Finland’s national public broadcaster, Yle, speculated that the reason young Europeans are running riot in the streets of European cities is that their parents expect them to get an education, work, and have faith in the future, but offer them nothing in return except insecurity, expensive housing, and political hot air. And the result, according to Yle, is that young people’s belief in a better tomorrow is wavering, and rather than simply waiting for change, they are demanding it in the streets.
Consequently, many cities in France have resorted to imposing curfews to protect people and businesses. In Italy, meanwhile, the government has been forced to send hundreds of army troops to Milan to maintain order.
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Yle’s explanation of the events unfolding across Europe in recent days raises the question of why, for example, Finnish young people did not behave in the same way during the Great Famine of the late seventeenth century, when roughly a quarter or even a third of Finland’s population died of starvation, and those who survived could hardly have expected to enjoy proper meals either. Instead, hunger was staved off with pettuleipä, bread made with pine bark, rather than proper flour.
Nor did Finnish youth run riot in the 1860s, when the Finnish famine killed seven per cent of the Finnish population. One might well imagine that young people back then had even less faith in a better tomorrow than Europeans do today.
There was probably little such faith throughout the seventeenth century either, when Sweden — of which Finland was then a part — waged continuous wars across Europe, and a huge proportion of young men were conscripted into the army. In practice, this meant a very real likelihood of dying either on the battlefield or from some disease. Yet Finland remained relatively peaceful, and young people did not set fire to churches in Turku or plunder the riches of Oulu’s wealthy tar merchants.
Nor is there any need to focus on wars or times of crisis. From the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, downward social mobility was by far the most common trajectory for boys in particular. Although people generally belonged to the peasant class in the early eighteenth century, following the Great Wrath — the Russian occupation of Finland during the Great Northern War — the family farm almost invariably went to the eldest son. Younger sons therefore typically had to become farmhands or tenant farmers, unless their parents managed to marry them off as sons-in-law to a farm that had no sons of its own.
In the next generation, they moved down another rung on the social ladder. The younger sons of tenant farmers became farmhands or, particularly from the late nineteenth century onward, industrial workers and lumberjacks who felled trees with hand tools. Yet these young men did not engage in the kind of rioting we are now witnessing in France and Italy, even though everyone knew that most of them would have to spend their lives in a lower social class than their parents.
Rebellion did not break out until 1918, when the revolution in Russia created a power vacuum. Two militant organisations — the Red Guards and the White Guards — were formed to fill it. Their eventual confrontation became inevitable, at the latest, when the bourgeois-dominated Senate declared the Civil Guards to be the government’s armed forces. The Red Guard leadership could hardly accept this, and therefore embarked on a military campaign that ended disastrously for their side.
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Similar examples can be found in other European countries as well, since Finland and its young people are not — and never have been — exceptions. I therefore suspect that the current rioting by young people has some entirely different cause than their supposedly bleak prospects for the future.
One reason for this is that, in reality, people’s lives are easier today than at any other point in human history. In Europe, nobody dies of starvation, and everyone has the opportunity to improve their social standing through education, provided they have the motivation and ability to do so. Hardly anyone dies of infectious diseases either, and in Western countries, young men are no longer dragged off to war to fight for the foolish ambitions of their inbred kings or emperors.
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Finally, I would like to record here a social media post published yesterday on this subject by Heidi Hagelin, one of Finland’s leading journalists:
“This makes me quite happy. They stayed quiet for a long time, even as the future kept becoming more uncertain. A home, a job, and a future. Pretty basic things. If it feels like those things are impossible to achieve, then…”
That really left me speechless. I will therefore refrain from further comment, other than to note that the journalist later came to admit herself that she had been stupid.
Previous thoughts on the same topic:
A Forecast of Population Replacement in Western Europe
How Immigration Has Reshaped European Politics
