Research conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, Inc. and The Nielsen Company

1. Introduction: Divergent demographics
Today’s generation of young people, born as the Cold War was winding to a close and coming of age in a geopolitical landscape defined by the events of September 11th and its aftermath, are the first to be raised in a truly globalised environment. The rise of new technology, in particular, has broken down old barriers and fostered the flattening of cultures across the world.

Just over two decades ago, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt published an important essay, “The Globalisation of Markets,” insisting that communications technology had radically shrunk the world and homogenised our tastes. “Almost everyone everywhere now wants all the things they have heard about, seen or experienced via the new technologies,” Levitt wrote at the time.

Some 15 years after another Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, first published his own landmark essay on “The Clash of Civilisations,” arguing very much the opposite, the tastes of Western and Middle East youth are now frequently remarkably aligned. Today, young people in the West and Middle East indulge in many similar activities, adopt similar technologies and engage in similar lifestyle habits. Both have mobile phones as their main technology and ceaselessly text their family and friends. Young people in both regions view many brands – such as Nokia, Sony, Toyota and Toshiba – with similar levels of warmth.

Both groups, like adolescents since time immemorial, constantly worry about their appearance, and spend the majority of their disposable incomes on looking good and going out with friends. Both wonder when and if they will find true love.

The superficial similarities between Arab and Western youth are indeed myriad. Yet despite these commonalities, the hopes, fears and aspirations of Western and Middle East youth frequently diverge – sometimes strikingly so. There are a range of drivers of this divergence, including culture, religion and historical identity. But demographics may be the single most important factor of them all.

Quite simply, the West is getting older, while the Middle East is growing younger by the day. Never before in history has the Arab world faced such a significant youth population bulge: today, one in five people in the Middle East is between the ages of 15-24. In contrast, by 2040, one in five Americans will be aged 65 or older – compared to barely one in eight in 2000.

Today, the average German is more than 43 years old; the average Jordanian is just 23. In Saudi Arabia – where an astonishing 38% of the population is under the age of 14 – the average citizen is just 21 years old. In the United Kingdom, in contrast, barely 16% of the population is under the age of 14, and the average citizen is 40.

Such divergent demographics unquestionably colour the perspectives of youth in both the Middle East and West. The rapid economic growth of the Middle East, and the Gulf oil states in particular, continues to act as a counter balance to the significant economic insecurity created by such a large and growing youth segment, which is endemically under-employed in many Arab states. In the West, meanwhile, rapidly aging populations will create unprecedented economic stress points, especially to entitlement programmes such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in the United States. In the future, the West’s shrinking working-age population will be hard pressed to provide for an older generation that is living longer than ever before.

2. Methodology
To gain a unique understanding of the attitudes of youth in the Middle East and compare them with those of their peers in the Western world, ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, the leading public relations consultancy in the Middle East commissioned a proprietary research survey of young people between the ages of 18-24. The results of the First ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey was announced at a special forum in Dubai on November 10, 2008 to mark the re-launch of ASDA’A under the global Burson-Marsteller umbrella.

Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, Inc. (PSB) and The Nielsen Company conducted some 1,800 interviews with respondents between the ages of 18-24 during September, 2008 in six Middle East states (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) and three Western countries (Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States). The results, which have been weighted to have a 50:50 balance between the two regions, have a margin of error of +/5.66% in the Middle East and +/9.8% in Western nations. Following are some highlights of the survey findings.

3. Bursting bubbles: An uncertain future
There is no question that the current challenges to the stability of the financial order are enormous in scale and global in shape. Worldwide, the bursting of the credit bubble has led to widespread pessimism. For that reason and a range of others, including perceived political lethargy, young people in the West are strikingly pessimistic about the future. Just 34% of Western youth feel that things in their country are heading the right direction. In the Middle East, despite ongoing conflicts in Iraq and the Levant, youth are considerably more optimistic, with 52% arguing that their country is heading the right direction.

Young people in the Middle East and the West share similar concerns – about the economy, inflation, their ability to live in a good area and stay in touch with their family. The economic outlook and rising cost of living is the overriding concern for both groups, including 43% of Western youth and 30% of their peers in the Arab world. Strikingly, though, just 4% of Western youth and 8% of Arab youth feel that conflict in the Middle East is the biggest challenge currently facing the world.

How to interpret this last finding? Why are Western and, in particular, Arab youth seemingly so unconcerned with current and seeming intractable conflicts in the Middle East – including their impact on stability and security worldwide?

While this may be partly due to the fact that fewer and fewer young people the world over read daily newspapers or closely follow geopolitical events, it is equally possible that such findings point to one of the most significant responses to globalisation: the increasing localisation of perspectives and concomitant hardening of national identities in response to this same trend.

