Global Youth: The Great Divide 

Julie Webber 
  

Introduction 

…in relation to the traffic in children, working-class parents have assumed characteristics that are truly revolting and thoroughly like slave-dealing. But the pharisaical capitalist…denounces this bestiality which he himself creates, perpetuates and exploits.  

     —Karl Marx  

1.1 This paper will examine the growing divisions in world politics created by global capitalism as it applies to youth in both "first" and "third" world areas. It is important, I argue, that we rethink the categories used to describe youth in the global marketplace since the conceptual containers by which we have previously understood their subjectivity, role in the economy and polity, and relationship to the generations that mediate access to power and wealth in the world economy have shifted almost imperceptibly. The "great divide" does not gesture toward apprehending the haves and have-nots that political economy uses to describe winners and losers in a competitive market, but rather provides a starting point for understanding how youth are valued or devalued as a resource in a shrinking marketplace. For example, youth in eastern Europe have vanished from the world radar screen while scholars debate whether or not these areas should now be designated as "third world," while youth in sub-Saharan Africa are examples to be avoided, except when referencing the good life provided to youth in the "first" world. This paper will examine how youth are mobilized in political discourse on economic and social matters to obscure newly emerging patterns of wealth and depravity unlike those captured under traditional IPE (International Political Economy) categories.  

The Commodification of Youth 

The geographical differences in the global economy are not signs of the co-presence of different stages of development but lines of the new global hierarchy of production. 

—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 288) 

2.1 Youth are officially commodities under the global proliferation of libidinal desires unleashed by our post-industrial, post-fordist conception of production. Hardt and Negri (2000) have claimed that we should view production as bio-political, deconstructing the boundary between public and private life and inorganic property in order to apprehend the "non-place of world production where labor is exploited" (359). But this labor is not a reified category. The majority of world workers are now young people aged 14-18, mostly in the global South and East—that is, primarily outside the global North, with the exception of zones of exploitation created for immigrant and poor workers in the Northern cities. Some scholars and development practitioners have written about global youth as an affective category; its own zone of depravity where adult bad conscience swoons. For example, it is almost impossible to get a grant to revive public schools or after-school care and activities in Chicago without mentioning how the money will go towards understanding school violence, whether there is any or not. Further, there is widespread acknowledgment that young people should now have a voice in any given progressive global enterprise from the United Nation's youth programs to campaigns against domestic violence and sexual assault. Everyone wants young people "involved" in social processes aimed at restoring responsibility, with little or no rationale for their inclusion. Is it because they follow the media and advertising and have found the youth market profitable? Or, is it because youth truly need representation in world affairs as they are the ones primarily affected by the worst aspects of them from child soldiering, to prostitution, to forced labor? Adults are represented in the media as agents of inclusion, making sure that youth are represented in this or that global forum, but it is unclear that youth voices will be included in policy-relevant solutions. 

2.2 Youth, for some reason, have carried great political currency in any given time period in history, but now it seems as if they are even more valuable in a strictly political economic manner. They have always been necessary for thinking about the "nation" or the "future," but in a global frame youth take on new significance that is not directly linked to progress or temporal shifts in cultures (youth as rebels pushing the culture forward, resisting), or even for providing the behaviors necessary to decide by contrast what the adult is, but now youth are socio-economic categories to be studied for the success of their inclusion or productivity in fixing major global issues. Or, is it, as Hannah Arendt (1959/2000) once noted, that adults secretly transfer the emotional and political labor necessary to realize their own political fantasies onto children. As she wrote concerning the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas: 

The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought in the schoolyards? (236)

2.3 Why the occlusion of boundaries and devolution of responsibilities to young people? Symptomatically then, by looking at how global youth are contained, described, and exported or imported on the global market we can see how [adult] libidinal and economic desire is structured and transfer the analysis back to a coherent description of the unwritten policy that structures "we" enshrined in the "pharisaical capitalist mindset" that Marx described. In other words, we can see how "youth" is a category through which the economic future of nation-states, armies, and corporations is deployed for profit in a shrinking global marketplace. Now we can begin to understand the kind of exploitative attitude (for exploitation is always hidden beneath rhetoric, ideology, and policy) in the adult population at large that supports this deployment. As Hardt and Negri (2000) also claim in the quote above, and I think rightly so, we must not think in terms of nations or worlds any longer when thinking of youth for they are not circulated in that fashion in the global marketplace; they are not contained to a model of development. There is no governance structure there to hold them in cultural or societal containers as they test boundaries and push history forward; this is an old way of thinking that is part of modernity, not postmodernity. For, underneath all the blustering about children's needs, the blessed category of the "girl child" in United Nations policy, putting children first, etc., there is an enormous mocking of these claims in reality. This is a progress narrative that the global economy can no longer fulfill, and has no interest in doing so. In an effort to move past my previous efforts to rethink resistance by students in schools, I want to look primarily at the way in which youth are captured beyond the nation-state under globalization.   

