Intergenerational Fairness and Ageing Styles in Europe: A Life-Course Approach

Demographic trends over the last decades and future projections clearly indicate a steady increase in the proportion of older adults (65+) relative to both the working-age (15-64) and child populations (0-15) across Europe. This demographic shift – driven by rising life expectancy and declining fertility – raises pressing challenges for intergenerational equity and questions the sustainability of the implicit formal and informal social contract that links generations through the distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resources. In particular, the two fundamental pillars of European post-industrial societies, namely an extensive welfare state and a liberal-democratic institutional framework, appear to be at risks. To address this issue, the notion of “intergenerational fairness” recently adopted by social policies in both USA and Europe, appears flexible and fundamentally ambiguous. As a substantial variant of neoliberal austerity policies, it is simply used as a justification for further austerity measures, the withdrawal of entitlements to social and economic rights by citizens and the dismantling of welfare states. A second meaning of “intergenerational fairness” is possible starting from the concept of ambivalence used to describe the mix of conflict and solidarity that characterizes intergenerational relations in contemporary post-industrial societies. In this respect, the two concepts of “successful ageing” and “active ageing” often considered as overlapping, actually involve very different perspectives: successful ageing adopts a substantially reductionist, individualistic and static approach to the process of ageing, whereas active ageing is a more comprehensive and dynamic strategy that seeks to overcome all these limitations by a life course perspective. This recognizes that a person’s path to old age is not predetermined but depends primarily on earlier life experiences and their influence: the ageing process affects people of all ages, not just the elderly. And since the subjectivization of ageing in contemporary societies has challenged the conventional notion of “natural life stages”, the new concept of “ageing lifestyles” becomes central to understanding the ageing process today. Ageing styles are the outcome of the interplay between the objective and subjective dimensions of the life course, represented respectively by the life chances (social structure) and the life choices (agency). A framework is proposed for analysing ageing styles that can be used from a life course perspective to highlight their complex and dynamic nature. To this end, the methodology of intersectionality is particularly suited to address diverse health inequalities, especially those linked to forms of discrimination such as ageism, sexism, and racism, which are at the origin of unequal ageing styles. Key concepts of role transitions, trajectory, agency, historical time and spatial context that can be employed for sorting out intersectional subgroups are illustrated, along with five guidelines which can be followed to analyse unequal ageing styles and identify the prevailing “matrix of domination” that originate them. An evidence-based European political strategy aimed at promoting active ageing from a perspective of intergenerational fairness, based on the eight principles indicated, can be flexible enough to ensure that everyone can adopt their preferred ageing style without top-down imposition and contribute to the maintenance of the intergenerational social contract.