Sins of the Children

Alarms have been sounded in all the foreign policy establishments of the West in response to the report that the young are less likely to accept the pieties of the postwar period and that the young with higher education are even less likely to, at least on the continent. Confidence in U.S. leadership has been down since Vietnam and hit a new low during the controversy over the installation of intermediate nuclear forces. Large numbers of West Europeans doubt a Soviet attack, do not want to be defended by the nuclear weapons of others on their own soil, are skeptical of appeals for increased defense expenditures, and not entirely believe in the peacefulness and good will of the United States. The younger they are, the more likely they are to display such attitudes, except in Britain, and the better educated they are, the more likely they are to distrust the U.S. and to oppose nuclear weapons. Whence many have concluded that the generation coming to power, which does not share the experiences of World War II and its aftermath, is not sufficiently committed to the alliance and something (usually educational and public relations efforts) must be done. This has sometimes been exaggerated into unfounded worries about anti-NATO, anti-American, neutralist, and pacifist opinions, none of which is very important in western Europe as a whole. But even many of the better informed and more sophisticated are alarmed by the drift of opinion as expressed in the polls, by the protests, and by the new politics. There are real changes in West European societies and these do have implications for politics. But we do not yet know what the implications of the long-term changes are, and the short-term effects that produced the rather shrill expressions of concern are already in decline. I will argue that the problem for policymakers is less with the successor generation than with the hard realities of geopolitics and with the Janus-faced policy and rhetoric of democratic states. In raising such questions, I must also ask how much change there has been and how much it matters to long-term trends in policy. In so doing I will argue that it is change in such things as threat and opportunity, resources and incentives that matter most to politics and will ask what change in resources and incentives can be accounted for by the changes in demography, opinion, and education which I review below

Democracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social change · Social democracy · Sociology · Successor cardinal · European Politics and Security · Law

• Brandt's children

  Stephen F Szabo•The Washington Quarterly•1984

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• Politicization of Higher Education in Britain and France

  Open Access•John S Ambler•Policy Studies Journal•1981

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