The whims of YouTube’s algorithm lead me to watch a few a videos about Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980. Some part of them resonated with me, as I’m clearly from that generation, but one thing struck me: all the narration is about the USA, and European of that generation experienced pretty different things, and so I think they are different in some ways.

I think this difference matters because as Gen-X is increasingly the management class and there seems to be an increasing cultural drift between both sides of the Atlantic. Trump is obviously a boomer, Pedro Sánchez, Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Péter Magyar are Gen-X.

One way Gen-X is defined in the US is the latch-key phenomenon: kids that had a house key and just went home and went on with their lives unsupervised. The same happened in Europe, but it was perceived differently, US kids were unsupervised, europeans one were autonomous, there was enough social structure, public infrastructure, nobody got traumatised, and following generations also had keys and everyone moved on.

In Europe, nobody really cared about Nixon and the end of trust. People cared about regime changes, end of dictatorships in the south Portugal (1974), Greece (1974), Spain (1975), they heard about Lebanon descending into civil war (1975). The US discovered terrorism in 2001, on the old continent it was the background noise in the 80s, with the troubles in Ireland, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) in Spain, the Brigate Rosse in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany. France had islamist terrorism before it was cool. The eastern block did not have terrorism, just state corruption.

The event that defines Gen-Xers in Europe is the fall of the iron curtain, they were between 9 and 24 when it happened. This completely upended your world if you lived in the eastern side, and your world-view if you were in the west. The geopolitical map was shuffled. The distance from Paris to the Iron Curtain was roughly 560 km (350 miles), it was not an abstract event, far away, it was next door and it was a surprise. Even today it’s the one event that shapes European politics.

If 1989 was the beginning of a new era, the Yugoslav wars were the first sin experienced by European Gen-X, the west was incapable of preventing atrocities. Death camps, and removing mine fields stopped being about world war 2, war-crimes were not prosecuted in Nürenberg, but in the Hague. The sense of shame related to conflict in the Balkans was not an abstract, detached thing, because there was another important difference between the US and Europe at that time: the army.

If you are a male European born before the 80s, you probably either did some military service, or spent quite some energy to avoid this requirement, for instance by doing civil service. While in the US, joining the army was a career choice, in Europe, it was an obligation, which only faded away with the following generations (with some exceptions, like Switzerland). This changed your views in management and your relationship with the community and the state.

European Gen-X were not told they would be the militia, they were the militia, here is your gun and your uniform. People in Europe did not learn about the second amendement, they learnt what to do when you unearthed unexploded ammunition. Weapons as a symbol of safety on one side, a reason to evacuate on the other. If your country had intervened in the balkans, you might have been called in…

Generation-X is often presented as the bridge between the analog and the digital world, in Europe, this role was much wider. Gen-X was the bridge between the national countries and the EU, it was not only about the media world, but also about language, education, systems. Boomers were the last pure nationals in Europe, they spoke the national language, went to the national education system, everyday objects from money to power plugs were nation specific. French cars had headlights with a different colour (yellow) than german ones, and german TVs could not get the colour signal of French emitters (SECAM). Russia also used SECAM, but it was not compatible, of course. Russian and Spanish trains ran on different gauges – they still do.

Gen-X is sometimes called the Erasmus generation, after the student exchange program that started in 1987. Studying in a foreign country used to be the exception, it became a common thing. Today, around 20% of EU student spend some time abroad. This also lead to Erasmus babies, kids born into bi-national families, often bi-lingual. At the same time as internet spread, knowing english became a hard requirement, European Gen-X often had to transition from a monolingual world, into one where you needed to know at least two languages, your own and English. People in the east had been forced to learn Russian, it did not help them much…

A similar transition happened for travel, the rite of passage was the Interrail, you travelled through Europe by night train, you crossed borders, exchanged currencies. The following generations only experienced Schengen, the Euro and cheap airlines. Gen-X leaders don’t need to understand how railway affects military logistics in Ukraine, they remember armies and tanks, they remember Kraftwerk singing about the Trans Europ Express. Travel in the eastern block was also by train, in 1989, there were still steam locomotives in service, even leaders went by train: Tito’s blue train was famous.

