by Paul Morland
As for Russia, although it turned out that it was not yet developed enough in 1914 to sustain a war against Germany and Austria, even when the Central Powers opposed to it were fighting on a second front, the great boom of Russian population then under way would underpin Russia’s rise as a great power. It ensured that, in the subsequent world war, despite the human losses endured by Russia under Bolshevism, the Germans were unable to resist Russia’s seemingly endless reserves of manpower. Russia’s demographic rise, coupled with economic and industrial growth, ensured its eventual emergence as one of two superpowers and its ability, during its demographic heyday, to dominate large swathes of the world during the cold war. In all these momentous events, demography was in the driving seat, disrupting the settled order and determining the outcome of conflicts.
Relevant too was the sheer youth of this booming Europe, a continent very different to the peaceable and greying continent of today. There is a proven link between the youthfulness of a society and its proclivity to go to war.44 It was large, young, enthusiastic populations that backed and egged on the most bellicose politicians; the young who flocked to the streets to celebrate the outbreak of war; the young who eagerly signed up, in so many cases sealing their fates as well as the fate of their continent. Demographic fears had helped feed the conflict. Demographic facts helped determine it.
5
The Passing of the ‘Great Race’
Ensconced in his headquarters in the first months of his campaign against the Soviet Union in the second half of 1941 and early 1942, Adolf Hitler was convinced that his forces had secured the great spaces of the east, which had been his obsession for at least twenty years. Holding a social Darwinist ideology, itself with Malthusian roots and built on a foundation of racial hatred and anti-Semitic fantasy, Hitler saw life as a struggle between the races for land, their means of subsistence. His Table Talk monologues–a series of late-night ramblings and musings–reveal a mind obsessed by matters of ethnic demography.
Hitler felt an urgent need to increase the number of Germans in order to be able to compete with the other world powers, particularly the Americans:
I hope that in ten years there will be from ten to fifteen million more of us Germans in the world… The essential thing for the future is for us to have lots of children… One hundred and thirty million people in the Reich, ninety million in the Ukraine. Add to these the other states of the New Europe and we will be four hundred million compared with one hundred and thirty million Americans.
Besides wishing to outnumber the Americans, Hitler was worried about the rising numbers of non-whites globally:
I read today that India at present numbers three hundred and eighty-three million inhabitants, which means an increase of fifty-five million in the last ten years. It’s alarming. We are witnessing the same phenomenon in Russia. What are our doctors thinking of? Isn’t it enough to vaccinate whites?
Ultimately, he mused, demography would be destiny: ‘The fall in the birth rate, that’s at the bottom of everything… It’s the feeding bottle that will save us.’1
The First World War had among other things been caused by fear and suspicion based on mutual dependence and competitive demography, Britain and France fearing Germany’s growth, Germany fearing Russia’s growth and its own dependence on British goodwill for food supplies. The Second World War was in turn in no small measure the result of Hitler’s obsession with population, although his views were hardly unique. Between these two wars Europe’s population growth picked up and then began to slow, and although Europeans continued to look at each other with fear, they also began to sense that their collective global supremacy was shaky and would be fleeting.
War, Flu and Population
One of the abiding consequences of the Great War is that a generation of boys never came home. In Britain, the figure was 700,000 (excluding the colonies); in Germany it was 1.75 million; in Russia it was almost 2 million and a million and a half each for Austria-Hungary and France. Overall, the war dead approached 10 million men. This entailed a shortage of husbands, and in an era when birth outside marriage was rare, women who never married usually remained childless. The impact, however, was reduced because women adjusted the age of the men they married and because fewer men emigrated.2 The British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The Demographic Consequences of the War was never written, but the consequences themselves were seismic across Europe and were still reverberating long after the problems of reparations and trade that so troubled Keynes had been forgotten.
But population was receiving more attention. In 1919 Keynes wrote that ‘the great events of history are due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen’. Keynes saw the war as the product of an age when Europe had gone from local to global economic dependency; in 1914, a highly industrialised Germany depended on the world for its markets, its raw materials and its food in a way it had not in 1814. This global interdependence was the cause and the result of booming populations, and it created insecurities that themselves contributed to the war. Germany depended on the good offices of the Royal Navy for some of its food and to supply its industries, and on British Free Trade policies for access to its markets beyond Europe. This resulted in tensions that, in Keynes’s view, were the most important factor in explaining the global nature of the recent conflict. Growing populations were a fundamental part of this new interdependent world in which reliance bred rivalry and suspicion.
