In another 25 years or so, most of Western Europe will
be third world.
Europe's Two Culture Wars
In Germany, neither last year's election campaign nor the recently installed Christian Democratic government of Angela Merkel has addressed the impending distress of Germany's state health-care and pension systems, in which a shrinking number of taxpaying workers will have to support an increasing number of retirees. Meanwhile, thanks to the same demographic trends, Germany will likely lose the equivalent of the entire population of the former East Germany by mid-century. Although German president Horst Köhler has publicly campaigned for raising the country's fertility rate, now standing at 1.39, a recent poll indicates that 25 percent of German men and 20 percent of German women in their twenties intend to have no children?-and see no problem with that choice.
Then there is Italy, whose large extended families have long been a staple of the world's imagination. The truth of the matter is far different: by 2050, on present trends, almost 60 percent of Italians will not know, from personal experience, what a brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or cousin is. But this is perhaps not surprising in a country in which the average age of a man at the birth of his first child is thirty-three and the number of those over sixty-five considerably exceeds the number of those under fifteen. (Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Greece also have more over-sixty-fives than under-fifteens.) Nor is the meltdown limited to "Old Europe"; by 2050 Bulgaria's population is projected to fall by 36 percent, and Estonia's by 52 percent.
Over the next quarter-century, the number of workers in Europe will decline by 7 percent while the number of over-sixty-fives will increase by 50 percent, trends that will create intolerable fiscal difficulties for the welfare state across the continent. The resulting inter-generational strains will place great pressures on national politics, and those pressures may, in a variety of ways, put paid to the project of "Europe" as it has been envisioned ever since the European Coal and Steel Community, the institutional forerunner of today's European Union, was established in 1952. Demography is destiny, and Europe's demographics of decline?-which are unparalleled in human history absent wars, plagues, and natural catastrophes?-are creating enormous and unavoidable problems.