2.4 Amidst the fervor (in report after report) surrounding non-compliance by States on conventions such as the Rights of the Child (1989) (which originated with the League of Nations following the horrors and mass orphanhood created by World War I, or even CEDAW (Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1979), which includes the girl child in its articles as a specific category (which is important), it seems as if a reader cannot capture the essence of the current problem. Many scholars have criticized development discourse for its false promises (Escobar, 1995), as a tool of hegemony, and even altered the conception of it to seek out "freedom" (Sen, 1999). I will not rehearse their criticisms here, but will simply add that in denouncing development, and in pronouncing the end of the nation-state, IR (International Relations) and IPE have not revised categories for thinking about progressive politics; that is, if the nation-state is at its end, what are youth to look forward to in the future? When are their concerns taken under consideration? Is it only when they conform to adult desires to contain youth for exploitative purposes? What does it mean to think about resistance to globalization for a young person saturated with a unified media culture (if they belong to the famed "global middle class" that tunes in to MTV and participates in McWorld) as opposed to the young person with no access to this particular brand of education or popular culture? Or, better yet, the young person who only has access to this popular culture without the financial means to pay for it? I am not suggesting that progressive narratives of development be completely thrown out; however, the economic and political reality of the global present urges practitioners and theorists to think about youth in a novel way that matches the challenges they face, not the dreams adults have for them nor the designs capital has put to them. As Mary Kaldor (1999) has rightly noted, part of the discourse that exacerbates ethnic conflict is motivated by the foreclosure of "forward-looking projects" especially for young people when the government can no longer rule or contain warring factions of adults bent on rectifying past injustices through force and capture of resources and populations, not territories. We are in Michel Foucault's territory now, looking at how populations are created and controlled through demographic discourse; youth is a key term in this global structure. Maintaining the basic conditions necessary for youth to believe they have a future may be important for preventing further nihilism and reasons for joining paramilitary groups, but what can be said when there are no resources to build them, or maintain them? Kaldor (1999) further explains that violence is a global phenomenon under the "new war" which collapses the distinction between worlds or states:  

It is sometimes said that the advanced industrial world is integrating and the poorer parts of the world are fragmenting. I would argue that all parts of the world are characterized by a combination of integration and fragmentation even though the tendencies to integration are greater in the North and the tendencies to fragmentation may be greater in the South and East. It is no longer possible to insulate parts of the world from other parts. (11) 

2.5 The "great divide" can perhaps be best captured when we look at how structures within different normative and economic environments contain or fail to contain "youth." So, it is not really so great a divide if you think of it outside of development discourse; that is, if one can begin to the see failing infrastructures within the global North, the loss of confidence in education there and the breakdown of public schooling, if not publicity itself. George Carlin (2001), in his political satire Napalm and Silly Putty, suggests that U.S. society is obsessed with children, and with finding endless structures in which to place their children. Carlin points out that most of the justification for excess structure is motivated by the parents' need to think their children are unique and special. He tells the audience:  

You'd be anxious and depressed too if you had to put up with pathetic, insecure, yuppie parents who enroll you in college before you've even figured out which side of the playpen smells the worst and then fill you full of Ritalin to get you in a mood they approve of, and drag you all over town in search of empty, meaningless structure: Little League, Cub Scouts, swimming, soccer, karate, piano, bagpipes, watercolors, witchcraft, glass blowing, and dildo practice. It's absurd. (37)  

We might add that following publicized school shootings and kidnappings, this attitude is increasingly the result of unfounded fears about increasing numbers of child sexual predators (Kincaid 1998; Morrione 2002). It may even be that the obsession with pedophilia marks a profound ambivalence that adult populations have toward youth—in other areas they are more than willing to exploit them: labor, advertising, education, heteronormative sexuality, and military service. Carlin's annoyance with "the children" is coming from a positive place: he wants them to be able to test boundaries and become grownup adults who can take care of themselves, and learn to live without an excessive normative structure.   

