ABSTRACT
European Union (EU), Council of Europe and European Youth Forum recommendations stress the importance of youth policies and policies which support youth participation and have also launched several youth programmes and promoted cooperation in the youth field. 2001 to 2015 period has been chosen because of the importance of the year 2001 for European discourses on youth. Young people as actors in a societal sphere are depictured as almost independent from institutional relations; they are given the status of ‘stakeholders’ of youth policy. The focus is clearly placed on institutional participation – in elections of political representatives and volunteering in formal associations while neglecting informal styles of public involvement and public but seemingly a-political spaces of youth practices outside schools and the offices of official organisations. There are cross-country variations in the ‘translation’ of EU documents with the national documents tending to serve specific national youth policy agendas rather than the framework of the European institutions.
