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Abstract
Against the background of the implementation of the EU Youth Strategy (2010–2018) in Germany, the article explores the question of how European youth policy can be anchored at the municipal level. The article discusses (1) federal and regional efforts to incorporate the municipal level in implementing European youth policy, (2) arising challenges and (3) the significance of European policy for national, regional and municipal youth policy. Results suggest that although the involved actors stipulate the importance of municipal level involvement in designing the implementation of the EU Youth Strategy in Germany, the Strategy is actually implemented as a top-down strategy in which the municipal level receives impulses from other levels, rather than being incorporated in policy development. The article concludes that, in order to successfully strengthening European impulses in sub-national youth welfare discourses, mutual understanding and dialogue between levels is just as necessary as a content-related rather than process-related discussion.

This article deals with the perspectives that European-level youth policy take on young people and youth as a life stage. Drawing on considerations from discourse theory, the Foucault-inspired dispositive of age, we use a combination of content, metaphor and thematic analysis to examine documents published by the EU and the Council of Europe. Our study aims to comparatively reconstruct implicit and explicit understandings of young people and youth as a life stage contained in youth work related and strategic policy documents. We conclude that both perspectives are characterized by the fact that youth is the future of society, but is supposed to shape this future in accordance with contemporary adult society. In this role attributed to youth, young people are described as particularly vulnerable to negative influences and, therefore, need the protection by adults. Youth as an autonomous life stage is only attributed little significance in these perspectives.

Following a lexical search of keywords, the general overview identifies trends in the analysed documents. These trends relate both to the conceptual basics of youth work and to the societal challenges that youth work is responding to. Whereas a keyword like "youth worker" is continuously mentioned in all documents over all years, other keywords follow trends, for example "refugee", which increases from 2018 onwards. Comparing political to professional documents show that political documents focus slightly more on conceptual keywords rather than on keywords associated with societal challenges, whereas professional documents focus slightly more on societal challenges. In summary, the general overview provides a specific pattern of topics that have been discussed in the European institutional discourse on youth work during the past five years: the relationship between youth work and overriding societal challenges; youth work and its support to young people in their personal development; and the framework conditions for youth work that support the previous two discourses. Following this pattern, the paper is divided in three more content-related chapters: the importance of youth work for society; supporting personal development as an important strategy for youth work; and the conceptual basics of youth work.