On top of the losses of war there was the Spanish flu which followed the war, killing 25–50 million worldwide. In the recent wave of Arab uprisings there has been much mention of the Sykes–Picot agreement, which was responsible for many of the now seemingly unsustainable borders in the Middle East; Sir Mark Sykes, the British side of the duo, died of the flu in 1919, at the age of just thirty-nine. Walt Disney (aged just sixteen) and Franklin Roosevelt survived it, going on in their different ways to make their mark on the coming era. The British writer Anthony Burgess recounted how in early 1919 ‘my father, not yet demobilised, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to [our home in] Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and my sister dead. The Spanish influenza pandemic had struck… I apparently was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room.’3 The scope of the flu was global. In a remote corner of Canada a girl of eight survived her parents and two siblings, keeping herself alive by burning Christmas candles to melt the snow: a local clergyman, coming upon her, reported that ‘the huskies now began to eat the dead bodies and the child was a spectator at this horrible incident’.4
Nonetheless, the population of Europe, North America and indeed the world continued to grow. When the human tide is in full flow, when mortality drops and fertility holds up, the underlying force for growth can be so strong that it offsets the losses from all but the most murderous calamities. War losses of 10 million represent little more than 2% of the population of Europe at the outbreak of the conflict in 1914. For a population growing at the pace of Russia’s before the war, making up a loss of 2% of the population would take little more than eighteen months; for a population growing at the pace of, say, Yemen’s in the early 1990s, making up 2% would take less than six months.
So Europe’s population carried on growing, albeit at a much reduced rate. When things returned to ‘normal’ at the close of the war, those forces of modernisation which had brought down the death rate and extended life expectancy first in Britain continued to spread across the Continent. However, the forces which then depressed childbearing and population growth also began to spread, and in the 1930s the growth of Europe’s population slowed.
In the first part of the nineteenth century, the European population was growing at just under 0.7% per annum, quite fast from the long historical view up to that point.
It accelerated to 0.9% in the last thirty years of the century and then to slightly over 1% in the years immediately before the First World War. (It should be borne in mind that a sustained rate of over 1% was historically remarkable at a national, never mind a continent-wide level.) In 1913–20 the rate of growth was still positive despite the war, albeit at less than a third of its previous level: not even the First World War and the flu pandemic had been enough to reverse or halt the human tide, although they had certainly slowed it. Europe’s population growth revived in the 1920s–which was not surprising given the period of war–but was more than a tenth below its early twentieth-century level. In the 1930s it slowed further.5 The war had disrupted what would probably have been a gentler trend of slowdown for Europe as a whole, and this trend from a very high peak resumed in the war’s wake. Gentle though the trend may have been at a continental level, it was sharper for some countries than others. This growth trend was in fact the product of three factors: a sharp reduction in births, a steep fall in deaths, and a near halt in emigration, the latter two more than compensating for the first. Given that a population’s size can be determined by only three things (births, deaths and the balance of migration), how exactly were the first two ‘natural’ changes playing out in what would become known as interwar Europe?
Europe’s Great Slowdown
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the demographic revolution which had struck Britain was widening its scope to Germany, Russia and beyond. As the tide began to ebb in Britain it was still flowing in Germany, and as it began to ebb in Germany, it was still flowing in Russia. Each of these successive tides was more pronounced than the last. Germany’s population growth was more rapid than Britain’s, but then it fell more rapidly. Russia’s population rise was more rapid than Germany’s but fell more quickly in turn.6 The reasons for this are clear. The pioneer moves tentatively along an uncleared path, while the better trodden the path, the more rapidly successors can follow. The techniques of public and personal health can be more rapidly adopted when they are understood, tried and tested. This means that death rates, the key driver of population growth, can fall more quickly. In this, demography is like economics. Britain’s industrial take-off in the nineteenth century was fast by previous standards but slow by the standards of those who came later and were not painfully cutting a new path but following one already charted, adopting techniques and technologies already adopted elsewhere.
Britain as ever was the leader of the pack, the first to experience explosive modern population growth and the first to witness a falling fertility rate and flagging population growth rates. By the eve of the First World War, fertility rates were down to below three children per woman and falling. After the First World War, British fertility rates continued to fall. Fertility sank to around two in the late 1920s and during the 1930s to below two. This is below what is today called ‘replacement level’, the level required to keep a population stable in the long term, which is slightly above two. It is striking that in the era immediately before the Second World War, British fertility rates were quite similar to what they are today, nearly eighty years later (there have been some fluctuations in between).
