Generation Europe

The beer is starting to spill in the lobby of La Bouche á L’Oreille — Word of Mouth — a crowded, kitschy sometime nightclub on a lonely block in Brussels. It’s Saturday night, there’s a DJ in the next room, and conversations are taking place in three languages at once. This is a party for past and present E.U. stagiaires, or interns — well-bred 20-somethings from across the Continent who come to Brussels as much to meet their equally cultured peers as to learn the intricacies of E.U. bureaucracy. Near the bar, Genevra Forwood, 24 years old and a few drinks in, chats in English and French with a gaggle of friends. Forwood’s contradictions are typical of her cohort. She has a master’s degree but “no idea what I want to do long term.” She holds a British passport but has spent most of her life in Belgium, with a stint in Mexico. “When I go to England I feel very weird,” she says. “I look around and think, who are these people? But the French are still the French, and the English are still English. Nothing will ever change. In Brussels, people speak three, four, five languages, so you don’t think about anyone’s nationality.” She sighs and sips her drink. “But Brussels is not Europe.”

Not yet, at least. Most young Europeans think Brussels — which is to say, the E.U. and its institutions — represents nothing so much as gray-suited bureaucrats and cumbersome regulations. And yet while the political idea of Brussels leaves Europeans cold, the experiment it represents is already a reality for an entire generation. And in that sense, the rest of Europe is starting to resemble Brussels more than it thinks. The polyglot, Continental crowd at the Brussels stagiaire party was hardly unique: on any given evening, a similar scene could unfold in the Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, or the Canal St.-Martin in Paris, or the Docas district in Lisbon, or the clubs in Vienna’s Bermuda Dreieck.

The reason is simple: a generation is on the move. In burgeoning numbers and with astounding ease, young adults in Europe are hurdling national barriers, dumping old routines and abandoning traditional career choices in search of their own, highly personalized, custom-made paths to happiness. And for many, that means leading peripatetic, borderless lives that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. All of this is forming the basis for a common European identity in which national and regional ties co-exist with a new and still evolving ésprit de Europe.

Says Michael Gillespie, 26, the head of international research at Informer Brand Development in London: “In terms of outlook and attitudes toward life, there are a lot of shared values among young Europeans. It has to do with a sense of being tolerant and open, and a willingness to try new things.” It’s no longer unusual for someone like the French novelist Frédéric Biegbeder, 35, to profess little desire to leave France but also “feel totally European. And that means I don’t give a damn about France. I go along with John Lennon: ‘Imagine there’s no countries.’ “

And as Lennon might assure Biegbeder, he’s not the only one. A Time poll of 1,225 people between the ages of 21 and 35 in Germany, France, Italy and Britain found that a majority of young adults still identify themselves with their native countries. But close to one-third prefer to call themselves European; in Italy, the number is over 40%. And there are countless others who have tried on so many identities that they simply won’t — or can’t — choose among them.

Paula Romero, 29, was born in Spain, has an English husband and lives in Brussels, where she is pursuing an arts degree at a Belgian university. “A true European is someone who doesn’t feel his or her culture is the only thing in town,” she says. “Just one culture is not enough these days.” Catherine Rubbens, 34, an environmental consultant in London who left the Netherlands after high school, speaks five European languages and says she feels more European than Dutch. “I notice as I start to adjust somewhere that I speak to myself in the language of that place.” Rubbens belongs to a distinct class of young Europeans: mobile, multilingual professionals who live, work and play outside their native countries and who bounce across borders — for business or pleasure. To be sure, the advent of such transplants is far from widespread: in 1999, fewer than 2% of E.U. citizens aged 21 to 35 worked in other E.U. countries. But those who do find their sense of belonging transformed. Swiss-born Alexandre Stucki, 28, a European equities fund manager in London, travels twice a week to various cities in Europe and visits his girlfriend in Paris on the weekends. “I feel very much European,” he says. “It’s a big word, but I don’t understand the future of borders and the definition of a nation.”

Of course, you don’t have to look far to find groups of Europeans — Austrian neo-Nazis, Serbian warlords, ethnic Albanian guerillas, English football hooligans — who still cling to more restrictive, and virulent, notions of identity and nationhood. But for just as many, such boundaries no longer signify anything. Sascha Pichler, 27, was born in Salzburg, Austria to parents of Austrian, Czech, Russian and Serb descent. She spent her childhood in Malaysia, the U.S., Portugal and Germany. After earning degrees from Oxford and the London School of Economics, she moved to Brussels. She rarely sits still: since January she has been to Paris, London, Nice, Milan and Vienna. “It’s so automatic. You forget you’re abroad and have to pay in a different currency,” she says. “Your identity is constantly in question and you feel disoriented. It’s unsettling but enriching at the same time.”

