that probably plays a pretty significant role, and a lot of people in our interviews talk about that communication or transparency.
And I imagine in the democracy chapter in the episode about tomography,
hopefully you'll speak about the conference on the Future of Europe and the EU's efforts to involve people in communication and make
the processes more transparent that I think our authors of that chapter would argue has probably thus far failed to some extent,
but I think when thinking about trust. It's one thing if you don't trust a system because you know how it works,
it's another thing if you don't trust the system because of this black boxes, Dan said.
And is it an individual's responsibility to figure out how it works or is it a government's responsibility to include that in civic education?
Apart from forming this coherent picture of young Europeans,
I also wonder how working on this chapter shaped your coherent picture of your relationship to the identity of being a young European.
Wherever you began before working on this project, I wonder where working on this has left you?
It definitely made me realise how weird Britain is.
I mean, that's coming also from talking to other Europeans being part of this project in general,
but the experience of being young European in Britain is extremely different to the
experience of being a young European where you can get in the car and cross the border.
And so even with the freedom of movement, things, so we talked today about the trade offs.
And while can you enjoy freedom of movement if you can't take flights?
I mean, you could travel by car and by train. I'm OK.
I know that the Eurostar from Britain to Europe. But that still feels like you're going abroad.
And so I think this really. As always, it also made me realise to some extent what Brexit is not.
Totally surprising. In the same sense that I found it at the time because that small town of the water, I think,
does slightly undermine what we now know to be one of the real foundational reasons for being in the European Union for young people.
So I think that changed my understanding of kind of my own relationship and how I grew up,
and I really hadn't quite realised like, I always appreciate the European Union and slightly removed way.
I quite like that. I didn't have to queue at the airport and I didn't.
I didn't actually take advantage of Erasmus, but I knew people who had.
But it was never quite as direct as seems to come out from the interviews and from the results.
So I sort of realised to some extent that the British experience is maybe a bit a bit different.
I think for me, it probably solidified my sense of responsibility to identify as European because obviously I did not grow up in Europe,
grew up coming over summer and Christmas and whatever to to visit family, but didn't live here until after I graduated from college.
So if you had asked me, you know, as a high school or do you identify as European, I would say, Well, not really.
I didn't. I didn't grow up there. I'm not allowed to identify as European. In a sense.
I can't claim that, but I think from living over there for four or five years and through this project,
I think I have a responsibility to identify as European again,
returning to the theme of privilege in terms of movement and rights and responsibilities as a person who possesses an EU passport.
This is obviously my area of interest, but in terms of movement and the privilege to move and who has that privilege again in the sense of travel,
but also in the sense of economic well-being and personal well-being, I think about conflict and all these kinds of things.
I think this project has really solidified my sense of the privileges that are associated with being European and driven that home.
Our guests today were Dave Moynihan and Dan Snow. We're also grateful to our funders, the Swedish Nobleman Foundation,
the tights diphthong and the shift of MacArthur for making the Europe Stories project and podcast possible.
A huge thanks to our podcast editor, Billy Craigan, our research manager Luisa Mello and our report editor Professor Timothy Garton Ash.
A special thank you to Ellen Leach, said Lily Striker Mave Moynihan,
Sophie Verité and Victoria Hansel for contributing to the podcast Production Music by Unicorn Heads and Ketter.
Finally, thank you to the whole Europe Stories Project team. I'm your host, Anna Martens, and I'm your host, Lucas, to thank you for listening today.
Join us for the next episode of the Europe Stories podcast, and until then,
you can find out more about our research project at European Moments dot com.