The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  The picture in France and Germany is similar. In both countries a mixture of heavy immigration flows from beyond Europe (plus significant inflows from within Europe) and the low fertility rate of the indigenous population over an extended period has radically reshaped the ethnic demography. France had already experienced–indeed encouraged–immigration from other parts of Europe before the Second World War, and this continued subsequently. It has received over 2.5 million Italians, 1.5 million Spaniards and over a million Portuguese. Since 1945 it has hosted a vast influx from north Africa, initially of pieds-noirs fleeing an independent Algeria but increasingly those indigenous to north Africa and to other parts of former French colonial Africa, a total of around 3 million.45 As with Pakistanis in the UK, initially many immigrants from north Africa were men who had come alone to work, but increasingly they managed to bring their families as well. France continues a tradition of ‘assimilationist Republicanism’ and lacks official data on minorities, but it is estimated that more than 10% of people living in France in the early part of the twenty-first century were foreign-born and a somewhat lower proportion were Muslim. Again as in the UK, the population of immigrant origin is younger than the indigenous French population, and this suggests future growth even without further immigration.

  In Germany, with its exceptionally weak fertility rate, the numbers are also striking. One source believes that as much as 30% of the population was either born abroad or is descended since 1945 from immigrants.46 As in the case of France, migrants to Germany have come both from southern Europe (often the Balkans, particularly Yugoslavia or the former Yugoslavia) and from the Muslim lands further south (particularly Turkey). Initially, Turks came as guest workers, but as elsewhere, families have followed. The gaining of citizenship has been more difficult in Germany than in Britain and France, with rights depending more on origin than place of birth or residence, although this has changed somewhat in recent years. The pattern of immigrant groups being younger and having higher fertility, already noted in France and the United Kingdom, appears to apply to Germany as well. This was the backdrop to the swell of immigrants trying to get into Germany in 2015, many but far from all fleeing from the Syrian civil war. Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted ‘wir schaffen es’–‘we can cope’, ‘we can get it done’–but the backlash from a large number of her citizens suggests that there is far from a consensus on this matter.

  In addition to arrivals from the south, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and expansion of the EU there has been a mass movement of people within Europe, from east to west. As in the US, these shifts have not only changed the ethnic composition but have been a major component in fuelling new political forces in reaction, whether UKIP and the Brexit vote in the UK, the Front National in France or Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. In France the vote for the Front National has risen steadily along with the size of immigrant communities as well as concern about their radicalisation. The slogan of Marine Le Pen, runner-up in the 2017 presidential election–‘On est chez nous’, which is perhaps best translated as ‘this is our place’–is about identity and a dividing line between the ‘indigenous’ French and more recent arrivals. As with Trump, Le Pen’s support can best be explained as a reaction to ethnic change rather than as a response to economic woes. More important than worries about economic inequality, today’s populism in the developed world can only fully be understood in its demographic context. For example, there is a clear correlation in the UK between changes in the ethnicity of a local district in the decade prior to the European referendum, and the share of voters opting for Brexit. Attitudes to immigration correlate more closely to an ‘out’ vote than to any other factors, other than to the EU itself. Moreover, support for Germany’s far-right AfD surged after the highly publicised mass migrations of Syrians in the summer of 2015.

  Without its early lead in the demographic transformation, Britain could not have exported its people to run an empire on which the sun never set. Without the sharp drop in fertility rates that followed–and the simultaneous rapid expansion of populations in lands where Britain had once ruled–mass immigration and the arrival of a more multicultural society would almost certainly not have happened. If one wishes to understand why Californians speak English or why there are five times more Muslims than Methodists in the UK, consider the great forces of population change in recent times.

  Just as the United States had implemented policies to preserve its (predominantly north-west European) ethnic character, so Australia introduced a ‘white Australia’ policy early in the twentieth century, specifically to stave off Asian immigration. As with the United States, so in Australia, a change in attitudes to race and ethnicity meant that these policies were relaxed in the post-war era. By 2011 a quarter of Australians had been born overseas and a further fifth were the children of at least one overseas-born parent. The UK continued to be the largest single source of immigration, although immigrants from the UK represented only a fifth of the total of foreign-born Australians, with 15% coming from various Asian countries (mostly China, India, Vietnam and the Philippines). Reporting ancestry (where some people cited more than one ancestor), only 55% claimed to be of English, Scottish or Irish descent while 35% claimed to be of ‘Australian’ origin (very few of whom, it can be assumed, were fully or even partly of Aboriginal descent). Those descended from Italians, Germans, Dutch and Greeks totalled 13% of the population, while Chinese and Indians represented a still modest but fast-growing 6%.47 Australia’s essentially Anglo-ethnic character, which once seemed insuperable, is rapidly waning.

