EU implosion, update #7: Demographic collapse in Germany, cont'd.

Germany's population plunge proceeds apace, despite a financial incentive program.  Reuters, November 12:

The number of births in Germany fell to a record post-war low last year despite government investment of billions of euros on incentives to counter the country's shrinking population.

Germany has a population of 82 million but the low birth rates mean average ages are rising, hampering the development of Europe's largest economy. The tide of immigration that fed the post world war two economic expansion has also now been reversed with new immigration controls.

The Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden reported that there were 665,126 children born in 2009, down from 682,514 in 2008. The annual birth rate has fallen by more than 100,000 a year in the last decade from 770,774 births registered in 1999.

An official at the statistics office said the 2009 figure was the lowest number of births in Germany since 1945, when 520,000 children were born.

Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

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EU implosion, update #6: Demographic collapse in Germany

In 2005 I did a series of posts outlining various political and demographic forces working against the attempted creation of the european superstate. 

How are they doing now? Even if political integration succeeds at first, it’s only a matter of time before the demographic time bomb alters the region beyond the recognition of anybody now living.

A January 21 article in German news website “The Local” outlines the challenge now facing that country:

Official figures on Thursday showed Germany's population shrank for the seventh year in a row in 2009, defying Chancellor Angela Merkel's bid to boost the country's birth rate.

The population was "81.8 to 81.7 million at the end of 2009," the Federal Statistics Office said, compared to 82.0 million in 2008. The number of births also dropped.

Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe - 1.4 children per woman - and data released in November suggested that at current rates, the country's population could shrink by up to 17 million in the next 50 years.

The article goes on to note the two major solutions that have been proposed.  Chancellor Merkel has introduced various incentives to encourage Germans to have more kids, but they don’t appear to be accepting the challenge.

That leaves massive immigration as the only real alternative.

Prof. Ralf E. Ulrich, a demographics specialist at the University of Bielefeld, said the figures were a wake up call for Germany to start a societal and political discussion about making the country more attractive to immigrants. He said the alternative would be forcing people to work much longer than they do now and slashing Germany's pension benefits.

Despite the fact that Germany would eventually be transformed into a country that is no longer German, natives are most likely to accept this solution, since it involves the least amount of personal inconvenience and allows the country’s welfare state to stagger along for a few more years… at least until the future majority population changes the laws more to their liking.

Demographic collapse in socialist paradise

Mark Steyn writes that Vermont (a state renowned for not only tolerating socialists, but electing them as well) is suffering demographic collapse, with children composing a steadily decreasing percentage of an otherwise-stable population:

Throughout Vermont, student enrollment at public elementary and secondary schools is declining. According to figures from the state’s Department of Education, there were 104,559 students at those schools during the 1999–2000 school year. Last year, that figure was down to 92,572.

Which is quite a drop. In fact, Vermont school enrollments have declined 13 years in a row. Since 1996, they’ve fallen by 13 percent, slumping below 100,000 in 2004 and projected to fall below 90,000 in 2014.

This blog has previously remarked on an identical phenomenon occurring in another leftwing paradise, San Francisco.

This may explain the Democrat Party’s seemingly insatiable desire to import voters – they’re trying to replace the ones they’re not (re)producing themselves.

Japan slowly commits demographic suicide

It's sad to see a culture implicitly make the decision to vanish from the face of the earth, however slowly.

Many native European peoples are making similar choices, but it's less obvious there, because their population implosion is masked by uncontrolled immigration from third-world countries.

Japan strictly limits immigration, so there is no hiding the fact that the sound of children there is slowly diminishing. AP via CNSNews, May 6:

Japan, which designates every May 5 as Children's Day, has fewer children to celebrate the holiday for the 28th straight year, underscoring a demographic dilemma that could eventually wreak havoc on the world's second-largest economy.

A government report released this week said the number of children under age 15 as of April 1 had fallen to about 17 million. Japan's proportion of children which has been declining for the past 35 years now stands at just 13 percent of the country's 128 million people.

In contrast, Japan's elderly population is swelling. The number of those over 65 years old has reached 22.5 percent and continues to climb.

The unprecedented changes to Japan's population, fueled by low birthrates and one of the world's highest life expectancies, are expected to strain government services and pension programs, as well as lead to labor shortages in the near future.

Japan now has the lowest percentage of children among 31 major countries, trailing Germany and Italy, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications report. Children make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population and 17 percent in neighboring South Korea.

(Photo found here)

Selfish Americans, Europeans, Russians and Japanese threaten Third World by failing to reproduce

An August 23 AP article sounds the familiar theme that global population growth is being led by developing countries. But then the article takes an interesting twist:

The rapid growth in developing countries, combined with declining birth rates in some industrialized nations could affect the ability of the wealthy to aid the poor, said a demographer who prepared the group's report.

The global wealth transfer from the pockets of the taxpayers of the developed world to the pockets of the leaders of the developing world is gravely threatened by this trend.

