by Paul Morland
Whereas Soviet Russia wavered somewhat in its attitude to motherhood and childbearing, attitudes in fascist Italy were more consistent when it came to traditional sexual morals and the role of women more generally. Despite his initial differences with the Catholic Church, Mussolini supported the Church’s teaching on contraception and abortion in making population one of the country’s four national ‘battles’ (the others being for land, grain and a stronger lira). In 1927 he declared: ‘I assert that a prerequisite, if not a fundamental aspect, of the political power of a nation, and so of its economic and moral power, is its demographic strength… Gentlemen! In order to count for something in the world, Italy must greet the second half of this century with no fewer than 60 million inhabitants.’55 This represented a 50% increase on the population size at the time. Bans on abortion and contraceptives were enforced, bachelor taxes increased and loans offered for families. Despite these policies, the impact on the Italian population was not dramatic, with Italy continuing to follow a path quite common to European countries. The population did rise from 37 million in 1920 to 47 million by 1950, but this was well short of Mussolini’s target, representing an annual growth over the period of around 1%. And the gain was not achieved through any victory in the ‘battle for births’–fertility rates fell from over four children per woman before the First World War to three by the late 1930s–but by a falling mortality rate and lengthening life expectancy–from forty-seven in 1910 to sixty-six by 1950–and by a dramatic fall in Italian emigration to around 6% of the level it had been before the First World War by the late 1930s.56
Hitler was obsessed by demography. His genocidal views stemmed from a perception of population quality, but we should not overlook his views on the quantitative issues more commonly concerning political leaders at the time. Half a million Germans had flocked into the country from the lands ceded to Poland after the First World War and another 132,000 from Alsace-Lorraine, but by the outbreak of war in 1939 hundreds of thousands of Jews had fled the country. There were already pro-natalist elements within the Weimar Republic, but these came to the fore with the Third Reich, where Mother’s Day became an official holiday and some assistance as well as encouragement was given to those prepared to bear large families. The Mother Cross was instituted for women having more than three children (bronze), more than five (silver) or more than seven (gold). Abortion was made a capital crime during the Second World War. In 1934 Hitler declared: ‘German women want above all to be wives and mothers… They do not yearn for the factory nor the office nor for Parliament. A cosy home, a dear husband and brood of children is closer to their hearts.’57
The Nazis wanted to expand the population base and were prepared to do this by pro-natal policies and propaganda and indeed by incorporating the Germans of Austria and Czechoslovakia, but they were more than happy to exclude those not considered suitable. Motherhood was encouraged only among those who were ‘worthy of bearing life’. Numbers counted, but for the Nazis purity of the race meant more than numbers. On the other hand, when the war economy required it, millions of those who were considered ethnically impure were permitted to enter the fatherland to work, often as slave labourers.58
In reality, Nazi population policies were confused. There was tension between traditional morality on the one hand and policies to propagate those deemed most racially valuable on the other; such policies included encouraging those going off to battle to have children, outside wedlock if necessary. Hitler believed that Germany’s survival depended on reversing a disastrous demographic decline, itself supposedly the result of decadence, individualism, homosexuality and over-urbanisation.59 Yet at the same time he believed that the existing German population was too great for its territorial resources, hence the need for Lebensraum (living space). Whether the ultimate problem was too little space for the existing population or too few people within the existing space was not entirely clear or resolved, and this gave rise to all sorts of contradictory as well as extraordinarily inhumane demographic policies both during the occupation of Poland and during the occupation of large parts of the western Soviet Union.
Overall, Hitler’s greatest impact on the population size of Germany–quite apart from his devastating impact on the population of Europe as a whole–was the loss of around 7 million Germans during the war, both military and civilian casualties. Underlying this calamity, however, were the fundamentals of Germany’s demographic trends, which resembled Italy’s and were in line with general European patterns. Nazi pro-natalist policies had a modest impact, with births per woman picking up from a little below two in the early 1930s to a little above two by around 1939, still well below where they had been in the early 1920s not to mention before the First World War. Life expectancy, a little short of fifty-four in 1920, had grown to nearly sixty-four by 1950. Fantasies of millions more Germans comfortably settled in the Ukraine and the Urals over the bones of the local Slavic population never came to pass. Nevertheless, in numeric terms, German losses from the First World War were made up in fairly short order.
The End of the Great European Powers
The second volume of Leonard Woolf’s memoirs, covering his work as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka in the first decade of the twentieth century, contrasts sharply with George Orwell’s Burmese Days, reflecting his own experiences in a similar capacity in Burma between the wars. Despite Woolf’s later (and possibly even contemporary but personal) anti-colonialism, the impression Woolf gives is of an empire full of confidence, expecting to last for the foreseeable future. Orwell’s empire is tired, apprehensive and full of a sense of its own doom. Not too much should be read into the works of just two individuals, but they do give us a sense of a changed attitude to empire and particularly to its likely lifespan.