2.6 Carlin further bemoans the fact that these structures are "useless," but I think that they serve a very material purpose for the societies that use them by allowing parents to work (for one thing), but also because they take the body and the sovereign individual out of the disciplinary relationship: children are now disciplined by environments or constructions of discipline that come from outside their communities or families. This is a change in the means of reproduction; no longer tied to the nation-state and the family as the model, they allow people to produce without destroying the fantasy of security, home, and progress. At the same time, we witness the resurgence in family values rhetoric uniformly across the globe as right-wing groups in the U.S. find fault with globalizing trends that are said to demolish the family and a settled way of life, while other cultures experience dissatisfaction with global inequities and the effect of transnational capital on their cultures (Buss and Herman 2003). As Ronnie Lipschutz (2000) has argued, the main problem "after authority," is "the disjunction between contemporary social change and people's expectations about their individual and collective futures" (157-158). For Lipschutz the "insecurity dilemma" created by the end of a type of authority associated with the national security State that is sovereign has been replaced by the individual replete with fears of other anonymous individuals no longer marked or predictable through national codes or loyalties. Among the most feared in the U.S. are young men, specifically "alienated" young men. According to more modern writers on power like Hannah Arendt (1959) or Francisco José Moreno (2000), authority is lost when the responsible party has to resort to force; when hegemony ceases to be effective and there is a subsequent Habermasian "legitimation crisis." While these fears of young men have been thoroughly exaggerated through media slander that I have detailed elsewhere, there is a point to connecting the end of authority with youth socialization and a transforming economy. What youth are looking for in the social and cultural environment created by the global economy, and are unable to find, is confrontation. What these writers have unearthed, in my mind anyway, is that there is something satisfying and tangible about confronting an adversary to the adolescent; indeed, all of our modern theories of power are based—at least partially—on the motive of confrontation or means of confrontation.   

2.7 Now, this can be juxtaposed to the research on child soldiering in areas of the globe where youth are further down the lines of production that Hardt and Negri (2000) have described. It is widely acknowledged that children who choose to join military groups are doing so because they have lost their social structure, been driven away from it, or it has been destroyed. Students in poorer school districts are targeted by JROTC personnel and the military is disproportionately represented by minority and lower-income young men who have joined for college tuition or a stable career (Berlowitz and Lang, 2003). As some critics of child soldiering have noted, in more moralistic terms, the youth that find themselves in active military service are looking for authority structures. Frank Faulkner (2001) observes:  

Removal of basic necessities and protective mechanisms ensures that children are particularly vulnerable to all manner of influences, most notably where the family unit has been fragmented or destroyed completely in the chaos and confusion of war. In certain instances, the military unit can act in loco parentis, thereby assuming the traditional position of guidance usually provided by parents. However, given the exigencies of warfare, this role will be characterized by violence, brutality, deprivation, death, sexual exploitation and callous indifference to others. (491) 

2.8 Faulkner goes on to explain that it becomes even more difficult to restore these traumatized children to normalcy as their families reject them once they find them in military service, the society condemns them as the cause of the widespread misery, and they are locked forever in a structure of authority that is demeaning and anti-social. As Kaldor (1999) points out, the other aspect to the child soldier phenomenon in the new wars is that the lines of authority in extant military groups is not hierarchical but vertical and diffused; relying less on discipline and control through face-to-face interaction. He states:

The various groups operate both independently and in cooperation. What appear to be armies are actually horizontal coalitions of breakaway units from the regular armed forces, local militia or self-defense units, criminal gangs, groups of fanatics, and hangerson, who have negotiated partnerships, common projects, and divisions of labor or spoils. (95)

Youth worldwide relate mainly to their peers. With the help of information technologies, the rapid devolution of authority, and the increase in democratic sentiment¹ (but not the practice of democracy) the lines of authority have eroded. When this happens, there is no point in looking at youth as "adolescents" or people who are growing into maturity since when there is no hierarchy there is no forward-looking sense of development. Anthropologists who study youth cultures now define them in opposition to all progressively modern temporal inflections. Mary Bucholtz (2002) argues:  

