Surprising experiences and new directions

Witnessing the upheavals and rebellions in the early months of 2011 in the Arabian countries of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, I came across a short television report from the ongoing Egyptian revolution, today usually associated with the Tahrir Square movements. This specific report had filmed several hundreds of participants in a stormy and obviously highly enraged meeting probably taking place in a university hall or inside another larger building in Cairo. To my utmost surprise, a large group of participants requested publicly that all people over the age of 30 should immediately leave the room. They were expected to completely withdraw from the important strategic debates during this gathering. While a majority seemed at first to be ready to follow this demand, only the forceful intervention of a middle-aged woman with a head scarf pointing to the necessity of uniting in a common cause for democracy could mellow the crowd, and turn around the mood of the excited audience.

This news clip did not go into reflecting on whether the phrasing of this request in the language of the revolutionary student movement of the last century was a deliberate form of quoting and reviving a specific heritage, or whether it had been more an everyday language twist with no direct reference or even knowledge about this particular history. However, this incident made clear that within this new revolutionary movement, deep feelings of distrust levied at older people could easily be mobilised. And this mainly because ‘old age’ seemed to stand here for the continuous experience of power abuse, of corruption and of receiving unjustified privileges and of experiencing a patronage of adult and older social elites from the upper class and from the military. In other words, showing off some degree of secure economical standing and at the same time belonging to a certain age cohort brought you into immediate suspicion of participating in the forgone dictatorship, as a direct supporter or at least as being a protege of the ruler now overthrown.

In this book, the main source of information and of rendering assessments is predominantly statistical data and quantitative indicators on the ageing process in the Mediterranean.