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rfmcdonaldIn the comments area to my review of Ben Wattenberg's Fewer, Pearsall Helms asked whether Canadian demographics were more similar to the United States' or to Europe's. The latter, I believe, as Statistics Canada has noted.
Québec before the Quiet Revolution had a relatively high birth rate. The Quiet Revolution saw Québec pass rapidly through the demographic transition to one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, provoking policy responses and inspiring serious nationalist concern about the future of Québécois culture. These pundits can now at least take comfort in the fact that, as Statistics Canada demonstrated in 2004, Québec's fertility rate is merely average for Canada, with Atlantic Canada and British Columbia lying significantly below the Canadian average and with the Prairie Provinces resting significantly above the Canadian average. National fertility rates are somewhat higher than Germany's, significantly lower than the United Kingdom's, and, again, well below the United States'. Immigration now dominates Canadian population growth, just as it dominates population growth almost everywhere else in the First and Second Worlds. If, for whatever reason, further immigration halted, the Canadian population would start to shrink in a generation's time.
And you know what? That state of affairs is quite fine.
What is that? Danny raised a lot of good points in his reply. These points merit individual responses, and so, here they are in thematic order.
France didn't fall because it had a particularly low birth rate compared to Germany, or because its population was barely more than half Greater Germany's. France had numerous powerful allies, to say nothing of the second-largest colonial empire in the world to fall back on; France had a military more mechanized than the German. The reasons for French collapse were fundamentally political, lying in the weaknesses of the Third Republic in the context of the depression and in the disaffection of many on the right with the secular and democratic republic of métèques. The most important reason rests in how military doctrine was shaped by the terrible casualties of the First World War, with that war's costly and unproductive offensives seemingly demonstrating that a defensive strategy would be the best use of the French military. Concerns over a low birth rate and relatively small population influenced French policymaking and French public opinion, but they didn't radically alter either process. Failings in French military doctrine led to the fall of France; a France of eighty million could have fallen just as readily.
Interesting that you bring up a Serbian doctor, after all, Serbs used to be a majority in Kosovo; though the primary reason why the Serbs lost their majority was ethnic cleansing they suffered, another reason was a lower birthrate than the Albanians. As a result, Kosovo is no longer theirs.
I think I'm safe in saying that although the details of the ethnographic and demographic histories of Kosova/o continue to be disputed, there is a broad consensus that there was always a proportionally large ethnic Albanian population in the region, perhaps a majority of the region's population by the time that the region was incorporated into the Serbian state in 1912. Certainly, there were enough ethnic Albanians to survive state-sponsored emigration to Kosovo/a and the various Serbian campaigns of brutality, of which the very earliest were described by Trotsky. Although mixed, the interlude of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia gave Kosova/o the best deal, with some concessions to local issues and concerns and the removal of the region from Belgrade's direct rule. The reimposition of direct rule from Belgrade--with an ethnically discriminatory pro-Serb tinge, no less--managed to thoroughly wreck affairs, with the known results. If Serbia has lost Kosova/o, it can blame no one but itself.
I asked on alt.history.future, in a related discussion, for people to name a reguion of the world where there has been, through immigration and fertility differentials, a radical cultural transformation. Four provisos apply.
We haven't gotten an Albanian-majority Serbia. We won't get a Muslim-majority France, and in all likelihood we won't get a Chinese-majority Siberia either. We will get an Arab majority west of the Jordan River in Israel-Palestine, but unless the Israeli government continues the self-destructive policies of the past generation and a half that Arab majority will not exist within the effective frontiers of the State of Israel (admittedly, the odds against this aren't as great as I'd like).
I'd like people to name an example of a given territory that meets my four criteria but yet has seen a radical shift in its ethnic demography. I can't think of any offhand.
Nations that have low productivity are not going to reproduce themselves, will become weaker, and will then be dominated by others.
It isn't obvious that is the case, actually. Consider West Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. West Germany was one of the first major nation-state to see a transition to below-replacement fertility rates; in the early 1980s, judging by TFRs of the period, less than two-thirds of the number of children needed to sustain the levels of current population of some 60 million were being born. In contrast to this, the Soviet Union had a population that was still growing quite vigourously on the whole, despite worryingly high mortality rates. The demographics seemed to suggest West Germany's eventual domination by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, though, West Germany absorbed the Soviets' German satellite state, increasing its territory and population greatly, while the enlarged German state played a pivotal role at the heart of a confederal Europe; the Soviet Union, in contrast, experienced first disintegration then continued sharp decline.