Youth foregrounds age not as trajectory, but as identity, where identity is intended to invoke neither the familiar psychological formulation of adolescence as a prolonged "search for identity," nor the rigid and essentialized concept that has been the target of a great deal of recent critique. Rather, identity is agentive, flexible, and ever-changing—but no more for youth than for people of any age. Where the study of adolescence generally concentrates on how bodies and minds are shaped for adult futures, the study of youth emphasizes instead the here-and-now of young people's experience, the social and cultural practices through which they shape their worlds….And where adolescence is usually placed in relation to adulthood, an equally salient group for youth may be other youth—that is, the peer group—and relevant age contrasts may include childhood, old age, and other culturally specific stages, in addition to adulthood. (525)

Adolescence focuses on "bodies" and "minds" whereas youth focuses on "experience." The bodies change but the experiences are locked in the present tense of the youth "worlds." If we want to know how to detect youth then we have to look at their worlds, places not dissimilar from those of adults, but primarily occupied by other peers. The world of global youth is beginning to sound much like a marketplace: identities are malleable, as in postmodernity. Furthermore, the bodies and minds of adolescents are on trajectories, yet for youth they are "no more" changing or flexible than for any other age group. Youth is a cultural term and adolescence a psycho-somatic one. Our bodies and minds develop but our identities shift. Why use the category "youth" if there is not distinguishable difference between their worlds of culture and those of other age categories? Youth are defined here in their isolation from adult groups; adults have access to youth culture, but youth are conceptually contained in with their own kind.

2.9 Markets that focus on youth culture are extremely profitable, and scholars have begun discussing the creation of a global "middle class" that has been created by common access to the internet, popular culture and global stores. There is widespread agreement in the literature studying global youth that they are negatively affected by contact with adult cultures, but there is no acknowledgement that the overall political culture of societies is affected one way or another by the adult appropriation of youth culture. Youth and adults pass by one another unnoticed in the global marketplace of culture, except where the predator or bad cultural object sends the youth down a noticeably wrong path. So, what does youth resistance resemble for persons whose identities "shift" but do not evolve, especially in the workplace? 

2.10 Despite efforts to produce a compliant workforce, resistance, or more properly, subversion, is widespread among youth in the workplace. Under conditions of underemployment and the lack of possibility of advancement, young American workers assert their autonomy through frequent job changing and rejection of the ideal of work as stimulating. Such solutions, however, are individual coping tactics rather than collective action (Willis, 1998), in contrast to young people's challenges to workplace conditions elsewhere in the world (Mills, 1999). Kathryn Borman (1988, 1991) documents another tactic, "playing on the job," that allows adolescents to endure the tedium of routine work tasks. This practice recalls Paul Willis' (1998) description of "having a laff" as a form of youthful resistance to school.

2.11 There is resistance but it mirrors the activity of the market. Kids change jobs, work several at one time, and foreclose the possibility of moving up. Perhaps it is that young people are victims of super exploitation and so must represent themselves as they cannot count on their parents or governments to do so; indeed, I think of Zillah Eistenstein’s (1998) insight that governments everywhere have to appear "real" because in a Baudrillardian sense they are simulating governance (Bush on No Child Left Behind—a far cry from It Takes a Village). These are all examples from the North, but they demonstrate the lack of development in other spaces too. Youth are shifting positions, and with the idea of the working class defunct in a post-Fordist economy, they cannot count on a secured wage or a secured future. In these spaces of the "developed" world, structures come into play to contain the breakdown (or forestall the realization) of civil society and progress. They are consumer oriented, and focus on the identities constructed through popular culture. Further over on the lines of production, there is no attempt made to hide or subtly coerce youth into structures. 