Europe has long had its share of cosmopolitan globe-hoppers such as Pichler. But now, even those who don’t fit into the go-anywhere jet set can now lay claim to a more expansive world. The ease of travel, the advances in communications technology, the ubiquity of multinational brand names, the interdependence of the global economy — all have served to provide young adults with a set of mutual experiences, attitudes and cultural cues. In a Continent where 83% of young West European adults carry mobile phones, this generation’s lingua franca is the text message. Europe’s nightclubs have made icons out of DJs who spin in different European cities every week, trailed by a transnational community of fans. “There are stronger communions that cut across national identity,” says Eric Tong-Cuong, the founder of the French record company Naive. Events like London’s Notting Hill Carnival and the Love Parade, the annual three-day outdoor rave in Berlin, have become massive pan-European parties. “Our generation functions tribally but you can belong to several tribes at the same time.”

On one recent Friday night, a characteristically polyglot buzz filled the air in a Brussels pub. But at once a hush fell over the patrons, interrupted finally by a gale of laughter. Every person in the bar had turned to watch the British comedian Ali G on television. And they got all the jokes.

Some young Europeans see a downside to all this cultural convergence: it often feels like homogenization. Paola La Falce, 34, an Italian who works for Universal Music in Paris, recalls her first trip to the U.K. 15 years ago: “It was incredibly different from where I came from. But now the center of London is just like the center of Milan — it’s the same Gap and Levis stores. I’m nostalgic for that period when you really felt like you were somewhere else. I’m all for a united Europe, but I think we’re losing something at the same time.” That ambivalence about the momentum of European integration — and in a larger sense, globalization — is widely felt. Young adults in all four countries surveyed by Time said they believed that by 2010 the balance of political power in Europe will tilt toward the European Parliament and away from national governments — to an extent greater than they would prefer.

So does this mean the European project is in trouble? Not necessarily. They may not entirely approve, but most 21- to 35-year-olds expect federal bodies to hold more power than national legislatures within 10 years. So for them, the argument is already settled. “For this younger generation, the E.U. is something taken for granted and not a cause,” says Mark Leonard, 26, the director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a London think tank. “Our parents’ generation experienced Europe pulling itself to pieces and lived with the constant threat of war. Now you don’t need to focus on why the E.U. was set up in the first place.”

That has some advantages. Europeans in their 20s retain only hazy memories of the ideological struggle that divided Europe for 50 years. As a result, many young adults in the E.U. tend to be enthusiastic about extending membership to Eastern and Central European countries. Says Sara Priem, 24, president of the Young European Movement, a British pro-Europe grassroots group: “It’s one of those issues that’s easy to be strong on because everyone agrees with it. The Berlin Wall came down when we were 10 or 11, so for us those in the east are part of Europe. There’s no divide in our heads.”

No one has benefited more from the steady erosion of that divide than those who lived on the other side. “Growing up in Hungary, you tended to think of Westerners as better than you were, but that feeling of inferiority has been overcome,” says Balint Nemeth, 24, a Budapest native and student at the London School of Economics. “You don’t feel you have to prove anything anymore.”

Perhaps nowhere has technology made a more dramatic impact: Nemeth marvels that his friends in Hungary are “miles ahead of me in their familiarity with technology: they know how to surf the Web on their mobile phones and download all the music files they want. It’s truly breaking down barriers.” Czech teenagers today are as adept with wap phones and Sony PlayStations as their Western counterparts. Meanwhile, gearheads like Lubos Lavicka, a 36-year-old from Broumov in the Czech Republic, find that getting a job in Western Europe has never been easier, or more lucrative. His starting salary at a Munich software company will be upwards of $50,000. In the Czech Republic he made around $8,000.

That money gap raises fears that some talented East Europeans who leave for the West will never return. But even the most inveterate nomads, like Bilana Raeva, a 27-year-old Bulgarian who just completed an internship with the European Commission in Brussels, profess a desire to return home someday. “I feel at home everywhere, but when I go back to Bulgaria now, I feel like a tourist,” says Raeva, who has already lived in Poland, the Netherlands and Spain. “But of course I’d like to go back. I want my kids to grow up in my country.”

At the same time, nationalism is on the wane among the young professional cadre in Eastern and Central Europe. But that’s good news for supporters of expansion. “I don’t feel any national belonging,” says Gabriela Novotna, 28, a lawyer in Prague. “We are all people living in Europe. It’s all the same to me if somebody is German, French, Vietnamese or Chinese.” She, for one, has no reservations about the E.U.: “The European Union will bring light into our lives.”

Some researchers say the collapse of communism has also changed the way young adults throughout Europe, East and West, organize their lives and imagine their careers. Stefan Baumann, a manager of the Hamburg-based Trend Bureau, says that the disappearance of “an alternative to capitalism” has made the “primacy of the economy” the governing principle of their lives. Politics and ideology consumed their parents, but Europe’s young professionals are now more likely to invest their jobs with social significance.

“Today’s workers see work as a way to put their values into practice — where you work has become something of a political choice,” says Richard Reeves, director of futures at the Industrial Society, a U.K. think tank. “For this generation, which box you put your ballot in on election day may matter less than which desk you put your butt behind every day.”

