The coming global population decline

DEMOGRAPHY” STUDENT’S FILE

(4 weeks: April – May)

PLAN

I. Lead-in

· Global demographic trends

· THE COMING GLOBAL POPULATION DECLINE

II. Obligatory material

· Reading 1: THE DEMOGRAPHIC TIME BOMB TRANSFORMING OUR CONTINENT

· Reading 2: GENDERCIDE: THE WORLDWIDE WAR ON BABY-GIRLS

III. Additional texts

· POPULATION PESSIMISM REDUX

· UK’S MESSAGE TO IMMIGRANTS: STAY OUT

· THE DYING BEAR (demographic trends in Russia)

LEAD-IN

PRE-READING QUESTIONS

1. What does demography study?

2. What, in your view, is the role of population issues in international relations?

Read the following extracts on the relevance of demographic issues to international relations and answer the questions:

What demographic trends appear to prevail today?

Whose ideas do you find convincing and why?

Discuss your answers in pairs then share your views as a class.

#1

Population and international affairs today encompasses far more than ever before. States now face challenges ranging from aging, pollution, and population decline to younging, HIV/AIDS, and population growth. These seemingly “soft” issues are increasingly tied to “hard” security and balance of power concerns, as HIV/AIDS threatens to destabilize certain African states. Russia’s military has difficulty maintaining itself, and Japan’s demographic difficulties lead to East Asian power shifts. / Baby Boom or Baby Bust? by Charles B. Keely /

#2

  Remarkably, most conventional wisdom about the shifting balance of world power virtually ignores one of the most fundamental components of power: population. The studies that do consider international security and demographic trends almost unanimously focus on population growth as a liability. In contrast, […] security experts from the Naval War College, the American Enterprise Institute, and other think tanks contend that demographic decline in key world powers now poses a profound challenge to global stability.   The countries at greatest risk are in the developed world, where birthrates are falling and populations are aging. Many have already lost significant human capital, capital that would have helped them innovate and fuel their economy, man their armed forces, and secure a place at the table of world power. /from Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics by Susan Yoshihara, Douglas A. Sylva/

#3

Current population trends are likely to have another major impact: they will make military actions increasingly difficult for most nations. One reason for this change will be psychological. In countries where parents generally have only one or two children, every soldier becomes a "Private Ryan" -- a soldier whose loss would mean overwhelming devastation to his or her family. In the later years of the Soviet Union, for example, collapsing birthrates in the Russian core meant that by 1990, the number of Russians aged 15-24 had shrunk by 5.2 million from 25 years before. Given their few sons, it is hardly surprising that Russian mothers for the first time in the nation's history organized an antiwar movement, and that Soviet society decided that its casualties in Afghanistan were unacceptable. Another reason for the shift will be financial. Today, Americans consider the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower, which it is. As the cost of pensions and health care consume more and more of the nation's wealth, however, and as the labor force stops growing, it will become more and more difficult for Washington to sustain current levels of military spending or the number of men and women in uniform. Even within the U.S. military budget, the competition between guns and canes is already intense. The Pentagon today spends 84 cents on pensions for every dollar it spends on basic pay. Indeed, except during wartime, pensions are already one of the Pentagon's largest budget categories. In 2000, the cost of military pensions amounted to 12 times what the military spent on ammunition, nearly 5 times what the Navy spent on new ships, and more than 5 times what the Air Force spent on new planes and missiles. /from The Global Baby Bust Philip Longman/

#4

  In 2002, Osama bin Laden wrote in his “Letter to America”: “You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, […] You use women to serve passengers, visitors and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.” As this quote indicates, what Al Qaeda is fighting for is a traditional understanding of the family. This is not a minor part of their program: it is at its heart. […]…. Intense controls on women are necessary to maintain the integrity of the family and society. In an interesting way it is all about women, and bin Laden’s letter drives this home. What he hates about America is that it promotes a completely different view of women and the family. Al Qaeda’s view is not unique to Osama bin Laden or Islam. […] the issue of women and the family defines most major religions. Traditional Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism, Orthodox Judaism, and various branches of Buddhism all take very similar positions. All of these religions are being split internally, as are all societies. In the United States, where we speak of “culture wars”, the battlefield is the family and its definition. […] The conflict is going to intensify in the twenty-first century, but the traditionalists are fighting a defensive and ultimately losing battle. The reason is that over the past hundred years the very fabric of human life – and particularly the life of women – has been transformed, and with it the structure of the family. […] The single most important demographic change in the world right now is an overall decline in birthrates. Women are having fewer and fewer children every year. That means not only that the population explosion of the last two centuries is coming to an end but also that women are spending much less time bearing and nurturing children, even as their life expectancy has soared. This seems like a simple fact but it can lead to groups like Al Qaeda and more such groups in the future. [This is the reason] why the European Age, which was built on a perpetually expanding population (whether through conquering other people or having more babies), is being replaced by the American Age – a country in which living with underpopulation has always been the norm. […] Traditionally, declining population has meant declining power. For Europe, this will indeed be the case. But for other countries, like the United States, maintaining population levels or finding technological ways to augment declining population will be essential if political power is to be retained in the next hundred years. /from The Next 100 Years by George Friedman/

Read the article below to find out more about population decline as a global challenge.

THE COMING GLOBAL POPULATION DECLINE

Diplomatic Courier

OCTOBER 5, 2012

By Richard Rousseau

It took tens of thousands of years for humanity to reach its first billion in 1804. But it took only 123 years to reach its second billion, 32 years to reach its third and another 15 years for its fourth. The seventh billion was attained only 13 years after the sixth.

