As I was writing this review, millions of residents of Hong Kong—including, evidently, the bulk of the city’s university students—were involved in a months-long pitched battle with authorities over the future of democracy and self-rule in the territory. The 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, meanwhile, was making her way back to Sweden from New York, where she had taken her battle over the future of the planet to the United Nations, backed by what may well be the most important global youth movement since 1968.
Youth are not always at the forefront of political change, and when they are, it is not always for the better. But whenever the politics of a society shift, we are likely to find youth somewhere near the fulcrum. And yet, as Félix Krawatzek argues in his new book Youth in Regime Crisis, we have very little in the way of a systematic theory of youth in political change.
Krawatzek’s book aims to remedy this problem by turning our attention to discourse. This is not simply a methodological or evidentiary predilection, although the empirics of the book draw predominantly on a novel approach to discourse analysis (about which more later). Rather than seeing discourse as a reflection of the crisis he seeks to study, Krawatzek sees discourse as part and parcel of the crisis itself. Put more directly, a crisis of politics is a crisis of discourse. Following Arjen Boin and colleagues (“Crisis Exploitation: Political and Policy Impacts of Framing Contests,” Journal of European Public Policy 16[1], 2009), the author writes, “A crisis is a particularly forceful interpretation of events” (p. 9)—one that involves not just competing allocations of blame and hope but also a dramatic change in the way that people talk about time. Borrowing from Reinhart Koselleck (Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, [1979] 2004), Krawatzek reframes crisis in terms of Erfahrungsraum (roughly, the use of the past in the present) and Erwartungshorizont (roughly, the future as it is presently imaginable). In doing so, his conceptual point is not simply that crisis foreshortens these things, drawing them more closely into the present and speeding them up; more broadly, that foreshortening and speeding up are themselves the crux of political crisis.
In addition to explaining why we need to take discourse analysis seriously, this conceptualization makes it abundantly clear why youth is at the center both of the study and of the phenomenon of regime crisis: young people are simultaneously less beholden to the past and more beholden to the future, a fact that is discursively—and thus politically—powerful both to regime incumbents and challengers. This conceptualization also clarifies why we should use the verb form “youth is,” rather than “youth are,” because youth in this context is primarily a symbol, rather than an agglomeration of people of a particular age. Its biological and biographical boundaries are malleable and permeable, demanding interpretation and contestation by analysts and protagonists alike.
Having established this perspective, most of the rest of the book is given over to a structured case comparison that examines the place of youth—and not its role, because agency is a question for Krawatzek rather than an assumption—in four historical episodes: Weimar Germany, 1968 France, Perestroika-era Russia, and post-Soviet Russia after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. For each of these four cases—which represent two democracies and two autocracies facing crisis, as well as two cases of regime change and two of consolidation—the author collects, codes, and analyzes hundreds of contemporaneous newspaper articles from across the political spectrum, which reflect both how “youth” speaks and is spoken about.
This analysis is presented in two ways, one traditional, the other less so. Happily, many of these texts are also presented, immersing the reader in the mood of the moment. It is in these passages where the book comes most alive and where the purpose of the author’s conceptual framework is most clear.
But because endeavors of this ambition cannot easily be built on a readable sample of texts, Krawatzek develops a method of discourse network analysis. Put simply, this approach uses words as nodes and then looks to see how they are connected with one another in a corpus of texts at given periods of time. We can thus see how words and concepts cluster together—which are more “central” and which more peripheral—and the findings are indeed illustrative of the dramatic differences in the way youth was discussed in the revolutionary days of Russia from 1986 to 1991 versus the more counterrevolutionary days of Russia from 2004 to 2011.
Like all methods, it is not without its limitations. Discourse network analysis provides less granularity and makes comparison harder than do more established approaches, whether human coding based on a more nuanced framework or computer-assisted topic modeling. The choice of network analysis is evidently motivated by a desire to focus not simply on the content of discourse but also on its structure—on the position of words and concepts in relation to others. Whether gaining that focus is worth the price of lost resolution on the details of the discourse is a question that will have to be addressed by anyone who wants to take this method forward.
Unfortunately, the book’s methodological novelty somewhat overshadows its potential for theoretical innovation. That potential is, to a degree, limited by the project’s research design. In seeking to elucidate the place of youth in regime crisis, Krawatzek defines the latter as episodes in which the status quo (as embodied in an older generation) is delegitimized and in which an alternative political arrangement is present (as embodied in an external example). By this definition, all four cases do indeed rise to the level of a crisis, and we can see important divergence. In those regimes that survive the crisis and consolidate, the position of the state in the youth discourse remains hegemonic, youth is at least partially co-opted, and mobilization fragments. Where regimes fall, it is the elite that fragment, because their attempts to co-opt the youth discourse founder and the demands of “youth” become more generalized.
The structure of the comparison, however, does not allow the author to see how the place of youth in the process of crisis affects the outcome. Across all four cases, the same variable—elite cohesion—more or less determines both the degree to which the incumbent regime is able to dominate the discourse on and with youth, and the propensity of the regime to survive the crisis. Indeed, in two of the cases, France in 1968 and Russia in 2004 onward, it is difficult to argue that the regime was ever seriously threatened, specifically because elites never split.
As a result, the book does not make a full-throated causal argument about youth in regime crisis: it remains a story of place, rather than role. To be sure, there is value in this. The book amply demonstrates how much more we can learn about the process of political crisis by using youth as a lens. It adds weight to an important but underrepresented literature on the place (and role) of ideas in processes of political change, including several of the cases in this book (see, for example, Stephen E. Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia, 2010). But ultimately it does not do as much as it might to undermine elite-centric theories of politics.