To some extent interwar imperial exhaustion had demographic underpinnings, and it was not limited to Britain. Concern about the decline in the birth rate and growth in numbers of people of European origin as a whole was widespread and included French, Americans and Germans. The days when someone like Rhodes or Seeley could foretell a world dominated by whites, let alone by Anglo-Saxons, was over, and in no small measure because they acknowledged the sheer numbers of non-whites, their potential to grow in number and the fall in growth of Europeans. Already Britain had lost most of Ireland. Now movements for self-rule were on the rise from Egypt to India and beyond. Europeans no longer believed that they could easily overcome such movements.
Although always outnumbered in their Asian and African colonies, Europeans had been buoyed by a sense of their own demographic momentum and dynamism in contrast to the apparent stagnation of their non-European subjects. But precisely the same pattern which had thrust Britain forward in contrast to its European nations, then seen Britain slip back relative to those nations, was about to be played out on a global scale. From the interwar perspective there was no reason to anticipate a post-war baby boom and plenty of reason to assume that European birth rates would remain low or even continue falling. On the other hand, the eventual growth of non-European populations through the same processes that had once driven forward population growth in Europe was all too evident. It was not for nothing that Hitler worried about how improved material conditions and medical care were raising the numbers of Indians as well as Russians.
In the meantime, while the threat of eclipse from the colonies loomed on the horizon, it became increasingly apparent as the Second World War progressed that the traditional European powers had been eclipsed by the United States and the USSR. They were ambiguously or only partially European in different ways–the former because of its location on another continent, despite its population being overwhelmingly European in origin, the latter because of its location on the edge of Europe and indeed stretching beyond it, and because of its Orthodox culture with origins not in Rome but in Byzantium. The rise of these two semi-European powers came at the expense of the European core. The role which demographic trends played in this is unquestionable. The German assault
on the Soviet Union was ultimately defeated by an abundance of Russian troops and Russian space (and, of course, Russian weather). Millions of Russians were killed, millions captured and yet millions more came and ultimately overcame. As German General Manstein complained, the Russian Army was like a hydra: cut off one head and two appeared in its place.60 When frozen German troops outside Moscow at the end of 1941 or their desperate comrades trapped at Stalingrad a year later noted how the Russians just kept coming, regardless of how many had been captured or killed, they were observing the simple playing out on the battlefield of deep demographic trends.
The Soviet Union’s ultimate victory would have been less likely without the burgeoning of the Russian population and the slowdown in Germany’s. In the first forty years of the century, Germany had managed an average of only a little over 0.5% population growth per annum, while Russia, despite the ravages of civil war and Communism, had experienced nearly 1.4% per annum.61 Thus while at the turn of the century the German population had been a little over half that of Russia, by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, it was not much more than a third. Superior German organisation, which had overcome Russian numbers even when simultaneously fighting a full-blown war in the west in 1914–18, was already being overwhelmed by the weight of Russian numbers before the Western Front was opened in 1944. There were other important and sometimes offsetting factors such as the rapid industrialisation of Russia between the wars, Stalin’s initial mismanagement of the military campaign, Hitler’s interference with his generals and the failure of Germany properly to equip its troops for winter warfare. The ability of Hitler and Stalin to alienate the non-Russian populations of the western Soviet Union also played an important role. Yet none of this can take away from the fact that the eastern front in the Second World War was to a considerable extent a brutal game of numbers. In the course of the war, Russia had more than 34 million men under arms, all fighting on the one front. Germany had 13 million stretched across various theatres.
The same point can be made in regard to the United States during the Second World War. Its economic might was to some extent the product of its population size, but that size was also highly significant in its own right. The inexhaustible supply of men as well as machines, of human as well as material resources, made the United States effectively unbeatable from the German perspective. Again, it is instructive to compare the population sizes of the two countries: at the turn of the century the population of Germany had been almost three-quarters the size of the United States; by the time the US entered the Second World War it was facing a Germany with a population less than half as large as its own.
With America’s population reaching a multiple of that of any European power, the dominance of the European powers was ended not only militarily but also economically. With a larger market and greater potential for economies of scale, the US was able to outclass the UK in terms of per capita income, but even more decisive than the absolute size of its economy was its population size. In 1870 the US population had been almost one-third as large again as that of the UK and its economy about the same size. By 1950, with a population three times larger than that of the UK, the economy of the United States was four and a half times larger than the UK’s. The relative positions of the two economies had been reversed on a per capita basis, but a much more significant factor in their changing relative sizes was the changing relative sizes of their populations.
