You could say that the difference between the totalitarian regime of the 80s and today’s democratic system are so different that only someone ignorant or someone with no memory could fail to see that. And yet, only one in four high school students today thinks that life today is better than it was under the communist regime. And 21% think that life under the communism was better or the same.
These statistics come from a recent survey conducted by the People in Need foundation and by the company Millward Brown, which polled a thousand young people in high schools, training schools and apprenticeships. It is the biggest such survey examining the attitudes of the generation born after 1989. The results are without a doubt interesting: They hint at what the Czech Republic could look like in another 20 years.
Surprisingly, young Czechs today, who only experienced life in a democratic society, share many values and opinions with their parents. One of the these opinions – something that seems irrational and hard to believe – is that the communist regime had certain positive qualities. But these shared values also apply to other issues. For instance, Czechs born after 1989 have a cautious approach when it comes to the EU. And yet, this is a generation that can benefit from the Czech Republic’s EU membership in very concrete ways (more work opportunities, for example), and the abstract disadvantages (for instance, loss of autonomy) must seem even more abstract than they would for older generations.
Europe experienced several waves of rebellious youth fighting the values of their parents (in fact, even the first days of the Velvet Revolution were about students revolting against old values). In today’s Czech Republic, there is not threat of an imminent youth rebellion. Young Czechs have similar political leanings as their parents and similarly socially conservative attitudes. Unlike their western counterparts, they are not particularly opposed to globalisation. They worry about the environment (a popular issue among young people all over the world) and homelessness. Immigration is a more pressing issue for them than political corruption. And when asked about the source of the biggest problems in cities, they pointed to the Roma.
How do we interpret these results. Young Czechs are probably influenced by their parents and by conservative schooling a great deal. They don’t try very much to find their own causes, and they feel no need to prove to their parents that their corruption and outlook limited by latent racism makes it difficult to solve social problems like corruption and Romani ghettos.
In any case, the fact that 18-year olds find homelessness to be one of the biggest problems suggests that they themselves have no real problems to speak of and that they are just putting it down for the purposes of the survey. That’s a good thing, of course, but the question is how they will behave once real problems actually arrive.
