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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]