Why did this happen? Demographics played only a minor role in the Soviet-West German competition. West Germany, for starters, was much more economically productive than the Soviet Union, and had a higher overall level of technology. If West Germans had wanted, they could easily have become a major military power, including a nuclear power. They didn't want to do that, though, in large part becase the West German government--and more importantly, the West German people--were far more interested in balanced and egalitarian cooperation with their neighbours, in Europe and the wider world, than the Second Reich or even Weimar Germany. West Germany proved--in NATO, in the EEC, in the UN--that it was a trustworthy partner in all manner of bilateral and multilateral relations, that there was no reason to fear it. So what if West Germany's population was a quarter the size of the Soviet and aging far more rapidly? In every other field--economic, political, technological, cultural--West Germany was far superior to the Soviet Union, hence the eventual outcome.
In the world of 2050, absent radical changes at every level of society, will Ethiopia really be more powerful than Germany just because the former country has four times the population of the latter? Hardly. Iran has almost as many people as Germany already, and Iran is a sizable factor in world politics only because of the size of its oil/natural gas reserves and because almost every other country within a radius of a thousand kilometers is weaker and less developed still. A large population is not a sufficient qualification for a country to be a world power; arguably, it isn't even a necessary qualification. Think of the Dutch Republic in 17th century Europe if you don't believe me.
At CFTAG several Sundays ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pauldrye suggested, rightly, that a technologically advanced economy with continued population growth would be stronger than a technologically advanced economy with a stagnant or declining population. The problem, though, is that even minimal investments in human development--in education, in medical care, in women's rights--seems guaranteed to produce fertility rates plunging far below replacement levels. Some tweaking is possible, certainly, but only tweaking. It seems that it is impossible for a country that's even halfways to modernity to avoid the spectre of a declining population. A developed country with a growing population, I concluded with pauldrye, was a statistical chimera, an artifact of spreadsheets and calculators without any chance of manifesting in reality. After all, even the United States--that most fecund of developed countries--has a fertility rate below replacement levels, fluctuations aside.
Or, at least that's what I thought.
Watch this space for the next installment in this series.
Canada's total fertility rate has been declining, but the American rate has been rising. In 1999, Canadian fertility hit a record low of 1.52 children per woman, compared with the American rate of 2.08, a difference of more than half a child per woman. Only 20 years ago, this gap was less than one-third of that size.
Québec before the Quiet Revolution had a relatively high birth rate. The Quiet Revolution saw Québec pass rapidly through the demographic transition to one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, provoking policy responses and inspiring serious nationalist concern about the future of Québécois culture. These pundits can now at least take comfort in the fact that, as Statistics Canada demonstrated in 2004, Québec's fertility rate is merely average for Canada, with Atlantic Canada and British Columbia lying significantly below the Canadian average and with the Prairie Provinces resting significantly above the Canadian average. National fertility rates are somewhat higher than Germany's, significantly lower than the United Kingdom's, and, again, well below the United States'. Immigration now dominates Canadian population growth, just as it dominates population growth almost everywhere else in the First and Second Worlds. If, for whatever reason, further immigration halted, the Canadian population would start to shrink in a generation's time.
And you know what? That state of affairs is quite fine.
What is that? Danny raised a lot of good points in his reply. These points merit individual responses, and so, here they are in thematic order.
France didn't fall because it had a particularly low birth rate compared to Germany, or because its population was barely more than half Greater Germany's. France had numerous powerful allies, to say nothing of the second-largest colonial empire in the world to fall back on; France had a military more mechanized than the German. The reasons for French collapse were fundamentally political, lying in the weaknesses of the Third Republic in the context of the depression and in the disaffection of many on the right with the secular and democratic republic of métèques. The most important reason rests in how military doctrine was shaped by the terrible casualties of the First World War, with that war's costly and unproductive offensives seemingly demonstrating that a defensive strategy would be the best use of the French military. Concerns over a low birth rate and relatively small population influenced French policymaking and French public opinion, but they didn't radically alter either process. Failings in French military doctrine led to the fall of France; a France of eighty million could have fallen just as readily.
Interesting that you bring up a Serbian doctor, after all, Serbs used to be a majority in Kosovo; though the primary reason why the Serbs lost their majority was ethnic cleansing they suffered, another reason was a lower birthrate than the Albanians. As a result, Kosovo is no longer theirs.
I think I'm safe in saying that although the details of the ethnographic and demographic histories of Kosova/o continue to be disputed, there is a broad consensus that there was always a proportionally large ethnic Albanian population in the region, perhaps a majority of the region's population by the time that the region was incorporated into the Serbian state in 1912. Certainly, there were enough ethnic Albanians to survive state-sponsored emigration to Kosovo/a and the various Serbian campaigns of brutality, of which the very earliest were described by Trotsky. Although mixed, the interlude of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia gave Kosova/o the best deal, with some concessions to local issues and concerns and the removal of the region from Belgrade's direct rule. The reimposition of direct rule from Belgrade--with an ethnically discriminatory pro-Serb tinge, no less--managed to thoroughly wreck affairs, with the known results. If Serbia has lost Kosova/o, it can blame no one but itself.