If things continue in this way, the developing countries may be forced to raise themselves by their own bootstraps, rather than ours.

(P.S. Before anyone accuses me of being a cruel, heartless monster who hates the poor, please note that my main point can be found in the third paragraph.)

Abortion rate exceeds birth rate in Russia

Russia is dying.

Bloomberg reports that reported abortions outnumbered live births by more than 100,000 last year in that country—there were likely many more unreported abortions. Add to this the facts that the death rate (out-of-womb death rate, that is) exceeds the birth rate by 50%, and that there is no immigrant inflow worth speaking of, and we have a significant geopolitical disaster in the making.

A vanishing Russia has nothing to fear from its European neighbors (who are dealing with their own population crisis), but it has plenty to fear from its neighbors to the south: the Muslims in Central Asia and the mineral-hungry Chinese in East Asia, neither of which would hesitate to move northward at the opportune time.

Interestingly, Russian scientists blame the abortion rate on poverty—which makes sense until one realizes that most poverty-stricken countries have out of control birth rates. Europeans have apparently decided that children are a hindrance to their pursuit of happiness, and it looks like many Russians have concluded the same.


(Credit: Adam's Blog)

EU implosion, update #5: The wolves are returning to Germany

Newsweek International, July 4 issue:

Wolves returning to the heart of Europe? A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat. Wolf-country villages like Boxberg and Weisswasser are emptying out, thanks to the region's ultralow birthrate and continued rural flight. Nearby Hoyerswerda is Germany's fastest-shrinking town, losing 25,000 of its 70,000 residents in the last 15 years.

Such numbers are a harbinger of the future. Home to 22 of the world's 25 lowest-birthrate countries, Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030 even with continued immigration, according to the latest U.N. Population Division report. The biggest decline will hit rural Europe. As Italians, Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely half the children needed to maintain the status quo—and rural flight continues to suck people into Europe's suburbs and cities—the countryside will lose close to a third of its population, say both the United Nations and the EU. "It's a triple time bomb," says University of Lisbon demographer Nuno da Costa. "Too few children, too many old people and too many of the remaining young people still leaving the village."

Chuck Colson also comments on the "birth dearth" in Europe (as well as Japan):

Now, wolves in Berlin sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s a science fact. What’s incredible is the response of the average European or East Asian. They literally shrug their shoulders; they can’t imagine changing their lifestyle to accommodate having two or more children instead of one or none. They believe against all evidence in a technological or political solution to this problem.

But, as columnist Mark Steyn writes, “there’s simply no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe’s”—or Japan, for that matter. Throughout history, societies in demographic decline, usually as a result of disease, have faced two unattractive options: a decline in their standard of living or the replacement of their native population with a more fertile immigrant one.

Europe has, essentially by default, chosen the latter. But as last week’s bombings in London illustrate, turning millions of Islamic immigrants into “Europeans,” however you define the term, is a dubious proposition. And in Japan, where racial purity is a primary cultural value, the population faces eventual extinction.

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EU implosion, update #4

WaPo's Robert Samuelson describes in a June 15 article how the term "Old Europe" is developing a more ominous meaning:

The End of Europe

Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we've heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Brussels, the E.U. capital; and an irrational backlash against globalization. Whatever their truth, these theories miss a larger reality: Unless Europe reverses two trends -- low birthrates and meager economic growth -- it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived.

Ever since 1498, after Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened trade to the Far East, Europe has shaped global history, for good and ill. It settled North and South America, invented modern science, led the Industrial Revolution, oversaw the slave trade, created huge colonial empires, and unleashed the world's two most destructive wars. This pivotal Europe is now vanishing -- and not merely because it's overshadowed by Asia and the United States.

It's hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling. Europe's birthrates have dropped well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children for each woman of childbearing age. For Western Europe as a whole, the rate is 1.5. It's 1.4 in Germany and 1.3 in Italy. In a century -- if these rates continue -- there won't be many Germans in Germany or Italians in Italy. Even assuming some increase in birthrates and continued immigration, Western Europe's population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030 that would be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.

No one knows how well modern economies will perform with so many elderly people, heavily dependent on government benefits (read: higher taxes). But Europe's economy is already faltering. In the 1970s annual growth for the 12 countries now using the euro averaged almost 3 percent; from 2001 to 2004 the annual average was 1.2 percent. In 1974 those countries had unemployment of 2.4 percent; in 2004 the rate was 8.9 percent.

Wherever they look, Western Europeans feel their way of life threatened. One solution to low birthrates is higher immigration. But many Europeans don't like the immigrants they have -- often Muslim from North Africa -- and don't want more. One way to revive economic growth would be to reduce social benefits, taxes and regulations. But that would imperil Europe's "social model," which supposedly blends capitalism's efficiency and socialism's compassion.

Read on. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion— you're fully aware of the impending doom for the train passengers, but all you can do is look on in helpless fascination.

