Much of the talk about Europe these days revolves around the return of the nation-state, the rise of identity politics and all sorts of geographical divides, north-south, east-west — trends again illustrated by Hungary’s referendum on Sunday.

What’s less explored is Europe’s generational gap: not just the differences between young and old but the way people’s expectations have mutated over time, and how that can create deep frustrations when initial hopes aren’t met. Frustrations will easily breed anti-establishment sentiment, and they can fuel the extremes.

Over the past quarter-century or so, Europeans have experienced huge transformations: the fall of the Berlin Wall, globalisation, and now the impact of migration, terrorism and illiberal forces. European ambitions that were entertained just two decades ago seem to have shrivelled, opening up a Pandora’s box of grievances. Of course, the 2008 financial crisis hasn’t helped, but economic statistics often fail to measure the gap between what citizens expected their lives to be like and what they feel they have ended up with.

A Czech friend of mine who recently returned to Prague after spending 15 years working in Asia told me how impressed he was by the improvement in living standards since the ’90s, and yet how depressing it was to see that a populist agenda had now taken hold.

A nation that spent decades behind the Iron Curtain is today a full-blown member of the European club, enjoying consumerism, better housing, better everything, its citizens no longer in the grip of a repressive police state or waiting in endless queues at food shops. Yet despite these changes there is deep frustration — which illiberal politicians are fast capitalising on.

People are obsessed with fears stoked by politicians and much of the media about the supposed threat of Muslim refugees swarming into the country. Czech president Miloš Zeman is notorious for fanning conspiracy theories about a radical Islamic takeover of Europe. None of this bears any relation to reality. But the very notion of refugees has been conflated with video images of Daesh (self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) militants chopping off heads.

Bewildered by this, my friend checked some facts: it turns out that just 131 people were granted asylum in the Czech Republic in the first half of this year — 64 of them Chinese Christians fleeing persecution.

Paranoia about refugees is now spread widely throughout the West. But something distinct seems to be at play in central Europe, and it can’t just be explained by the fact that these countries have historically had little or no experience, historically, of immigration from the global south.

The need to find scapegoats in countries that have hardly taken in any refugees draws from a particular frustration that has grown over time — that of comparing one’s life with the life enjoyed by western neighbours, not with what it was like a generation ago.

In the Czech Republic, although living standards have risen, wages and GDP per capita remain well below those of neighbouring Germany. When Czechs joined the EU in 2004, the general feeling was that the country had finally “made it”. But prosperity didn’t follow at the speed many hoped for, and people seem to think they’re still second-tier members of the EU club.

Elsewhere in Europe too, it’s not that real problems don’t exist (unemployment, corruption, growing inequalities); it’s that they are compounded by the way many people compare their current lives with what they felt entitled to expect. Paradoxically, criticism of the EU institutions sits side by side with a genuine attachment to the union. The latest Eurobarometer poll, published in June, shows 75 per cent of Czechs believe that “what brings the the citizens of the different EU member states together is more important than what separates them”.

I thought about this when reading another completely different study, carried out among French Muslims. It pointed to a perhaps comparable phenomenon of frustration. The reasons why some French Muslims feel disenfranchised are too long to list here, but the Paris-based Institut Montaigne’s recent survey also highlighted a generational gap. What first-generation migrants expected from life in France, when they moved there for work in the 1960s and 70s, is something second and third generations no longer accept as anything close to satisfying.

Half of the 28 per cent of French Muslims who say they dislike the republican model of integration are between 15 and 24 years old. This is the group, says the institute, that turns to “rigorist” Islam as a way of expressing a generational revolt. They compare their lives not to where their parents came from, but to the opportunities other French people of their age can enjoy that they are denied.

None of this may be very surprising, but because Europe seems to be cracking at the seams with all the focus on diversity, lack of inclusiveness, and dividing lines between regions, nations and communities, it’s worth stepping back a little.

What links the populist spiral in the Czech Republic (taken as just one example in Europe) and the discontent brewing among some young Muslims in France is that in both cases, the things that parents or grandparents strove for (joining the West, emigrating for jobs) no longer hold the same appeal for younger generations. The young tend to see what they don’t have (German wages, equal opportunities), whereas previous generations felt, to a degree, that they had “made it” (joining the EU, or establishing themselves in the developed world).

It’s as if, in today’s Europe, it has become much harder to cross social and economic boundaries than it was once to break out from behind the Iron Curtain, or get a migrant’s residence permit. These comparisons certainly don’t sum up everything that’s happening across the continent, but frustrations and multiple generation gaps are real — and are part of what is challenging the cohesiveness of Europe as a whole, and parts of its social fabric.

— Guardian News & Media

Natalie Nougayrède is former executive editor and managing editor of Le Monde