I asked on alt.history.future, in a related discussion, for people to name a reguion of the world where there has been, through immigration and fertility differentials, a radical cultural transformation. Four provisos apply.
- This candidate state or region must not include two distinct populations with widely different demographic behaviours (Serbia in Kosova/o, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, a hypothetical greater France retaining the Maghreb).
- This candidate state or region must not be a sparsely-populated frontier region in the process of rapid and extensive colonization (the Argentine pampas from the 1870s on, the Eastern Townships of Québec from the 1840s on).
- This candidate state or region cannot experience the ethnic cleansing of established populations (formerly German territories of western Poland, formerly Arab territories in Israel, formerly Estonian areas in the northeast of Estonia proper).
- This candidate state or region cannot be conquered by another state and subjected to a program of intensive colonization (as described recently at The Head Heeb).
We haven't gotten an Albanian-majority Serbia. We won't get a Muslim-majority France, and in all likelihood we won't get a Chinese-majority Siberia either. We will get an Arab majority west of the Jordan River in Israel-Palestine, but unless the Israeli government continues the self-destructive policies of the past generation and a half that Arab majority will not exist within the effective frontiers of the State of Israel (admittedly, the odds against this aren't as great as I'd like).
I'd like people to name an example of a given territory that meets my four criteria but yet has seen a radical shift in its ethnic demography. I can't think of any offhand.
Nations that have low productivity are not going to reproduce themselves, will become weaker, and will then be dominated by others.
It isn't obvious that is the case, actually. Consider West Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. West Germany was one of the first major nation-state to see a transition to below-replacement fertility rates; in the early 1980s, judging by TFRs of the period, less than two-thirds of the number of children needed to sustain the levels of current population of some 60 million were being born. In contrast to this, the Soviet Union had a population that was still growing quite vigourously on the whole, despite worryingly high mortality rates. The demographics seemed to suggest West Germany's eventual domination by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, though, West Germany absorbed the Soviets' German satellite state, increasing its territory and population greatly, while the enlarged German state played a pivotal role at the heart of a confederal Europe; the Soviet Union, in contrast, experienced first disintegration then continued sharp decline.
Why did this happen? Demographics played only a minor role in the Soviet-West German competition. West Germany, for starters, was much more economically productive than the Soviet Union, and had a higher overall level of technology. If West Germans had wanted, they could easily have become a major military power, including a nuclear power. They didn't want to do that, though, in large part becase the West German government--and more importantly, the West German people--were far more interested in balanced and egalitarian cooperation with their neighbours, in Europe and the wider world, than the Second Reich or even Weimar Germany. West Germany proved--in NATO, in the EEC, in the UN--that it was a trustworthy partner in all manner of bilateral and multilateral relations, that there was no reason to fear it. So what if West Germany's population was a quarter the size of the Soviet and aging far more rapidly? In every other field--economic, political, technological, cultural--West Germany was far superior to the Soviet Union, hence the eventual outcome.
In the world of 2050, absent radical changes at every level of society, will Ethiopia really be more powerful than Germany just because the former country has four times the population of the latter? Hardly. Iran has almost as many people as Germany already, and Iran is a sizable factor in world politics only because of the size of its oil/natural gas reserves and because almost every other country within a radius of a thousand kilometers is weaker and less developed still. A large population is not a sufficient qualification for a country to be a world power; arguably, it isn't even a necessary qualification. Think of the Dutch Republic in 17th century Europe if you don't believe me.
At CFTAG several Sundays ago,
pauldrye suggested, rightly, that a technologically advanced economy with continued population growth would be stronger than a technologically advanced economy with a stagnant or declining population. The problem, though, is that even minimal investments in human development--in education, in medical care, in women's rights--seems guaranteed to produce fertility rates plunging far below replacement levels. Some tweaking is possible, certainly, but only tweaking. It seems that it is impossible for a country that's even halfways to modernity to avoid the spectre of a declining population. A developed country with a growing population, I concluded with pauldrye, was a statistical chimera, an artifact of spreadsheets and calculators without any chance of manifesting in reality. After all, even the United States--that most fecund of developed countries--has a fertility rate below replacement levels, fluctuations aside.Or, at least that's what I thought.
Watch this space for the next installment in this series.