  Is the European in Retreat?

  Declining fertility of people of European origin, whether in Europe or in demographically ‘Europeanised’ lands, along with the great inflow of non-European peoples into these lands, has changed the world in ways that would have been unimaginable at the peak of European ascendancy in the late nineteenth century.

  The peoples of what would become the West were, until the fifteenth century, not particularly significant on the global stage. Their collective religious dream of imposing themselves on the Holy Land had been defeated by the Muslims and they were hemmed in by Islam to the south, by the ocean to the west, by Arctic seas and wilderness to the north, and by wide expanses peopled by often hostile nomads to the east. In retrospect, perhaps the seeds of Europe’s rise were visible, but it might not then have been expected that the people of this small peninsula would come to dominate the globe. By the start of the twentieth century it was difficult to imagine anyone but the Europeans as overlords of the planet.

  Europe’s people had subdued vast areas of the Americas. The same was true of Australasia and might have been in the process of coming true in southern Africa. Where Europeans had not settled, they held political control by means of their empires in most of Asia and Africa, and where they did not incorporate territories formally, such as in China, they still held great sway. Economically, the industrialised areas of the world were almost exclusively European (including Europeanised America) and lands beyond the US and the European heartland (including parts of eastern Europe and Russia) were of global economic significance only for their provision of raw materials and in some cases as markets. None of this, the human tide shows us, would have been possible without an essentially demographic base. Although Europeans started to circle the globe in the fifteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century, with their dramatic population explosion and expansion, accompanied by technological and industrial advances, that they were able to dominate it.

  We are perhaps too close to events to see what a dramatic reversal the twentieth century has been for the peoples of western European origin. The end of formal empire was a largely political event, and initially did not seem to end the European economic and military dominance of the globe. Yet there was no inherent reason to believe that the technologies that had facilitated European demographic growth and economic and political dominance would forever remain the exclusive domain of Europeans. Signs
of the end of European domination came even before the outbreak of the First World War: the resistance of the Boers, albeit people of European extraction, shook the British Empire. The defeat of Russia by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 dispelled–or should have dispelled–any illusions of the supposed invincibility of the white man.

  Today Europe and the United States and the wider traditionally white Anglosphere continue to be relatively prosperous societies by global standards, but that relative prosperity is no longer anything like a monopoly. Highly prosperous societies have emerged in east Asia and are emerging elsewhere. Demographically, even after accounting for the large inflow of non-Europeans, the West has waned significantly when compared with other regions and cultures. On the basis that the overall size of an economy is nothing other than the product of the per capita income and size of the population, this has inevitably meant the waning of Western economic dominance.

  In 1950 the United States and the rest of what was then the developed world represented between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s population; today it comprises below 15%, and by mid-century it will be barely a tenth. In power purchasing parity terms, the West commanded around two-thirds of the world’s economy in the middle of the twentieth century, but this figure is likely to be around 40% by the middle of the twenty-first.48 Having triumphed in the cold war, the West still dominates the world militarily; effectively, here, ‘the West’ can be defined as the United States, assisted by its NATO allies. It is debatable how long this will continue with challenges from the world’s other great civilisations, particularly China, whose economy is already believed to have surpassed that of the US on the above basis.

  However, comparing the demography of the US to the demography of its current or erstwhile global rivals, Germany, Japan, Russia and China, it is the US which is in the best shape.49 Large powers such as China and Russia, and potential powers such as Brazil, India and Indonesia, are experiencing either low or fast-falling fertility rates. Both their flagging demographic expansion and the institutions of international order may limit the ability of these powers to challenge established Western global hegemony. Meanwhile, areas of population explosion in the Middle East and Africa, which we will investigate in later chapters, lack economic development and are experiencing fragmentation. Before we come to look at today’s prospective rival for global hegemony, however–namely China, or the Middle Eastern and African lands of demographic explosion–we must first examine a recent rival, namely Russia, along with members of the erstwhile USSR and the rest of what was once the Eastern bloc. Russia, always ambiguously partly in, partly out of Europe, was a late but rapid adopter of the European demographic transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and after 1945 once again the human tide turned east.

  7

  Russia and the Eastern Bloc from 1945

  The Demography of Cold War Defeat

  On 11 March 1985, hours after the death of Party secretary Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union elected Mikhail Gorbachev Chernenko’s successor at what was, by Soviet standards, the tender age of fifty-four. Chernenko had held the position for only a year, inheriting it in a state of terminal illness from Yuri Andropov at whose funeral he could barely even raise a salute (and at which, according to Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher’s doctor was able to forecast the date of Chernenko’s own demise to within a few weeks).1 As Gorbachev surveyed his realm he was, as he put it later, ‘immediately faced with an avalanche of problems’.2 The USSR may well have been one of only two global superpowers, a nuclear power, the largest country on earth by surface area, and the centre of a socialist camp stretching from Germany to Vietnam, but signs of severe ill health were showing.

