Europe’s Broken Bargain

How Europe’s Promised Prosperity Became a Political Liability

Political science has long recognized a particularly uncomfortable source of instability: people’s expectations can grow faster than their ability to satisfy them. A government may discover that improving conditions produces more demands, while an economic setback can turn yesterday’s promise of progress into today’s accusation of betrayal.

Alexis de Tocqueville explored this paradox in The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856. Studying France before its revolution, he observed that improvements could make surviving injustices increasingly intolerable. Once people could imagine a better life, conditions previously endured as inevitable became much harder to accept.

Progress changes the standard against which people judge their circumstances. A modest improvement can enlarge the horizon of what they believe is possible and, eventually, what they believe is owed to them. As the proverb observes, appetite comes with eating. Governments generally welcome the first part of this process and develop reservations about the second.

Modern political sociology approaches this problem through the concept of relative deprivation: the perception that one’s circumstances fall unfairly short of a relevant standard, accompanied by resentment or anger. That standard may be another group’s prosperity, an earlier period in one’s own life, or the future one was encouraged to expect.

James C. Davies developed a related argument in his 1962 theory of revolution. A prolonged period of improvement establishes expectations of continued progress. A subsequent reversal opens a gap between those expectations and actual circumstances. People fear losing gains they have come to regard as permanent. The political danger lies partly in that broken trajectory.

This complicates the familiar revolutionary formula in which worsening poverty automatically produces rebellion. People can endure considerable hardship when they regard it as temporary, share a convincing reason for the sacrifice, and retain confidence in eventual recovery. A comparatively prosperous society can become volatile when its members conclude that advancement has been unfairly closed to them. These are mechanisms that help explain unrest; the transition from grievance to collective action still requires its own conditions.

Viewed through this framework, Europe’s current difficulties form a particularly dangerous combination. The opportunities available to many people are narrowing while the standards against which they measure their lives remain high and, in some respects, continue to rise.

The Economy Lowers the Ceiling

Europe’s economic difficulties have a substantial material foundation. The European Central Bank’s research documents how energy shocks reduce investment, weaken purchasing power, and threaten future competitiveness, with particularly serious consequences for energy-intensive firms and businesses already facing financial constraints. The effects extend beyond the immediate utility bill. Investment postponed today can mean weaker production and fewer opportunities tomorrow.

Europe’s politically driven retreat from its energy relationship with Russia belongs in this account. The EU has deliberately reduced Russian energy imports as part of its strategic policy. My assessment is that the cost of that choice has accelerated industrial pressures that European governments were already struggling to manage. The political justification may satisfy a summit communiqué; an industrial customer still has to pay the resulting bill.

Other structural pressures operate across advanced economies, including changing labor markets and the rising cost of establishing an independent household. OECD research identifies housing affordability as a major obstacle for young adults in many countries. European policymakers therefore inherited genuine difficulties. Their responsibility concerns how much their own decisions have added to them.

The generational consequences are becoming politically significant. In Pew Research Center’s survey published in January 2025, roughly three-quarters or more of respondents in France, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom expected children to become financially worse off than their parents. That finding measures expectations. For an argument about political confidence, expectations are precisely the point.

A young person can understand that economic conditions change. Accepting that explanation becomes harder when education, work, and patience were presented as dependable routes to security, and those routes now appear to lead toward an expensive rented room and another temporary contract.

The disappointment concerns the apparent reliability of the social bargain. A society that has encouraged people to organize their lives around upward mobility assumes a substantial obligation when it asks them to lower their ambitions.

The Screen Raises the Standard

Economic opportunities and personal expectations follow different schedules. A factory can reduce its workforce immediately. People’s understanding of the life they should be able to build adjusts more slowly.

Digital media adds another source of pressure. Carefully selected images of wealth enlarge the circle of comparison far beyond the neighborhood, workplace, or family. A person can spend hours encountering exceptional lifestyles presented with the reassuring informality of ordinary daily experience.

The yacht is apparently routine. So are the overseas apartment, the perpetual holiday, and the discovery that everyone else has somehow become financially independent before thirty.

Research provides evidence for the psychological mechanism. A 2025 study using surveys and experiments found that exposure to displays of wealth on social media could increase feelings of relative deprivation through upward comparison. Its participants were recruited in China, and its findings concern individual responses. Applying that mechanism to European political unrest remains an analytical inference requiring further evidence.

The inference is nevertheless worth examining. A recommendation feed can repeatedly place extraordinary consumption before a viewer until it begins to resemble the normal condition of everyone outside the viewer’s own life. The comparison is made against a selection of other people’s most impressive moments, with the financing and disappointments discreetly outside the frame.

For young Europeans facing constrained prospects, two standards can then operate simultaneously. Their parents’ lives supply an attainable-looking past. Digital platforms supply an extravagant present apparently enjoyed elsewhere. Their own future must somehow compete with both.

The resulting frustration can be especially intense where ordinary aspirations have already become difficult to fulfill. A private yacht may provoke envy. An unaffordable first apartment raises a more serious question about whether work and effort still provide a credible route to independence.

This is where the argument about expectations acquires political substance. Conspicuous wealth becomes more inflammatory when people encounter convincing evidence that the ordinary routes to advancement are narrowing.

When Education Stops Looking Like a Way Out

The controversy around France’s Parcoursup admissions system illustrates the importance of perceived opportunity. Students participating in the current protests have criticized its selection procedures and unequal access, alongside demands for more teachers, better facilities, and improved learning conditions. Their concerns reach directly into the institutions expected to connect effort with a future.

Parcoursup’s actual rules vary by program. Geographic priority applies to certain courses, and institutions assess applications using their own published criteria. The use of an applicant’s secondary school as a selection factor has also drawn scrutiny: France’s Défenseur des droits warned that such practices could become discriminatory when they disadvantage applicants because of where their school is located.

For a student from an economically depressed area, the political significance is immediate. A system presented as a route to mobility may appear to reproduce disadvantages already attached to family circumstances, school reputation, and geography.

At that point, an admissions decision can acquire a meaning far beyond the allocation of a university place. It can look like confirmation that the future has already been distributed.

Governments can ask citizens for patience when there is a credible explanation of what patience will achieve. That becomes much harder when institutions seem to convert an unfavorable starting position into a lasting one. In political terms, hope has a practical content: a visible route through which effort can improve a person’s circumstances.

A system may ration access to its most desirable opportunities. It takes a greater risk when people conclude that access has been reserved in advance.

The Appeal of Switching Off the Problem

Reports that the French government considered restricting access to social-media platforms during the October unrest show how quickly attention can shift from grievances to the channels through which they circulate. The discussion focuses on coordination, imitation, and the spread of images that may encourage further disorder.

That addresses one part of the problem. The deeper argument concerns the accumulation of frustration before a demonstration begins. The same digital environment that carries footage of a burning vehicle also supplies the comparisons through which people evaluate their own status, opportunities, and exclusion.

A platform restriction might interfere with the circulation of an incident. The rejected application, unaffordable rent, and uncertain employment would remain available for inspection without an internet connection.