Yet, the United Nations Population Division’s figures released in May 2011 on Western states’ aging workforce provided fresh evidence on the most important trend of our time: the global labor force will peak in 2050 or is already close to peaking in most major economies. If the Industrial Revolution was the main highlight of the 19th century, and competition between sociopolitical ideologies haunted the 20th, then the 21st will be an epoch fixated on the planet’s depopulation, especially in the West and some new industrialized countries. The future humanity faces is not one of overpopulation, but of depopulation.

In most daily controversy, in most emerging economic, political, and social conflicts, the topic of depopulation is likely to be one of the underlying latent factors beneath the surface news. United Nations Statistics Division’s medium variant projections forecasts that the planet will be inhabited by 11 billion humans by 2100, after which date the global population will level off, and even, some say, start to decline sharply. However, birthrates everywhere are falling at a faster rate than most international organizations had previously predicted, so that most demographers maintain that the UN low variant will, in the end, prove closer to the truth. The world’s population is then projected to reach between eight and nine billion between 2040 and 2050. Then, if the trend holds, humanity will enter for the first time into sustained population decline.

There is hardly an academic conference in social sciences or a front-page story in today’s newspapers that is not being connected closely or remotely by the depopulation trend. The Middle East’s Arab Spring, American-European tension, Afghanistan, Iraq, Islamic terrorism, HIV/AIDS in Africa, Japan’s world status, the economic recession in the European Union, all these phenomena are related to the issue of depopulation. In highly industrialized countries, issues of emerging labor shortages in some economic sectors (despite high unemployment rates), urban infrastructure, sustainability of private and public pension plans, immigration policy and public debt are also, at the bottom line, engendered by the impending depopulation.

In an increasing number of regions, depopulation has already begun and is a daily topic of discussion for public authorities. Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian birthrates have already dropped below replacement level, while Indians are having far fewer children than before. Over the past twenty years, Russia’s population has shrunk by 8 million people. Fifty-three out of the 211 designated regions that make up the European Union are experiencing population decline. In the mid-2000s Spain was aggressively courting Argentines to move to the Iberian Peninsula, in an effort to bring to life around 2,000 depopulated towns. Population decline means fewer consumers and fewer workers to support the payment of pensions for the elderly and thus insurance companies that cannot maintain profit margins and growth. For the developed world, population decline means inevitable economic decline.

The explanation for Germany’s and France’s irritability toward the Americans is to be found in the former’s population decline. Thanks mostly to Hispanic new immigrants, the United States remains the only highly developed nation with a healthy birthrate, but because of this situation, the gap in prosperity and world influence between the old and new worlds is widening.

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – all highly developed states – have also many reasons to worry about their birthrate, but their immigrant heritage makes it relatively easier to compensate for a low fertility. These countries’ population and economy should keep on growing throughout the 21st century, inasmuch as they are willing to sustain and even increase the number of immigrants, and provide the funding for infrastructure and services needed to integrate them. However, these new immigrants, almost certainly from Asian and Hispanic descent, will eventually outnumber the European old stock.

In many ex-Soviet republics, nationalist policies and a sluggish economy make it harder to attract immigrants, and the few immigrants ready to settle in these countries are unlikely to support the cause of nationalism, to the chagrin of ethnic nationals. Likewise, in poorer countries, which immigrants tend to avoid, population decline is either under way or imminent. By 2050, many Mediterranean and Scandinavian countries may consist of half a dozen cities separated by scenery.

Depopulation is also helping to drive the international crises of our day. While most of Asia and Latin America are approaching the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa remain the only two places in the world with high birthrates, partly due to these regions’ high poverty, skewed wealth distribution, and the little control women have over their reproductive decisions.

The rapid increase of the Arab population within Israel’s borders threatens to exceed the natural growth of the Jewish population within a few decades. The Bush administration hoped that the ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003, through regime change in Iraq and the introduction of Western-type democracy to the region, would bring down the Arab fertility rate. It is difficult to make prediction on the impact the Arab Spring will have on Middle East birthrates. For their part, Europeans fear to see their homelands swamped by North African and Middle Eastern hordes, a fear that fuels anti-immigrant sentiment.

Population decline, just like the Industrial Revolution from 1750 to 1850, will challenge many societies. Although it will push some into relative decline, a shrinking world population has the potential to reduce disparities between the “First World” and the “Third World” and relieve pressures on the environment. At the beginning of the 2000s some European planners were talking about reforesting parts of the continent. Moreover, no depopulation trend lasts forever since it eventually flattens or reverses. If it wouldn’t be the case, according to one calculation, there would be no ethnic Japanese in Japan within 600 years.

Today’s headlines on international issues have to be put in perspective by keeping in mind that a great demographic revolution lies beneath these surface events. Israeli paranoia over the Palestinians, Italy’s demand for more help from German or French taxpayers, developed countries’ demand for more financial resources from Asian exporters – all these are ultimately a reflection of an uneven depopulation trend. The world’s population hit seven billion on October 31, 2011, but humanity is just not making babies like it used to.

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

1. Which is a greater global threat: overpopulation or depopulation?

2. In what regions of the world has depopulation already begun?

3. What countries are using immigration policy to make up for population decline?

4. What current political processes, according to the author, can be put down to the depopulation trend?

Speak Up

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What implications does population decline have for national, regional, and global economies and policies?

2. Which of them matter most in international relations?

Reading 1

PRE-READING QUESTIONS

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