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Five months after its initial appearance, a second edition of the Europa supplement jointly published by six major European newspapers — Le Monde,El País,Gazeta Wyborcza,Süddeutsche Zeitung,The Guardian and La Stampa — has hit the news stands.

Focused on the “Generation ‘E’”, identified with the triptych of “education-euro-employment”, the supplement remarks that the young people born after the fall of the Berlin who grew up with the single currency, the Schengen area, and the Erasmus programme, have also had to contend with mass unemployment.

“If its not McDonald's, then what?” wonders the Polish version of the supplement, which has collected “stories from French, German, Italian, British and Spanish students who moved abroad — a positive choice that can come at a high cost.

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How does this generation view the European project? For these young people, the EU is something taken for granted and not a dream: as the opinion polls have shown, for some it is even the subject of suspicion. The current European generation is the best educated, and the best qualified in history, but it is also the most disenchanted — having suffered from the disparities in the various approaches adopted by governments and educational systems in their bid to adapt higher education to the needs of the labour market. Europa tells the story of Europe in 2012, a continent where institutional mechanisms and political leaders have failed to deliver on promises made to the young people.

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