The relationship to technology is very different. The explosion of Challenger was a defining moment for the US Gen-X, in Europe, this was quickly eclipsed by a more serious problem: Chernobyl. The radioactive winds blew over Germany, officially they stopped at the French border. Things break, government lie. NASA had tried to implement Star Trek, had failed, and now the nation was traumatised.

In Europe new projects had started: France’s nuclear program, super-sonic passenger planes (Concorde), mono-rails (Aérotrain, Transrapid), the channel tunnel, a European plane manufacturer (Airbus), a European Space Agency (ESA). In 1982, as TCP/IP was finalised and the internet was still called Arpanet, France was distributing computer terminals to every household. Everyone was building their own 8 bit computer, it was the age of the hovercraft, the ekranoplan.

A typical example of what a European Gen-Xer experienced is in this Giscard-punk video: a high-tech push grounded in national identity which is now largely forgotten, but contains all the basic elements of today’s world. Gen-X is often described as the fixer generation, in the US they retired to the garage to create a startup or a grunge band, in Europe everyone agreed things needed fixing (but not on how to fix it). When you grew up with incompatible phone cables, you invent SCART. It was brittle, it was ugly but it allowed to connect everything. The ultimate improvement hacking an analog computer monitor in the US is to add a SCART connector. 50 years laters, the same crowd forced Apple to use USB-C.

In the US, a Gen-X whatever is a sign of resignation, in Europe it is a sign of determination. Things in Europe failed, multiple times. Half of the people come from states that failed, learnt songs that are forgotten. Everyone used infrastructure from one or the other fallen empire. The winners of the cold war were the USA, they were number one in everything, whatever. Mono-rails failed, you build turbo-trains, turbo-trains failed, you build electric trains like the Japanese. You take the parts, the ideas and try another approach. People in the eastern block had failed at least twice as much, they shrugged it off. Nobody remembers the ECU, when the euro came out, people in the US laughed. They also laughed when Airbus was cobbling planes together from parts from all over the contient, whatever.

The US killed disco, Giorgio Moroder fixed it with synthesisers, the Italians re-engineered it, Daft Punk remixed it. US music stayed acoustic, Europeans used synthesisers, again, Gen-X was the bridge generation between the analog and the digital world. These new instruments needed a standard interface, it was a DIN (Deutsche Industrie Norm) plug. Kraftwerk was too conceptual, Jean-Michel Jarre fixed that, with lasers. In the US, Dépêche Mode is goth music, in Europe, everybody listened to it. Eurovision was one of the first European initiatives, it really took off in 1976 with ABBA, songs need to be in english, whatever. US Gen-X music was divided, in Europe we had euro-pop, everyone had their national hits, of course. People in the US laughed about europe’s robot music, whatever, Ariana Grande’s latest hits are euro-pop engineered by Swedes.

Tolerance for Ambiguity is often cited as a defining characteristic of Gen-X, kids in the US had cartoons, it’s easy to underestimate how weird the stuff kids in Europe watched on TV was. TV production was expensive, and so was dubbing, so there many cooperative projects and cartoons with no voice (to avoid dubbing). So we had a mix of social realism shows (Zora, Silas), Czech social and ecological cartoon (Krtek), Italian social critique (Calimero, Grisù), abstract absurdism (la Linea), 70s anime with Jazz sountracks (Captain Future), space-opera 特撮(tokusatsu( (Sankukai / Message from Space: Galactic Wars), educational cartoons (produced by half of Europe and Japan) that describe the human body like a living society, including episodes about sex and death, with a black heroine (Il était une fois la vie), surrealist British cartoons (Dr Snuggles, Shoe Shop) and of course US cartoons (a few years behind, so they would be cheaper).

US Gen-Xer merely adopted cultural diversity and ambiguity, Europeans ones were born into it, moulded by it, they did not see a TV show with a straight plot until they were grown men or women.