With unemployment for 21- to 35-year-olds in the E.U. at 11% as of 1999 — compared to the overall jobless rate of 9.2% — anxiety about getting and keeping any job at all remains high: in the Time poll, 42% of respondents cited unemployment as their chief concern for the future. But young workers today are also better prepared to handle uncertainty. Indeed, in the new economy they embrace it. “My dad worked at BNP all his life. For my generation, the trend is to change jobs frequently,” says Benoit Cacheux, 26, a French native who works for a Web design agency in London. “There are so many companies starting up that it creates an energy that makes people want to change.”

Francesco Quaranta, an account manager at an Internet consulting firm in Turin, is in his third job at the age of 30, and it won’t be his last. “I don’t ask myself where do I want to work, but what I want to do and who I want to be,” he says. “How many jobs more? One, none or one thousand, depending on how long it takes me to feel that I got it.”

Like those other mainstays of European life — political parties, labor unions, marriage, church — the organization man is fast turning quaint. “The key thing,” says Matteo Costantini, 25, an online journalist in Milan, “is that you believe not only in the company but especially in yourself.” And so many are abandoning the corporate track altogether. Eide Dücker, 32, a former sales manager at Hugo Boss, is now trying to raise $2.5 million to open an indoor rock-climbing center in Berlin. “I didn’t want to deal with office politics and be dependent on people who are not necessarily competent,” he says. “When I work, it’s part of my life. I don’t want just something that gives me a salary.”

Even for Europe’s new class of individualists, money isn’t everything. The Frenchman Guillaume Burucoa, for instance, makes six figures a year as a corporate vice president at J.P. Morgan in London, but his dream is to become a “remote interior designer” and open a seaside restaurant. “If I can travel and pay the bills, I’m happy. I don’t need to pile up millions.” Easy, perhaps, for an investment banker to say. But unlike their American counterparts, few young adults in Europe spend waking hours monitoring the size of their stock portfolios. Instead, they are more concerned with maintaining balance, cultivating personal ties, appreciating leisure.

Claire Power, 24, a native of Ireland and former stagiaire in Brussels, is currently looking for work, but salary seems the last thing on her mind. “I think I can do lots of things and do them well,” she says. “But what’s important to me is having financial independence from my parents and a good lifestyle — which simply means being able to go out and enjoy myself and be with my friends.” Adriano Rossi, an Italian who works as a banker in London, says that many friends who left Italy to pursue international careers eventually want to move back “because of quality of life, family and a generally more comfortable lifestyle.” He’s among them. “What is an evening in Trastevere worth?” he asks. “Or a weekend at the beach in Gaeta?”

It’s possible that nothing binds young adults to each other so much as a common quest for the good life, and the belief that you can find it in Europe.

To people like Emma Achilli, 30, who was born in the U.K. to British and Italian parents and now works as a consultant in Brussels, the good life means “you go to Spain for an all-night party, to England to drink, to Italy for sing-songs and fine food.” For Igor Karpatechev, a 30-year-old Russian now doing graduate studies in Paris, the singular charms of Europe reside in “the flavor of the old châteaux, and all those books and museums. The Americans only live in the present and the future, but Europeans also live in the past.”

As time goes on, the desire of young Europeans to pursue those ideals — in essence, the desire for a high quality of life — could have broader implications, strengthening support for the idea that such common aspirations can be realized through pan-European cooperation. Expanding access to the good life, for instance, depends on the preservation of Europe’s open market and the easy availability of such delights as French wine, Belgian beer, Italian pasta and Spanish beaches. And in Time’s poll of 21- to 35-year-olds, 56% cited the environment, global warming and pollution as their chief long-term concern, and 40% named crime and drugs.

That too reflects the primacy this generation places on the quality of life, and their determination to protect the components of it: safe streets, clean water, fresh air. Those also happen to be the kind of social problems that are best tackled on a supranational level. “European institutions have to show that they can deal with the challenges that are bigger than individual countries,” says Mark Leonard. “But they also have to be seen to embody the exciting things about European identity.”

And if politicians want to glimpse the excitement of this generation, they might try venturing into some buzzy European neighborhood on a Saturday night in Paris or Stockholm or Prague. Or, for that matter, in Brussels.

They might have to be patient, though: at the stagiaire party at La Bouche á L’Oreille, the attendees spent much of the night schmoozing in the lobby, shouting over the house music booming from the speakers in the makeshift dance hall. Some people stood in between the two rooms, trying to groove to the beat and still carry on their conversations. At midnight the dance floor was still empty, and the party organizers wondered whether they had hired the wrong DJ. But by two in the morning, the lobby began to clear and the multilingual din subsided. In true European fashion, it was only after a lot of talk that the crowd was ready to come together. But eventually all of the partygoers made it out on to the floor, happy to lose themselves in the music and dance the night away.