4. Equal opportunities: Reality and perception
Inboth the West and Middle East, young men are slightly more optimistic than their female counterparts about the future – though the gender divide is statistically insignificant in each case. This is a very positive finding, which suggests increasing gender equality in both the West and the Middle East. However, when asked if they believed that men and women currently have equal opportunities in the workplace, a majority in both regions said no. In the West, strikingly, 54% of male youth agreed with this vision of workplace equality, while just 31% of female youth shared this sentiment. Among male and female Middle East youth, in contrast, 44% and 42%, respectively, agreed that there is now equality in the workplace.

Perhaps more importantly, Western and Arab male youth diverge significantly when asked if they believe that men and women should have equal opportunities

in the workplace: 79% of Western male youth concurred with this statement, while just 58% of their male counterparts in the Middle East agreed. In striking contrast to the attitudes of their male peers, 73% of female Arab youth feel that they should have equal opportunities for professional advancement.

Does this point to a growing gender divide in the Arab world? Possibly. More likely, however, is that this data points to the powerful forces of conservatism that pervade in the Middle East, partly as a result of historical identity and partly in response to the forces of globalisation. For reform-minded policymakers in the Middle East, such findings suggest the importance of framing the debate on gender equality on economic terms, rather than cultural ones.

5. Where East meets West: The role of faith
Nowhere is the contrast between Arab and Western youth more pronounced than when examining the importance of religious belief. Some 68% of Middle East youth say that religion defines them as a person, compared to just 16% in the West. Asked to name an influence on them and their outlook on life, 59% of Western youth cited music, compared to just 32% of Arab youth. In contrast, 62% of Middle East youth listed religion as a key influencer, compared to just 38% of their Western peers.

Of course, the degree of religious belief varies not just between these two regions but also within them. Yet the extent to which religious ritual is integrated into the quotidian experience of Arab youth remains remarkable when compared to that of their Western peers.

Especially when contrasted with the generally strict divide between church and state in post-Enlightenment Europe, where such barriers are frequently constitutionally codified, religious ritual is commonplace in the Arab world at nearly all levels of society, including within the political space. Of note, the same statement is largely valid in the United States, where political discourse frequently invokes religious belief and voting patterns often mirror those of faith.

In this regard it is also noteworthy that 9% of Arab youth say that the loss of traditional values and culture is the greatest challenge facing the world today, a sentiment a statistically insignificant percentage of their Western peers agree with. Likewise, Arab youth generally very strongly agree that their national identity is very important to them, while Western youth view the same as only moderately important.

Correspondingly, roughly 11% of Arab youth say success means being enlightened spiritually and 34% say it is making the world a better place – compared to 5% and 12%, respectively, in the West. In line with these findings,

Arab youth have considerably more positive impressions of those who make a contribution to the public good, across the political, religious and economic spheres.

Asked whom they look up to, 30% of Arab youth cited government leaders, compared to just 9% of their Western peers. Likewise, while just 5% of Western youth said they looked up to religious leaders, 31% Middle East youth claimed admiration for the same group. In the economic space, 29% of Arab youth look up to business leaders, a sentiment shared by only 5% of youth in the West.

Middle East youth are therefore not just more conservative than their Western peers; they are also far more idealistic in their vision and optimistic about their future. Western youth, by comparison, come across as cynical beyond their years.

This overarching dichotomy between the West and Middle East cannot be fully appreciated without taking into consideration the larger forces shaping the views of the youth of both regions. Historically, Western societies have celebrated individual achievement while generally underplaying actions that benefit the culture as a whole. Indeed, the West’s founding myth, and especially that of the United States, is based on the ideal of equal opportunity for all – with comparatively scant regard for the social responsibilities of those selfsame individuals.

In the Middle East, by comparison, and especially in the Gulf states, the identity of the individual has historically been defined by their place within a larger social network. Deference to one’s elders or superiors therefore comes more naturally in this region, as does a certain humility about the limits of individual achievement. Arab youth may therefore be less cynical and pessimistic than their Western peers partly because their ambitions are less grandiose and their personal expectations less exalted. Driven by religious and cultural norms, contributing to the social good thus assumes far greater primacy for Middle East youth than it does for their Western peers.

6. Conclusion: Family values
If Western and Middle East sharply diverge on some of the most fundamental issues shaping their outlook and vision for the future, especially the role of religion, they nevertheless are in complete agreement on at least one key determinant: both groups see their family and friends as the among the most influential forces in their lives, with both ranking them as the people they most look up to.

Precisely 64% of Arab and Western youth say that their family defines who they are as a person, with both groups citing family as one of the most important factors in this area. The two also agree that friends are among the key determinants in defining their identity, with concurrence from 57% of Western youth and 61% of their Arab peers.

Despite volumes of rhetoric about a so-called clash of civilisations, youth from the Middle East and West ultimately mirror one another as they cope with the eternal challenges of adolescence and struggle towards self-definition and adulthood. Both groups recognise that nothing matters more to them than their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and extended networks of family members and friends.