Leaders For A New Age

Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done. Today we are called once more—and it's time for our generation to answer that call." That was U.S. Sen. Barack Obama announcing his presidential candidacy last February. The echo of John F. Kennedy's 1961 Inaugural Address—"the torch has been passed to a new generation"—is no accident. The 46-year-old Obama is among the youngest serious contenders for the American presidency since JFK, who was just 43 when he took the oath of office. And Obama's campaign has been eager to invite parallels to the youthful president.

In New Hampshire and in Iowa, Obama found that a new generation was indeed ready to answer his call. Although his older rival Hillary Clinton edged him out in New Hampshire, Obama led heavily among voters under the age of 30, according to exit polls. His victory in the Iowa caucuses was the result of a record turnout, particularly among the young. Exit polls there showed him supported by 60 percent of those under 25 and half of those under 45, while older caucusgoers favored Clinton. While it is too soon to know whether Obama will clinch the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency, America is far from the only nation where baby-faced politicians are dominating the headlines. In Europe as well, men and women too young to have been shaped by either of the two major ideological contests of the 20th century—the battle against fascism and the long twilight struggle against communism—are reaching the highest echelons of political power.

In Britain, Foreign Secretary David Miliband is just 42. He is among the most prominent members of what's been called the "second generation" of New Labour, a group whose ranks include Miliband's younger brother, Ed, 38, who is a minister in the Cabinet Office, and Ed Balls, 40, secretary of State for children, schools and families and one of the prime minister's closest advisers. Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron, is just 41. Across the channel, Nicolas Sarkozy, very much a baby boomer—he turns 53 this month—won the French presidency last year railing against the " '68ers"—those on the left whose political identities were forged in Paris street battles of the 1960s and who, Sarkozy argued, are now dangerously out of step with the times. Once in office, Sarkozy appointed a number of youthful politicians to cabinet posts, including his 42-year-old protégée, Rachida Dati, as Justice minister. In Germany, 35-year-old Hubertus Heil has been making waves as general secretary of the Social Democratic Party, a post he has held since 2005.

In Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the post-boomer who leads the Social Democrats there, narrowly missed becoming that country's first female prime minister in November's elections. And in Sweden, post-boomer power is already a fact: Fredrik Reinfeldt, 42, was elected Sweden's prime minister in late 2006. In Russia, Dmitry Medvedev will also be 42 when he succeeds Vladimir Putin as his hand-picked successor in March. The age difference between the two is just 13 years, but the generational gap is enormous. Putin was born when Stalin was still alive, and was brought up as one of the last believers in communism and the greatness of the Soviet empire; Medvedev grew up in a family of intellectuals and was still a student in liberal Leningrad when every intelligent young person in the country was picking those orthodoxies apart.

To borrow a phrase from a previous era: there's something happening here. This new crop of politicians is different. Compared with the baby boomers, they are more technocratic, more global in outlook, more comfortable with technology, more idealistic and yet less ideological and less invested in old debates. They are also international in a way most of their parents' generation was not. Both Obama and Dati are the children of immigrants, used to having one foot in two cultures. Thorning-Schmidt is married to a Brit (former U.K. Labour leader Neil Kinnock's son, Stephen). David Miliband's wife, Louise Shackleton, has dual U.S.-British citizenship; the couple adopted two children from the United States. And all these politicos think nothing of hopping on a plane to get close to the action. "We're the global generation by virtue of travel," says David Miliband. "But we're also the global generation because of new technology."

In the coming years this generational shift promises to transform politics and foreign policy. Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says that seminal moments tend to color the way leaders behave for a generation. During the 1956 Suez crisis, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden became obsessed with avoiding "another Munich." Two decades later, Vietnam replaced Munich as the new lodestone, at least in the United States. Every subsequent U.S. military intervention brought fears of a "quagmire," and for decades later U.S. presidential candidates were judged on whether they supported the war, and whether they served or dodged the draft. "The new generation doesn't have those hang-ups," Nye says.