The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent - Hardcover

ONE

Europe Shrinking

MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, A MILLER, was born in 1850 and lived in Upper Silesia. He had six children. Three of his six children had no children of their own, two had two each, and one had a single child. This, in a nutshell, is the story of the rise and decline of the population of Europe. The average European family had five children in the nineteenth century, but this number declined steadily until it fell below the reproduction rate (2.2) in the major European countries before the outbreak of World War I. There were brief periods when the trend went in the opposite direction, for instance the baby boom after World War II, when the birthrate in all European countries rose above 2.2 and in some nations, such as the Netherlands, Ireland, and Portugal, above 3.0. But this lasted for less than a decade, and since the late 1950s the decline has continued. At present the total fertility rate for Europe is 1.37. (The crude birthrate is the number of births per 1,000 persons per year.) To give another example, in Italy and in Spain in the early years of the twenty-first century, about half as many children were born as around 1960. This trend continues, and it is difficult to think why there should be a lasting reversal. In a hundred years the population of Europe will be only a fraction of what it is today, and in two hundred years some countries may have disappeared.

It is certainly a striking trend considering that only a hundred years ago Europe was the center of the world. Africa consisted almost entirely of European colonies, and India was the jewel of the British empire. Germany, France, and Russia had the strongest armies in the world, Britain the strongest navy. The European economy was leading the world. America was making rapid progress, but it still had a long way to go, and few were taking notice. Politically and culturally, only London and Paris, Berlin and Vienna counted; there was no good reason that European students should attend American universities, which were behind the European in every respect.

But there were clouds on the horizon, for instance the Russian revolution of 1905. But in Russia, too, there was considerable economic progress. There were tensions between the European powers, but there had been no war for several decades, and a war seemed unlikely. The confidence of Europe was unbroken. The world population in 1900 was about 1.7 billion, of whom one out of four lived in Europe. Europe’s population was about six times that of the United States, which was 76 million at the time. Then World War I broke out with its horrible devastation and its many millions of victims—some 8.5 million soldiers died and 13 million civilians perished from starvation, disease, and massacres—followed by revolutions, civil war, inflation, and mass unemployment. Europe had become considerably weaker, but it was still the center of the world, the leading force.

All the while the population clock was ticking away, but few paid attention because in absolute figures the population of Europe continued to increase, and people were living longer. But Europe’s numbers grew much more slowly than the population in other parts of the world. If the population of Europe had been 422 million in the year 1900, it was 548 million in 1950 and 727 million in 2000. In fact, there were false alarms from time to time of overpopulation. When I went to school in Germany (beginning before the Nazi takeover), the teachers talked at great length about the need for more lebensraum, “living space.” The famous bestseller of that period was Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space). The author had lived for many years in South Africa, and he thought, like many others, that agriculture was the most important pillar of the national economy and determined the health of the nation. This was wrong even at the time (before the great technological revolution in agriculture), and Hitler, too, had accepted that for building up and maintaining a big, modern army developing heavy industry was more important than growing potatoes and tomatoes. But even after World War II the fairy tale of European overpopulation found for a while influential supporters such as the Club of Rome, which published 30 million copies of a report in 1972 about the limits of growth that preached precisely this warning about overpopulation.

What was the reason for the steady decline of the birthrate in Europe? This is a question not easy to answer because the trend took place all over the continent—in countries of very different character in north and south, in west and east, in Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox countries, among the very rich and the relatively poor. For this reason it does not come as a surprise that there is no unanimity among demographers on this question. The birth control pill played a certain role but probably not a decisive one. More important was the fact that more and more women accepted (or felt compelled to accept) working full-time and did not want their careers interrupted by pregnancies and the need to take care of their babies. To give but one example, half of the female scientists in Germany are childless. Most important in all probability was the fact that the institution of the family had greatly declined in value and esteem. Families became outmoded; many wanted to enjoy themselves, not to be tied down by all kinds of obligations and responsibilities. Thus the apparent paradox that at the very time when Europeans could afford to have more children than at any time in the past they had many fewer children.

Given this decline, what are the predictions for the future? According to the estimates of the United Nations and the European Community (“World Population Prospects” and “Eurostat”), the population of France will decline only slightly, from about 60 million at present to 55 million in 2050 and 43 million at the end of the century, but the number of ethnic French will decline rapidly. A similar trend is forecast for the United Kingdom: from 60 million at present to 53 million in 2050 and 45 million in 2100. Most other European countries would fare considerably worse. Thus the population of Germany, 82 million at present, will decline to 61 million in 2050 and 32 million in 2100. The decline of Italy and Spain would be drastic. Italy counts some 57 million inhabitants at present; this is expected to shrink to 37 million at midcentury and 15 million by 2100. The figures for Spain are 39 million at present, declining to 28 million in 2050 and 12 million at the end of the century. All these predictions do not take into account immigration in the decades to come.

The projected population losses for Eastern Europe for midcentury are even more catastrophic:

By 2050, according to these sources, only Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, and perhaps Sweden will still be growing. This is only part of the overall picture, however. For once societies become overage, the number of those able to produce children falls rapidly and the decline gathers momentum. For the first time in history there are more people aged over sixty than under twenty in major European countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain, and Greece. The other factor that has to be taken into account is that the relatively slow decline in countries such as France and Britain will be the result of the relatively high fertility rate among the immigrant communities—black and North African in France and Pakistani and Caribbean in Britain.

It is true that there has...