Everyday Politics and Generational Conflicts in the World Economy

Abstract

The world is getting old and so are we. Our societies are aging rapidly, presenting some new challenges to human interdependencies in both advanced and developing economies (Elias 1991). The challenges are mostly of the “everyday” variety, as I will clarify below, and can be seen as socio-economic, emotional-psychological, political, and conceptual. My aim here is to demonstrate why the emergence of intergenerational conflicts in the world economy is a topic worthy of attention to readers of International Political Sociology . The pitch is straightforward: scholars interested in international political sociology are concerned with changes in figurations of human interdependence. Intergenerational conflicts are fundamentally about changes to these figurations, with consequences for how we understand our societies, international relations, and ourselves. I suggest that what is sometimes called “process” or “processual” sociology, which focuses on figurations of human interdependence and the processes behind their evolution, provides an important boost to scholars of International Relation and International Political Economy who wish to address issues of generational change (Elias 1991; cf. Abbott 2001). Such issues are not typically handled well in fields where actors’ interests are often regarded as self-explanatory from their status as an entity (states want power, firms want profit, etc.). We can talk about “intergenerational contracts” to understand changes between generations, but such pacts are abstractions of obligations offered by one generation to another. We can easily see the violation of such a “contract” by the “Baby Boomers” generation, who took advantage of the welfare state at its peak, with stable jobs, cheaper housing, free education, easy love, and fat pensions. While there is some truth here, such a depiction paints over issues of mobility, race, stratification, and class. Demographers inform us of some general changes on how …