Before the First World War, German fertility rates were tumbling too, albeit from a higher level. Afterwards, Germany’s fertility rate also slumped further, likewise falling below two children per woman by the early 1930s. My own family–who were living in Germany until the late 1930s–is a typical example of this: my great-grandparents, born in the middle of the nineteenth century, were mostly part of large families of around six children; my grandparents, born between the early 1880s and the period immediately before the First World War, had one or two siblings; and my parents, born in the 1920s and 1930s, were in one case a single child and in the other one of a pair. The perpetually fertile German over whom French writers and military planners had fretted a couple of decades earlier turned out to be a phantom. Concern about the low birth rate spanned the political spectrum; the left-wing SPD agreed ‘unequivocally that maternity was a woman’s social task’ and that ‘women had a duty as protectors and rearers of the species’.7
French women, meanwhile, were carrying on much as normal. French fertility rates in the interwar years fell only slightly, from a little under two and a half to a little over two. Not having been very high in the first place, French fertility rates did not have so far to fall. France’s birth rate benefitted in this respect from the country’s remaining relatively rural in an era when it was urban areas in which fertility was declining and country areas in which it remained high. Whereas in the UK in the 1930s around three-quarters of people lived in urban conurbations, and in Germany well over two-thirds, in France it was barely half. Along with matters of mortality and migration discussed below, this meant that France’s perennially slow population growth in contrast to the UK’s and Germany’s was much diminished. Whereas prior to the First World War France’s population growth was a fraction of Germany’s and the UK’s, during the interwar years the margin was much smaller.
If the UK was the leader of the pack, Germany a close follower and France an exception, then Russia was an extreme case. Russian fertility had been higher in the early twentieth century than it had been in the UK or Germany at their peaks (more like seven children per woman than five or six), so the fall, when it came, was faster than further west. By the late 1920s Russian fertility was down to six children per woman and by the eve of the Second World War down again, to around four and a half. This was still very high and a major contributor to continuing population growth, but the speed of the fall was the harbinger of what was to prove a very low Russian fertility rate. That fertility rates fell so fast in Russia should not be a surprise; the country was undergoing a forced, rapid, top-down transformation. Many of the goals closest to the heart of the new Soviet regime–general and particularly female literacy, urbanisation and the participation of women in the workforce–are now understood to be closely associated with lower fertility rates. The ideal Soviet woman was politically conscious (and therefore, almost by definition, literate), living in a town or city and probably employed in a factory; she was bound to have fewer children than her illiterate peasant mother. Elsewhere in Europe the pattern was similar. Italian women, who were bearing more than four children before the First World War, were bearing fewer than three by the outbreak of the Second.8 And although the image of the large Italian family lived on long into the second half of the twentieth century, it was by then nothing more than a myth.
At a national level, data on declining fertility disguises some underlying patterns and regional variations. Within a particular country, the pace of development and therefore its position in the demographic transition was often variable. Channels of communication, cultural association and religious belief were particularly important in impacting regional trends, with low fertility rates spreading from France to Catalonia and Piedmont but not to more distant and less industrialised parts of Spain and Italy.9 Protestant and industrial areas in Germany had the lowest fertility rates in the country, while peripheral and agricultural areas had the highest. In central Europe low fertility rates seemed to spread down the Danube to areas most accessible to the influence of Viennese modernity, while Upper Austria and the Czech lands were somewhat more resistant to the trend towards smaller families. In the Balkans, the areas which had fallen within the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Romania and Yugoslavia witnessed faster falling fertility than those areas which had been outside the Hapsburg lands before the First World War. In Russia, too, rural areas retained the highest fertility rates, as would be expected.
Part of the story of the fall in fertility is the fact that a large share of populations moved from the high-fertility countryside to the low-fertility town or city. Meanwhile, a remarkable development in Europe was the increasing collection of data, which afforded a more detailed and reliable picture of what was happening on the ground. This was partly thanks to the existence of the League of Na
tions, which was able to gather standardised information on births and deaths. Precisely how lower fertility was achieved is not entirely clear, just as in earlier times, but contraception was becoming more widely known about and available. In Britain, Marie Stopes championed ‘planned parenthood’, publishing Married Love in 1918, offering advice on contraception, and opening family planning clinics across the country; and while she certainly met resistance, it was by now far less than the earlier generation of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant had encountered. However, the methods of contraception available were not always cheap or reliable, as the following ditty suggests: ‘Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes / Read a book by Marie Stopes / But to judge from her condition / She must have read the wrong edition.’10
The fertility slowdown certainly had the effect of reducing population growth but on the other hand, mortality was still falling in many parts of Europe, and this had the effect of propping up population growth. Life expectancy in England was just under fifty-four years at birth in 1910 and by 1930 had risen to over sixty. Fewer people joined the population through birth, but fewer left through death. This was achieved through rising living conditions and better access to health care, particularly for children. In France, life expectancy rose over the same period from slightly over fifty to a little short of fifty-six, and in Germany from forty-nine to over sixty-one, just surpassing England. The data at this time is less dependable for Russia, but it is known that life expectancy increased from thirty-two years in 1910 (for Russia) to sixty-seven (for the Soviet Union) between 1910 and 1950, a quite extraordinary increase against the background of terror and famine.11 Just as the human tide, when in full flow, could not entirely be held back by war or pandemic, neither could it be held back by one of the most murderous regimes in history.