ABSTRACT
Looking across the whole of the European Union (EU), we can see paradoxical trends toward both convergence and divergence with respect to young people. On the one hand, the tendency toward convergence is encouraged by, for example, the effects of globalized tendencies in education, the labor market and the harmonization of social and economic policies through the EU, the EU accession negotiations and benchmarking. The tendency toward divergence, on the other hand, is encouraged by the range of different welfare, family and gender regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1996; Gallie and Paugam, 1999), and is now further diversified by the inclusion of ten new member states (NMS) and two candidate countries (CCs), Romania and Bulgaria, which are themselves rather diversified, as well as having traditions of welfare, family and gender regimes that differ from those of the EU (Haas et al., 2004). The contrasts among different populations across Europe, for example in terms of wealth and poverty, is now even wider than in the United States, despite Europeans generally priding themselves on their ‘European social model.’ Hence, we now have countries where many people live at subsistence level and others have a very high standard of living.
