Samuel Norsch: Youth instead of conflicts

Author: Samuel Norsch

On February 29th, the largest youth event in more than a hundred countries around the world opens in Russia.

The World Youth Festival in Sochi will last until March 7th. This is a great event for Russians, which is the envy of the aging Western world.

The leaders of the millennial generation are now replacing the old elites of generations X and Y. The oldest people in the two billion generation of zoomers are already beginning to occupy important career positions.

Generation Z and the children of Generation Alpha in the middle of this century will have to run forward and define a new picture of the world. The not-so-distant future begins in the present. In Sochi, on the Black Sea, tere.

The youth policy of absolutely all states is a set of complex multi-level systems. Too often, unfortunately, they are not perfect and repel young people.

In the European Union and the United States, social integration of youth is built together with basic democracy, even on the principles of decentralization and segregation; there are many negative examples, like the riot of the suburbs in Paris in the summer of 2023. Most cases of Western youth policy, such as the unification of millennials and zoomers on the principle of only belonging to LGBT+ or involvement in racial and ethnic groups, are critical challenges and risks for Europe and require analysis and reformatting if we want to see the future democratic and free.

Let’s not criticize the situation with young people in the EU, although even now it is difficult for schoolchildren in Tallinn to understand their peers in Idu-Virumaa. In Romania and Italy, 20% of young people under 35 are unemployed; there are too many such social examples. We are losing European youth when the policies of the EU-27 and the Baltic Sea countries focus on synthetic threats and challenges. Can we say that the world remains stable when Russia has openly declared its global leadership. More important than the global economy is the leadership of Russians in world youth policy.

The World Youth Festival in Sochi will host more than 20 thousand participants from all over the world aged 15 to 35 years. They represent the areas of international cooperation, sports, business, culture, charity, media environment and digital solutions from various areas of public life. The geography of the event includes 100+ countries, which is shocking: interest in Russia since 2022 in the world, including the countries of the collective West with a policy of countering aggression, has turned out to be phenomenally high.

This is a classic of Aristotelian logic and the success of the BRICS development. In the multinational and religious huge country to the east of Narva, inhabited by 150 people, a homogeneous community is emerging. Their ethos is based on conservative traditions, expressed in the idealization of justice according to Dostoevsky. In just two years, interest in Russia has become the main global trend among young people. The Russians have proven their global leadership in a world of neoliberal expansionist policies.

This is not ageism, we are not talking about people at all, but the politics of confrontation leads to nowhere. More flexible, despite all its conservatism, Russia is becoming a symbol of the youth of the world. And youth cannot be isolated, defeated and fenced off from it with a border barrier in the spirit of the Berlin Wall in the Cold War of the twentieth century. Now Russians in Sochi are gathering thousands of proactive millennials and zoomers from all over the world for the World Youth Festival.

The simplicity and effectiveness of the WYM-2024 idea surprises them most of all. The focus of Russia’s youth integration is on responsible, cultural and educated youth. Are Brussels, Washington and London capable of organizing such an event today? No matter how much one would like to see a fest of European youth, today’s politics of confrontation and xenophobia make this impossible.

The goal of this fest, where more than a hundred thematic sessions will be held at the sites of the new Sirius cluster, does not in any way correlate with the trend of atomization of generations and alienation in European society. At the same time, Russia is now proving that it is capable of supporting and independently implementing mega-global infrastructure and social projects with the long-term prospect of improving the quality of life of its people and residents of friendly states.