Right Mind takes a look at how the US is doing in comparison.


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EU implosion, update #3

The tide seems to be turning against the political integration of Europe. In just a few days, we've seen voters in France and Holland give the smackdown to their elites by voting down the atrocity known as the EU constitution, and the Financial Times reports that polls in Denmark and the Czech Republic aren't very promising. (We also have news that a minister in the Italian government is publicly suggesting that Italy consider dumping the euro and going back to the lira, but grumbling on that front is a side issue.)

The European elites, seeing which way the wind is blowing, appear ready to discard the document and start over again with a governing model that does much more to respect individual liberty as well as the sovereignty of member states.

Just kidding. They're realizing the folly of asking what their subjects think of this new superstate, so for the time being they may simply stop asking. Denmark, Portugal, Britain and Ireland are all considering postponing referenda in an attempt to diffuse some of the anti-union momentum.

The FT article also reports that:

Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor, is spearheading an attempt to keep the ratification process on track and is scheduled to meet Jacques Chirac, French president, in Berlin on Saturday.

Am I reading this correctly? He seems to be suggesting that overwhelming public disapproval of the treaty shouldn't stand in the way of its ratification. Are the referenda a required prerequisite to ratification? If not, then why have they been held? Were the elites so insulated from public opinion ("Everyone I know is for ratification") that they truly were surprised by these results?

And to think that many on the American left wonder why we don't try harder to be like Europe.


UPDATE: Looks like the Germans are having second thoughts about the euro as well.


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EU implosion, update #2

More evidence that the EU will inevitably collapse under the weight of bureaucracy and regulation:

Horse passports rule introduced

Every horse, donkey and pony in England and Wales is now required to have its own passport.

The regulations come in response to a European directive aimed at preventing horses treated with certain drugs from being sold as horsemeat.

The documents will identify each individual horse and show a record of which medicines the animal has taken.

The passports cost around £20 each but owners face fines of up to £1,000 if they fail to comply with the new rules.

Animals without a passport cannot be sold or exported, moved from one place to another or slaughtered for human consumption.

EU implosion, update #1

I doubt that I gave him the idea [brief pause as you laugh hysterically at the thought], but Mark Steyn is also advancing the notion that the European Union is doomed to implosion, and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Among other things, he shows how this political entity's founding document is more of a suicide pact:

Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

Despite the absurd complexity of the proposed constitution, it appears that it will be ratified, thus sealing the EU's doom. How long will it take? What action, if any, should the US take to delay the inevitable? Steyn, as usual, has an opinion on this:

[T]he fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.

...Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.

Yet another reason the EU is doomed to implode sooner or later

History shows that nation-states are most likely to succeed when organized around a common culture and a common language. The entity known as the European Union possesses neither of these, of course. The EU is trying to deal with the former by attempting to create a common European culture ex nihilo. As for the latter, National Geographic News reports that they're not even going to try to tackle this one yet:

The European Union has been operating in 20 official languages since ten new member states joined the legislative body last year. With annual translation costs set to rise to 1.3 billion dollars (U.S.), some people question whether EU institutions are becoming overburdened by multilingualism.

Brussels, Belgium, the European Union's headquarters city, is fast getting a reputation as the new Babel. Parliamentary sessions are conducted 20 languages simultaneously. With further countries soon to join the EU, some analysts fear the effectiveness of its institutions could be getting lost in translation.

Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, and Slovene are the most recent tongues to become official EU languages. With the countries of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania also on the EU membership waiting list, the body is due to accommodate several more languages by 2010.

Even before expansion in 2004, the EU ran the world's largest translation operation—twice as big as that of the United Nations, which has six official languages.

EU institutions currently require around 2,000 written-text translators. They also need 80 interpreters per language per day, half of which operate at the European Parliament. The total annual cost of EU multilingualism will soon rise from 875 million dollars U.S. (670 million euros) to 1.3 billion dollars U.S. (1 billion euros), according to the European Commission, the union's executive body.

The European Parliament requires some 60 interpreters to help elected politicians from the 25 member states understand each other. These interpreters work in soundproofed booths, translating the words of European members of Parliament (MEPs). Even so, unfamiliar words or phrases can leave interpreters lost for words, says Struan Stevenson, a British MEP.

Referring to a debate last month, Stevenson said, "The system ground to a sudden halt when a British MEP described the EU Constitution as 'gobbledygook.' Apparently there is no such word in Polish and some of the other East European languages. The interpreters were flummoxed—and that's another word they'd find hard to tackle."

Comic misunderstandings can arise that become part of Brussels lore. For instance, during an agricultural working group session, "frozen semen" was translated into French as "frozen seamen."

Another MEP recalls how the expression "out of sight, out of mind" became "invisible lunatic" after a computer-aided translation.

Read on. The EU government appears to be an attempt at a full implementation of the ideologies of the Left; the people of America would be wise to learn the lessons offered by the EU's disastrous misadventures.