2.12 The basis of exploitation is that it is hidden, but this would not seem to be the case with global youth today as parents are forced to give up their children to sex traders and prostitution rings, or abandon them to migrate elsewhere in search of work. Or, if that doesn’t happen, they are turned into commodities when they are snatched up by rebel movements and exchanged for wars. A further baseline for understanding exploitation is that it is derived from surplus; capitalists suck more labor out of workers in order to generate excess capital that they do not share in the form of equitable or living wages. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer but no one knows why it is happening this way, believing instead that capitalists worked very hard to earn their money (and therefore deserve every penny) or that there simply isn't enough to go around for everyone (basically the surplus is obscured from view by the ruling classes). In Marx's day this formulation would have been sufficient to demonstrate exploitation, but in today's global marketplace the problem is that few seem to care about this in a critical way, and now capital operates with very little criticism of its contradictions. Instead, parents and most of the public have decided that standards for education (which operate the same way signifiers float in the media) will determine the future of youth and their prospects in a competitive job pool. This is because the widespread commodification of structures to replace modern authority after sovereignty constitutes a rapidly proliferating form of reification in the minds of people. If one can buy microcosmic forms of authority and discipline that replace the body and mind, then the fact of exploitation is obscured under the detailed descriptions of poor behaviors these technologies are designed to control or eradicate. Moreover, it helps if students in "developed" countries can see and hear how good they have it when compared to others. They do not then notice the normative manipulation of their future by security structures. My favorite is the example of Japanese students becoming afflicted with "school refusal syndrome," or of teenagers ravaged by "character disorders" in the United States. Or, of the recent survey of 17 million teenagers in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), plus Brazil, Latvia, Liechtenstein, and the Russian Federation, who say they are overwhelmingly "bored" in school with rates at 67 percent in Germany, and 66 percent in Greece and Spain, to name a few (Education Today, 2003). 

2.13 There is a normative void at the center of this "non-place" that Hardt and Negri (2000) have named. This is an age of imperialism, but it is virtual. So, after sovereignty, of course there is no government protection of youth, no motive to recreate public education or build it through development programs because there is no one to hold it accountable or anything to measure it against. Nevertheless, we persist, at least in the "West," in believing that the category of youth has magical properties and can provide the kind of "common action beyond measure" (359) that will change the relationship between youth and the future capital has laid out for them. Hardt and Negri (2000) believe that the 1960's generation was confronted with a labor market that they made a normative choice to avoid; this insight is structural in that generations are confronted with the totality of capitalist relations and its normative framework at any given time in history and respond positively (at least from the point of view of the Left, or progressivism). Consider how Hardt and Negri outline this confrontation: 

The various forms of social contestation and experimentation all centered on a refusal to value the kind of fixed program of material production typical of the disciplinary regime, its mass factories, and its nuclear family structure. The movements valued instead a more flexible dynamic of creativity and what might be considered more immaterial forms of production. From the standpoint of the traditional "political" segments of the U.S. movements of the 1960's, various forms of cultural experimentation that blossomed with a vengeance during that period all appeared as a kind of distraction from the "real" political and economic struggles, but what they failed to see was that the "merely cultural" experimentation had very profound and economic effects. (274)

This argument makes the generation of the 1960's the architects of the transformation of subjectivity that preceded these new forms of capitalist discipline. In other words, as Hardt and Negri (2000) later argue, the managers had to "catch up" to this "transvaluation of values" (a la Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) and reorganize capitalist production and reproduction (because you need people to believe in the value of production, as Louis Althusser has taught us) along the "indexes of value of the movements—mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication, cooperation, the affective—would define the transformation of capitalist production for decades" (275). This is what Jean-Francois Lyotard (1993) primarily referred to as the "libidinal economy" where desires once compartmentalized: economic man, social man, political man, family man, now converge and deviate around normative choices made according to the value of acts themselves (versus what they get you in the form of tangible things, wages, benefits, etc.). This is why the economic and the cultural are now "indistinguishable." For Bill Readings (1996) this was the end of the nation-state era that ushered in the advent of cultural studies, but it is also motivated by a "proleptic nostalgia" that cannot confront the idea that humanism is gone and human subjects are now "aggregates" who fit into preordained slots of thought, no longer critical or requiring a public space for resistance (142). These romantic visions of confrontation structure the fantasies of adults about youth who have no sovereign object, authority figure, or embodied imperialist to fight.   

