Flexibilisation of youth transitions in Central and Eastern Europe

The flexibilisation of youth transitions in the post-communist half of Europe is an indication for the pluralisation of modernity. In the 1990s young people in the region were thrown sharply away from the certainty of the previously firmly structured and strictly controlled transition patterns of the state-socialist societies into the sea of the risks and uncertainties of market regulated societies. At present they face the conflicting challenges of globalisation and nationalistic mobilisation, technological advancement and economic underdevelopment, individualisation and traditional military conflicts. The risks of the transition force young people to invent flexible strategies to move through education and training, work and leisure, family and peer relationships to uncertain destinations. The flexibilisation of the passages through the life stages involves a constant shifting of established borders in terms of time and place. Neither the time limits nor the routes of the transitions are any longer fixed in the fluid social, economic, political and cultural orders of post-communism. The first and widely accepted fact about youth condition in East Central Europe is that young people are making their life transitions at a time when the societies they live in are