There is an epochal divide opening up between Gen-Z voters (born between 1997 and 2012) and previous generations that are beginning to struggle for relevance.

In recent weeks, members of the Gen-Z generation in Madagascar, Indonesia and Nepal have been demonstrating against governments they accuse of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. In Moscow, young musicians and their supporters have been demonstrating in Red Square against Putin’s authoritarianism. Gen-Z members across China are increasingly restive about the grip President Xi and the CCP have on their lives.

In 2024 in the US, voters under 30 preferred presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. In the 2024 federal election in Australia, only 18% of Gen-Z voters voted for the Coalition parties. Are these young people in the vanguard of an emerging generational change in the leadership of countries around the globe?

Members of the Baby Boomer generation (born in the decade or so after World War II) thought they were the generation that would radically transform capitalist societies the world over. (Disclosure: this includes this writer.) They (we) were misled by Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book One-Dimensional Man. In that book, Marcuse anointed university students as the new proletariat, replacing the old working classes whose revolutionary potential, he claimed, had been compromised by the materialist siren songs of the capitalist classes. The more rebellious Boomers were united in their opposition to the Vietnam War.

But just as the Baby Boomers were graduating, the Vietnam War was grinding to its inevitable end. They began to drift off into well-paid jobs in business, the bureaucracy, the media and politics, shaving their beards, cutting their long hair and donning conservative suits. Those were golden days (late 1960s-early 1970s) when the happy dilemma faced by many graduates was which job offer to take, not whether there would be a job for them at all. They (we) were quickly and comfortably absorbed into the economic structures of the capitalism of the time, shedding radical ideas and settling down to business as usual. Marcuse had got it wrong. The Boomers turned out to be anything but a revolutionary proletariat.

So, will activists from among the Gen-Z generation suffer the same fate as the Baby Boomers? Will they too become a compromised generation? Possibly not. They are less corruptible than the Boomer radicals of yore. They are no longer a small minority in the voting population. They are better educated and more in touch with local and global political developments. They are in regular contact with like-minded young people around the globe (a positive result of social media). They are globally conscious. They are aware of the need to close the dangerous wealth divide between rich and poor economies. They know that a co-operating world already has the resources to end famines (nearly all human-made) and provide medical care to the majority of the world’s population suffering from preventable diseases. They want practical solutions to these problems, not high-minded speeches by dithering politicians in global forums.

Moreover, thoughtful Gen-Z members realise that the actual political structures of modern states and the mind-sets of their political leaders — especially states with vast military-industrial complexes dominating their economies — have reached their use-by date. They are no longer fit for purpose. They recognise that states (especially those claiming to be “democratic”) are nothing more that politico-cultural structures for entrenching localised power elites, enabling them to exploit their societies and economies in their own interests.

The orthodox Westphalian apology for state sovereignty has proven to be fiction entrenching the privileges of the few at the expense of the many. The most heinous feature of the state sovereignty fiction is that it is the incubator of war. As research and development of war technologies become ever more evil (stealth drones, far-range nuclear missiles, the militarisation of space), Gen-Z understands that war itself must be rendered obsolete if the obliteration of humanity and the destruction of the physical world is to be avoided.

And then there is arguably the wickedest problem of all: global warming and climate change. Astute Gen-Z members are profoundly angry at the abject failure of governments the world over to swiftly and comprehensively adopt measures to ameliorate, if not halt, the ravages that a heated globe means for their futures and the futures of those to come after them. Their understanding is far deeper than the blinkered pragmatism and counterproductive thinking that clouds the vision of the Boomer generations and their immediate successors who presently sit in the seats of power around the contemporary world.

The great challenge now facing thoughtful Gen-Z members will be to devise a radical alternative to the Westphalian fiction. As the Boomer generation that has dominated local, regional and global politics since the end of World War II dies off, opportunities will open up for Gen-Z leaders to invent a different world, one that is based on cosmopolitanism and co-operation in which making an enduring peace is the object. It will be a world that transcends the petty politics of self-interested rulers hiding behind fake claims to state sovereignty while feathering their own nests. Think of Putin, Trump, Xi, Netanyahu, Orban, Khamenei, Kim, and others in their ageing cohort. That generation has never understood what good governance actually means. Good governance is about cultivating the intellectual and physical resources of humankind for the well-being of the entirety of humankind, nothing less.

The ceding of the hollow doctrine of state sovereignty has to be a fundamental step Gen-Z must take towards inventing a world that is truly globalising, not as was forecast by those who thought of it as the Americanisation of the entire world (“globalisation-from-above”). As the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 showed, this was never a solution for anything. Rather, what the world needs is “globalisation-from-below”: grass roots co-operation transcending state borders between individuals and organisations who understand that it is vital for them to work together to meet the dire threats to humanity and the physical world.

The coming of the Gen-Z generation is at hand. Their challenge is to become a genuinely transformative generation.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.