2.14 If we accept this characterization of the social movements and their affect on societies, then we also have to confront how empire was generated out of this dialectical refusal of the 1960's youth culture. The models of sovereignty were dismantled by this generation, and now, youth in the globalized economy have no standard around which to judge their relationship to capital, or how to organize their desire into a coherent subjective (or objective) movement against it. With world production comes (one hopes) a subjectivity that should have preceded it, showed it its organizational imperatives, and begged it for discipline and control (all youth movements do this). As Jacques Lacan (1969) replied to students: "What you, as revolutionaries aspire to is a master. You will have one" (127). Yet, in the new immaterial world of production, control is exercised not through bodies or minds, but externalized forces in the form of what I have elsewhere called "Virtual Security Regimes," which are containment forces organized along a Foucauldian axis where discipline and control is de-centered from the body and organized around unmarked bodies through technologies of the virtual (e.g., Net Nannies, aerial bombings, video cameras on freeways, in stores, and on street corners), non-evidential searches, excessively punitive incarcerations—they are only leveled to "make a point" to other populations, banishment of cultural objects that seemingly "motivate" only undesirable behaviors, military training or boot camps, ² vouchered schools whose curriculums are as varied as the social itself, God, telepresence monitoring—monitoring by remote using cameras and digital technologies, test scores, Human Development Indexes, D.A.R.E. graduations, JROTC, etc. All of these means of de-authored control (so, we can now say that the death of the author has not only affected writing, journalism, and literature, but also discipline and control) serve to obscure the act of discipline as they are all for the betterment of the populations over which they are exercised. This is the normative form of control that is incorporeal; there is "no doer behind the deed." They are all "in loco parentis" and this is because the model of the nuclear family was modeled on sovereign government, so when this becomes a chimera or a signifier thrown out by sectors of both the right and the left it is only to hide the fact that they no longer exist. As Baudrillard (1994) said a long time ago, this is the "proving of the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, […] pedagogy through antipedagogy" (19). What global youth share in common is that they are all political orphans. Some have better means of coping or better structures than others along the lines of production in the global economy, but none have the task of maturity before them, only the medium of virtuality and the commodification of culture and identity.

Confrontation?

Much like virtuality itself, we seem to be served up copies of real people. Reality is simulated and illusory, so one begins to think nothing matters or that little can be done that will matter. This is great for transnational capital, which is left alone to masquerade around the globe. As we move toward reality as a "manufactured and metered commodity," it becomes harder to believe in democratic dialogue. Howard Rheingold calls these new relations of power a "reality-industrial complex." Seeing is not about "the' real or non-real; rather it obscures the distinction itself.

—Eisenstein, 1998: 47-48

3.1 In this short concluding section, I want to underscore some of the ways in which youth around the globe have been parsed by governments, the media and the entertainment networks. As Readings (1996) has argued, they have already been interpellated by specific channels to desire in mass categories with their own languages, styles of dress, and cultural referents designed to further commodify desires and generate profits. However, there are other ways that youth have been grouped. On the one hand, we have the existence of certain labor markets for youth that are pleasing to capital for their cultural proclivities: "When I think of Indonesia—a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and a Muslim ban on alcohol—I feel like I know what heaven looks like" (from the former President of Coca-Cola).³ After the world publicized events of school shootings by the most privileged of young men in the remaining years of the 1990's, we were primed by the media to believe that young men in groups were suspect and dangerous, an interesting conclusion given that most of these young men acted out individualized fantasies, not collective ones. As Chris Rock (1999) confessed in "Bigger and Blacker," he jumped out of an elevator when two young white boys got on! The reaction to these shootings caused schools across the U.S. to enforce zero tolerance policies, peer reporting and surveillance, even though the F.B.I., the Secret Service, and the American Bar Association have all rejected profiling and zero tolerance as practical ways of predicting who are violent students in the nearly 100,000 schools (Cornell, 2003). Later, following September 11, we get another dose of young men in schools that are to be feared for their terrorism: students in Pakistani madrassas bordering Afghanistan. We hear more about them in the media when they join terrorist organizations in the poorer areas of global South or fantasize about them in the rich suburbs of the North. 

3.2 Migration is a blanket term for people's movement throughout the world, but most of the migrating is the outcome of U.S.-led, but certainly not exclusively so, military proliferation (and its attendant marketing and commercial potential) throughout the world. Labor is a category that is rapidly being replaced by "soldier" (especially for hire), in the world. Military employment is the primary means of upward mobility for young men in the globalized economy and this is because of the active remilitarization of youth and the scarcity bred by economic and political failure. As I demonstrate throughout my first book, militarized dispositions on the part of students in the U.S. are the result of the ready availability of small arms and explosive materials, but also the lack of a holding environment that could positively contain youth for developmental purposes, to provide a view of a future for them and an appropriate adversary (Webber, 2003a, 2003b). As Donald Woods Winnicott (1986) very thoughtfully wrote about the importance of adolescent immaturity: 

I confess that I feel I am insulting this subject by talking about it. The more easily we verbalize, the less we are effectual. Imagine someone talking down to adolescents and saying to them: "The exciting part of you is your immaturity!" This would be a gross example of failure to meet the adolescent challenge. Perhaps this phrase 'a meeting of the challenge' represents a return to sanity, because understanding has become replaced by confrontation. The word 'confrontation' is used here to mean that a grown-up person stands up and claims the right to have a personal point of view, one that may have the backing of other grown-up people. (163) 