  Many of the problems Gorbachev described as descending on him like an avalanche had deep roots in the demography of the country, as was being borne out in the ageing of the party leadership, whose enfeebled senior cadre had elected in Chernenko a man within thirteen months of death. For just as we can learn much from Britain’s demography by understanding the family life and fertility of its queens, so we can learn much about the Soviets by seeing how their leadership aged. The gerontocracy which, until Gorbachev, had been running the country, was representative of a demographic retreat at the heart of the Soviet Union. Indeed, a decade earlier Gorbachev had commented to Andropov that most of the members of the Politburo running the country already had one foot in the grave.3 The young, Red revolutionary avant-garde of 1917 (even the most senior Bolshevik, Lenin, was under fifty, and most were much younger) had turned into a greying establishment, mouthing tired revolutionary clichés nobody any longer believed. The greying of the establishment was symbolic of the greying of the country as a whole, or at least of its Slavic heartland.

  Just as rapid population growth had been a precondition of Russia’s emergence as a superpower by the middle of the twentieth century, so population decline was fundamental to the issues with which Gorbachev had to wrestle. True, a grossly inefficient command-and-control economic system lay at the heart of the country’s economic problems; the queues which formed for the most basic provisions, the sloth and decay in factories, the slapdash approach to health and safety which caused the Chernobyl nuclear disaster–none of this can simply be put down to demography: but whatever the changing needs of the economy, a drying up in the flow of new Russian workers, a reflection of an earlier slowing of the birth rate, made it harder and harder to disguise the underlying problems. Whereas in the past an endless flow of fresh workers allowed economic inefficiency to be patched over and created an impression of economic dynamism and growth, now there were as many hands retiring from the factories or fields as entering them, and this made it difficult to sustain the mirage of economic growth.

  Gorbachev’s problems were not limited to an underperforming economy at home. As he looked across his southern border he could see a war in Afghanistan in which Soviet troops had been bogged down for years. Here casualties were mounting as Soviet troops failed to exert control over the country and prop up the puppet regime in Kabul against its Islamist adversaries. The Soviet Union’s problems in Afghanistan were no more purely demographic in nature than were its economic problems back home. The topography of the country and the famously resistant culture of its people played a major part in Moscow’s headache, not to mention the support the rebels received from the West; but all of this was made much more difficult for the Soviets by the fact that their own army could no longer draw on an ever-growing cohort of recruits from the Slavic heartlands but instead had to rely more and more on the polyglot youth of the Caucasus and central Asia, whose own loyalties were suspect and whose lack of command of the Russian language made the management of the campaign more difficult.

  The inability of the Soviets to master Afghanistan had many causes, but some basic demographic data tells us an important part of the story and this has to do with the demography of Afghanistan and not just the USSR. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Afghanistan’s population was growing nearly ten times as fast as Russia’s. (As recently as the mid 1950s it had been growing more slowly than Russia’s.) The median age in Russia was thirty-three; in Afghanistan, it was below sixteen.

  As ever, we need to be careful with historical counterfactuals, and to be aware that the picture for the Soviet Union as a whole was better than for Russia alone (although, as discussed, this itself gave rise to problems of military reliability and uniformity). Nevertheless, despite the challenges of the terrain and enthusiasm for supporting the rebels from Reagan to Riyadh, we should wonder whether, had the demography been the other way around, had Russia been young and growing and Afghanistan experiencing feeble population growth and ageing, the shoe might not have been on the other foot. Just as positive Russian demography had stood the country in good stead as it faced the ageing Germans, so negative Russian demography let it down in the face of the demographically vigorous Afghans. A young, growing population, even if smaller i
n size, is difficult to defeat on its home patch, as the West itself was to learn in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps Gorbachev was only partly aware of it, but as he wrestled with the problems of the Soviet system and Soviet society–from ossified Leninist orthodoxy to alcoholism, from Afghan mujahideen to the newly self-confident leadership of the West of Thatcher and Reagan–he faced the fact that history had dealt him an almost impossible demographic hand.

  Russian Retreat

  Gorbachev might have complained of his problems, but when the Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917 the problems were of a quite different order of magnitude. A still ‘backward’ country with a predominantly peasant population, Russia had been severely damaged by four years of war, was warding off German and Austrian military advances and was running short of supplies. Meanwhile a civil war was looming, which made matters worse still.