The bipolar superpower world of the US and Russia could perhaps have been predicted from the demographic reality of the interwar years, when the Soviet Union and the United States, with their vast spaces and potential to support expanding populations, started pulling away from the countries of Europe. Indeed, the emergence of Russia and the United States as the world’s leading powers had been predicted by the French political theorist and traveller Alexis de Tocqueville more than a hundred years earlier: ‘each of them,’ he wrote, ‘seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destiny of half the globe’–and precisely on the demographic grounds of their fast-growing populations and an ability to sustain population growth which the traditional European powers could not rival.62
Without economic and industrial growth the demographic giant of China continued to slumber, but where population growth and industrial development went hand in hand with demographic growth and scale, a fundamental shift in world power and the global system was unavoidable. The decline of Europe’s empires was not just a matter of waning European demographic predominance, though; the antagonistic ideology of Woodrow Wilson at Versailles in 1919, forcing the League of Nations on the Europeans as well as ‘mandates’ in place of ‘colonies’, had origins going back to the American War of Independence. However, the fact that Wilson was in a position to impose his ideas reflected the triumphant growth of America’s population. It foretold a world not fully to be born until after 1945, in which the United States had completely ceased to be an appendage of ‘the West’ and had become its embodiment. This was a new world created by the human tide–the wax and wane of which would shape the half-century to come.
Over the course of two world wars, whole populations were mobilised in ways that would have seemed unimaginable earlier. Jane Austen’s heroines had lived their lives famously oblivious to the Napoleonic Wars engulfing Europe at the time, an event they only seemed to notice when presented with an opportunity to meet the odd dashing soldier or sailor. A century or so later, their female descendants were busy as land girls, digging for victory and ensuring the country was fed, or working in armaments factories, keeping the front line supplied with shells or tanks. The invention of the aeroplane and subsequent bombing meant that even in their island fastness they could not escape direct experience of the conflict. And when societies were able and willing to call up their whole populations to the war effort, the numeric size of those populations counted more than ever.
After 1945 the West entered a quite different phase. Its wars were once again fought in distant lands, having little direct impact at home. New social and economic trends came to the fore, and now the trendsetter was the most populous country of the West, the United States.
6
The West since 1945
From Baby Boom to Mass Immigration
Living in Surrey in the early nineteenth century, and seemingly oblivious to the revolutionary changes occurring in the industrial heartland a few hundred miles to the north, the Reverend Thomas Malthus was describing a vanishing world. It was a world in which the capacity of land to support people rose only gradually, while growth in human numbers might grow exponentially and would be kept in check, one way or another, by the limitations of slowly growing food production. Yet while Malthus was expounding his theory in various versions of An Essay on the Principle of Population, his agrarian assumptions were being undermined as a whole new society was being born around Manchester and other new industrial centres in England’s north and Midlands.
In this new world, where furnaces replaced furrows and rows of tenements replaced country cottages, it was possible for vastly larger populations to manufacture goods and trade them with the rest of the globe in exchange for huge quantities of food, which could be produced from vast new tracts of territory in distant continents cleared of their indigenous peoples and placed at the service of feeding the mother country. New forms of transport unimaginable to Malthus, the railway and the iron steamship, would move food across the globe, adding innumerable ‘ghost acres’ to England and then to other industrialised countries. Malthus lived too early in the nineteenth century, and too far away from the heart of the action, to see how the system he had described was being ripped up and replaced by a new one which could support vastly more people than he believed possible.
After the Second World War something strange happened. A generation of statisticians and social scientists living a century after Malthus had reasonably theorised and described the post-Malthusian world. Less well remembered than Malthus, the American Frank Notest
ein described what would come to be known as the ‘demographic transition’. Rather than existing in a state of eternal Malthusian constraint, a country would start with a high fertility, a high mortality rate and a small population, then its mortality would fall, causing the population to grow rapidly; next, fertility would decline, resulting in continuing but slower growth; and finally, fertility and mortality would be back in balance, with the population stable again but at a much higher level.
Broadly speaking, Notestein got it right–this is what had happened earlier in Britain, America and across Europe–but as with Malthus, precisely as he was describing the system, it was changing. The advanced industrial societies of North America and northern Europe were supposed to have reached the final stage of the journey, with around two children per woman, low death rates and large and more or less stable populations, and the human tide’s course had been charted to what was supposed to be its end. But what in fact happened, against all expectation, was a baby boom, with young women across the developed world for the couple of decades after the end of the war bearing significantly more children than their mothers had. Just as population turned out to be more unpredictable than Malthus had thought, so Notestein was likewise wrong-footed. Again, just when the study of demography appeared to have identified a settled pattern, it took a new form.
The Birth of the Baby Boomers
On 10 March 1964, a mild early spring day, a forty-one-gun salute was heard in the heart of London.1 Winston Churchill was in his final year of life and Alec Douglas-Home–the last aristocrat to hold the job of British prime minister–was installed in no. 10 Downing Street. The event being marked by the salute was the birth of Prince Edward, third in line to the throne at his birth behind his two elder brothers Charles and Andrew but ahead of his sister Anne. After this fourth birth the Queen–by then in her late thirties–had no more children, but she had notched up precisely twice as many children as had her mother. Once again, the British royal family matched their generation and their age, typifying trends which went well beyond the gates of Buckingham Palace–where Prince Edward had been born–and well beyond the narrow confines of the British Isles. And in turn, the current Queen Elizabeth II’s four children have gone on to typify their generation, none of them having more than two offspring, reverting to the more limited childbearing habits of the interwar generation to which their grandmother had belonged in terms of small family size.