Българската младеж с лице към Европа
Bulgarian youth facing Europe

Summary/Abstract: While in the late 1940s the then postwar youth became a generational subject of the country's geopolitical re-orientation toward the USSR and the ,,sister nations" of Eastern Europe, today's younger generations are the collective medium of westernization. The adoption of the western cultural patterns and behavioral models is a formidable generational fact which does not depend on gender, community size, ethnic identity (e.g. young Romanies prefer to study English instead of the Romany language!), and political affiliations. Making their way into the public life are the first post-Komsomol levies, or age groups. Public developments have taken the young at a new historic distance. Young people have been making a historic breakthrough to a new mentality even though they do not have enough supporting points in the social experience and the value system of the elders, by working their way through a conflicting social reality. Such breakthrough tallies with the expressway of social development - civil society and European integration. Going along with it are such phenomena as bias, one-sidedness, favoritism, exaggeration, illusions — idealization of Europe, the dismissal of social values, mercantilism. The hopes that may unify the nation with the gradual passing of the ideologized nostalgia, are of different generational worth. Europe will remain for the elderly a symbol of prospect and anticipation, and the path to Europe will be a reality full of hardships. For the young, contrariwise, Europe will have a dual meaning - as a realistic, even if more distant, prospect for the country, and as a realistic, even if somewhat difficultly realizable, opportunity for individual integration

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