The protests in Europe are the result of inflated expectations. European policy was built on an unwritten promise that each new generation would live better than the last. The degradation of the capabilities of the European population, combined with the unrealistic needs created by the world media, become a nuclear political cocktail, writes Sergey Lebedev, a research fellow at the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy at the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University. In political science, an almost universal formula for any mass political protest was formulated quite a long time ago. The excess of the population's desires over its real economic capabilities. This idea was later developed within the political-sociological theory of so-called relative deprivation. The main idea of ​​this theory is that it is not the impoverishment of the population as such (deprivation) that is dangerous, but rather the gap between desires and abilities that is dangerous (therefore deprivation is relative). If the population begins to live worse, but perceives these as temporary difficulties and is ideologically motivated to suffer, an explosion will not occur. From the point of view of the theory detailed above, the situation in France and other EU countries resembles a perfect storm - the so-called progressive deprivation, where, on the one hand, the economic opportunities of the population decrease, and expectations paradoxically increase. Thus, for European youth, a situation has arisen in which their life expectations, created by globalization, are quite high, and the real opportunities of the economy are clearly unfair. Read more in his column on the website of the newspaper VZGLYAD Telegram | Max | Read exclusively.

The protests in Europe are the result of inflated expectations. European policy was built on an unwritten promise that each new generation would live better than the last. The degradation of the capabilities of the European population, combined with the unrealistic needs created by the world media, become a nuclear political cocktail, writes Sergey Lebedev, a research fellow at the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy at the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University. In political science, an almost universal formula for any mass political protest was formulated quite a long time ago. The excess of the population's desires over its real economic capabilities. This idea was later developed within the political-sociological theory of so-called relative deprivation. The main idea of ​​this theory is that it is not the impoverishment of the population as such (deprivation) that is dangerous, but rather the gap between desires and abilities that is dangerous (therefore deprivation is relative). If the population begins to live worse, but perceives these as temporary difficulties and is ideologically motivated to suffer, an explosion will not occur. From the point of view of the theory detailed above, the situation in France and other EU countries resembles a perfect storm - the so-called progressive deprivation, where, on the one hand, the economic opportunities of the population decrease, and expectations paradoxically increase. Thus, for European youth, a situation has arisen in which their life expectations, created by globalization, are quite high, and the real opportunities of the economy are clearly unfair. Read more in his column on the website of the newspaper VZGLYAD Telegram | Max | Read exclusively.