Youth-led Approaches to Tackling Polarisation in Europe

Polarisation has become one of the key challenges affecting many European countries. The ability to find common ground has reduced, and instead extreme politics has driven apart communities and helped to cause a collapse in trust in society.

On March 15, a group of leaders from the Obama Foundation’s Europe programme hosted a roundtable with young leaders from 10 countries across the continent to discuss the ways in which polarisation has affected their communities, and share ideas for strategies that could help tackle the problem.

The Obama Foundation’s mission to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world, with a particular focus on the next generation of leaders. Joining the roundtable was a group of political and government leaders, including Hungarian MEP Anna Donáth, UK Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister for Young People and Voter Engagement Cat Smith, the US Director for Human Rights and Civil Society at the National Security Council Jesse Bernstein, and Ben Rhodes, the bestselling author and former Deputy National Security Advisory under President Barack Obama.

The young leaders highlighted several factors driving polarisation in their countries and what some of the approaches could be to tackle the problem:

• The education system has not been effective at teaching students how to address polarisation in their communities, and how to bring people of differing views together. School programmes could be designed to address this gap, and also bring a stronger human rights perspective to young people.
• Social media has become one of the key drivers of polarisation, especially as a vehicle for misinformation online and the impact of algorithms that direct people towards more divisive content, including conspiracy theories. Technology companies could be better held to account for the polarising impact they have and benefit from, and support is needed for local media that is often less divisive.
• Political parties have often been intolerant of people with different viewpoints and have too often put up barriers to young people wanting to get involved to make positive change in their communities. There should be better pathways for young people into politics.
• The link between grassroots civil society and politics is often not strong enough, meaning that leaders in civil society who could improve politics do not join, and political leaders are not in touch enough with community leaders. Civil society and activism is often the only route for people and communities who are excluded or prevented from joining party politics.
• Increasing economic inequality has helped create further division and polarisation, and can lead to blaming of immigrant communities even in schools.
• Decision-making in government is too closed, and young people too often lack the opportunities to influence decisions based on their experience of how to tackle polarisation. There needs to be more formal opportunities for young people to influence government decisions, which would help build trust in government.

These trends were recognised by the political and government leaders at the roundtable, who were all keen for more opportunities to engage with young leaders directly on the topic of polarisation. There was strong agreement that given the powerful political forces in many European countries that seek to divide society, there is huge value in providing space for cross-county exchanges of ideas and approaches that seek to do the opposite.

The way out of division and intolerance must start with holding those in power accountable for fuelling polarisation. While this work should not fall on the people and communities who are subject to marginalisation and discrimination, the rest of us should think about what we could all do to change the us vs them dynamic. First, in ourselves and then maybe with our proverbial uncle as well.

Authors: Peymana Assad, Andrej Nosov, Ahmed Abdirahman, Fanny Hidvégi and Joe Powell are part of the Obama Leaders: Europe program.