3.3 This is exactly what global media culture says to young people (and old people) and through numerous, distinct, and separate types of understanding (e.g., antidepressants—over-prescription of them anyway, behavior modification therapy, dress codes, security checks, small arms training, the promise of a new life in a growth economy, marriage, etc.) but not confrontation. The lure of advertising and youth culture is that it says "I understand you because you are young and exciting!" Where are the "grownup people" in the global economy who will present an adversary for youth cultures? How can youth rebel against depersonalized virtual structures? Students are at the apex of the division of labor in this society as they are forced to compete for scarce resources through a sublimated form of grading and testing (standards are completely arbitrary when not based on rote memorization and disciplinary ingenuity). As Andrea Perkins (2003) noted in a talk on child soldiering, "Children are cheap, replaceable, and easier to train into fearless and unconditionally obedient soldiers. Also, the size and agility or inconspicuousness makes child soldiers especially suitable as spies or messengers for a number of government militaries or non-government armed groups alike." As the job market dwindles, so does respect for civility in this competitive space formerly called the democratic public school. In the developed world, as Readings (1996) notes, "The appeal to excellence occurs when the nation-state ceases to be the elemental unit of capitalism" (17). An empty signifier that cannot be measured, Readings further argues that categories such as culture also lose their specificity under excellence as it "proceeds from a certain sense that no knowledge can be produced," and that this is a "vision of culture appropriate for an age of excellence" (47). 

3.4 In so-called "developing" societies the impetus to forge civil societies is foreclosed by violent competition, often narrated by ethnic language that results in refugee camps. Perhaps this "development" distinction is not even really valid any longer and we can speak of differently deteriorating spaces of civil society that, as Lipschutz (2000) pointed out, are recognized or avoided in each space through structures designed to contain youth and foreclose recognition that the future is no longer there. Both spaces are inadequately "contained" by VSRs (Virtual Security Regimes) in the post-Cold War world, yet the U.S. government promises to make them the cornerstone of foreign policy. The "great divide" is not among nation-states but generations lost in an ahistorical void of consumer capitalism and exploitation, resource scarcity, and emotional scarcity. As George J. Tenet (2002) has claimed in a speech, "weak States" created an "environment conducive to terrorism," and demographic trends tell us that the world's poorest and most politically unstable regions—which include parts of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa—will have the largest youth populations in the world over the next two decades and beyond. Most of these countries will lack the economic institutions and resources to effectively integrate these youth into society. These are really just the fears of a narrow class who know that eventually somewhere down that line of production, militarized or not, youth around the globe are going to tire of working for culture and anonymous structure, and eventually they will desire confrontation. 
 

References 

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¹ By this I mean the idea that one opinion is as good as any other. This is the brilliance of the behavioral revolution in social science, of giving people the right to express their opinions without encouraging the necessary actions or forethought to back them. Others have pointed out that destructive technologies like nuclear bombs have added to the leveling of hierarchies among people by taking authority out of the hands of parents and grandparents or has led to the increasing lack of responsible leadership and placing them in the hands of technologies seemingly beyond human control and poised to destroy humanity (Flower-MacCannell, 1992; Rogin, 1998).

² See Deems D. Morrione's (2002) "Sublime Monsters and Virtual Children." See especially the chapter on "Sally Jesse Raphael's Postmodern Love," and the concept of "dressage regressif."

³ Quoted in Wheeler, Nicholas J. and Dunne, Tim. "East Timor and the New Humanitarian Intervention." International Affairs 77(4) (2002): 805-827, 810. 
 

Author Notes 

Julie Webber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. She is author of Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence, and co-editor of the forthcoming book Expanding Curriculum Theory: Dis/Positions and Lines of Flight (with William M. Reynolds). This project is one chapter from her forthcoming book which stresses the role of Empire(s) and their narratives of "appropriate" political socialization in the construction of civil societies. Thanks to Michael Dillon, Scott Nelson, Nevi Soguk and the audience members at the Central and Eastern European International Studies Association Conference, Budapest, Hungary, June, 2003. Thanks also to Ali Riaz, Janie Leatherman, Sienna Crawford, William F. Pinar, Deems D. Morrione, and Diane Rubenstein for help and comments on the manuscript.