WESTERN EUROPE: The New Breed

All over Western Europe, tanned, crew-cut boys and golden girls in ponytails reluctantly faced up last week to the end of the prodigal summer, began settling back into the familiar patterns of work, family and school. Listening to their nostalgic tales of Stockholm love affairs, or bikini-and-bistro living on Spain’s Costa Brava, their elders brooded over the appalling deficiencies of Europe’s younger generation. To Britain’s Arthur Koestler, they seemed “earnest, bland, sober … a generation without profile, whose typical gesture is a great silent shrug.” In Germany, a Volkswagen personnel man remarked with distaste: “By 19, most of them are satisfied little bourgeois.” But the most plaintive and perceptive lament came from a parent in Denmark: “I sometimes wonder if our youngsters know they are Danish at all.”

Adults may disapprove, but today’s young Western Europeans, from 25 on down, represent something new and promising on the crosspatch old face of the Continent. Growing up in the aftermath of World War II, they have scant interest in the traditional rivalries that fueled it, are subtly but surely moving toward a common European mentality.

Contagious Tastes. The crumbling of the old national barriers is neither a conscious nor idealistic process. Says a cynical Parisienne: “If the whole youth of Europe was told, ‘You are a unity from the Elbe to the Atlantic,’ its answer would be, ‘We could not care less.’ ” Yet, in practice, young Europeans recognize their kinship. “Wherever I go in Western Europe,” says a Berlin physics student, “I feel as if we all have the same blood group. We don’t really have to bother to get acquainted, because there’s nothing strange about anybody’s life or ways. We can get right down to the fine points, like which drinks, dances and music we prefer.”

Most of today’s young Europeans prefer the same drinks, dances and music. When French teen-agers began wearing black stockings, it was not long before Oxford undergraduettes and Düsseldorf schoolgirls were sable-calved too. German youth has developed a taste for soft French and Italian cheeses. And all over Western Europe this summer, the popular song was Petite Fleur—composed by a New Orleans clarinetist, recorded by a British jazz band, and bestselling in Germany.

“Our Americans.” Mingling on the dance floor of the Whisky a Gogo at Cannes or in a bull session at the University of Geneva (where less than half the students are Swiss), the new Europeans look alike, regardless of nationality. And they look quite unlike their parents. Middle-aged Germans, with a mixture of pride and apprehension, refer to their long-legged, Levi-clad kids as “our young Americans.” It is an apt description; today, for the first time in Europe’s history, young Europeans, like young Americans, have a continent for a playground and the money in their pockets to explore and enjoy it.

Freed from the struggle for bare subsistence by Europe’s prosperity and largely freed from the rigmarole of passports —only an identity card is necessary to move from one Common Market country to another—the new breed skims all over Europe. By thumb, motorscooter or car, with only license plates or a hitchhiker’s occasional flag to betray their nationalities, they flock to places such as Avignon, where two months ago youths of six nations joined in an amateur theatrical festival that drew 12,000 youngsters. Putting up in youth hostels (French hostels last summer housed 500,000 guests) or pitching their tents au pair in public camp sites (the Swiss played host to 250,000 campers in 1959), young Europeans go, go, go. Western Europe’s tourist officials estimate that the summer’s youthful transients included 5,000 Norwegians, 10,000 Swedes, 55,000 Belgians, 250,000 Dutch and uncounted millions of French and West Germans.

The Good Life. Except for the juvenile-delinquent fringe that plagues every European nation—Britain’s Teddy boys, France’s Blousons Noirs, Germany’s Halbstarken—Europe’s footloose young find that they share the same, surprisingly conservative hopes and values. Increasingly, they are turning to religion: half of West Germany’s kids claim to go to church every week; last year some 19,000 boys and girls made a pilgrimage on foot from Paris to Chartres. But the overriding aspirations of the new generation were summed up by a Hamburg lad whose teacher ordered him to produce a theme on “What I Would Like to Do When I Grow Up.” Wrote he: “When I grow up, I will work for the railroad and get married. I will live comfortably with my wife in a three-room apartment. I want at least one child. I would go to the movies with my wife and visit my old school chums and talk over old times.”

No Interest. The unity of young Europeans follows the pattern of national change in Europe today. The establishment of a supranational European state is of no more interest to Europe’s kids than to their governments, and European political parties have never had so tough a time winning young recruits. In West Germany, 62% of the young people say they have no interest in politics. In Sweden, a girl admitted: “I joined the Social Democratic club because they had dances once a week. Who cares about their silly old discussions?”

Young Britons, whose country remains stubbornly outside the Common Market and who do not feel other young Europeans’ enthusiasm for the Continent’s growing economic unity, share least of all in the emerging “European personality.” And everywhere healthy patriotism survives: Frenchmen will brook criticism of the Fourth Republic but not of French wine; Dutchmen will plug raw herring while condemning snails; and Spaniards defend the virtues of their cloistered women while whooping it up in Scandinavia. Explained an Italian engineering student last week: “Patriotism still exists, but not along antagonistic lines. Patriotism and Europeanism can coexist. Nationalism and Europeanism cannot.”