The Lost Generation Arrives in the Square

The Guardian's Rome desk has spent the week in Milan, and what it found there is not quite the picture the phrase 'lost generation' suggests. Its correspondents describe a square divided between young people with prospects and young people without them, between the children of the marginalised and the children of the settled, and a fringe of violence that belongs to neither. The distinction matters. A generation is not lost because it is angry; it is lost when nobody bothers to ask what it is angry about.

France 24 put the same unrest in what its guest called materialist terms: not a mood, but a set of grievances about wages, housing, school conditions and the plain arithmetic of whether a working life can still buy a decent one. That reading travels well across the continent, from the tent camps of Madrid to the blockaded schools of Rome. It also has the virtue of being answerable. A mood cannot be negotiated with; a grievance can.

The temptation, which the Guardian's Alberto Alemanno warned against, is to let the violence write the headline. He is right that each country's protesters carry distinct complaints, and that the picture of a coordinated European uprising serves precisely those who would rather govern by fear than by argument. The Guardian has separately reported how the far right moved quickly to frame the unrest as the fruit of open borders and liberal weakness. We note the speed. It suggests the frame was waiting for the footage.

What the foreign coverage cannot supply is the texture of the Italian version: how much of this anger is about work, how much about the cost of a room, how much about the feeling of being governed by people who will never need either. Those are questions for the country itself. But the world has now seen the square, and it will keep watching to learn whether anyone in it is listened to.