The European continent of 735 million will be halved in 47 years, and in 177 years it will decrease to 8 percent, fifty-five million people. And this process has already begun. Our young people will see the extinction of the European peoples - declared János I. Tóth, author of the Demographic Winter .
– Demographic Winter , you report on the invisible problems that can decide the future of the whole of Europe. What are the telltale signs of deepening demographic problems?
- Our most important - and at the same time most worrying - data is the low fertility rate. That is, not enough children are born to maintain the existing population. The fertility rate is an important indicator - if we do not count migration - then this number should be 2.1 children/woman in order for the given population to survive. All this means in everyday life that 100 women should give birth to 210 children on average. If this doesn't happen, the population will naturally die out.
We don't usually talk about it, but in all of Europe, not a single country reaches this necessary fertility rate of 2.1.
- Do you think that Europe's population could run out in the foreseeable future?
– Yes, if we only count the reproductive potential of the European peoples. Pál Demény, a famous American-Hungarian demographer, made a calculation in the early 2000s. He showed that with a fertility rate of 1.37, the European continent of 735 million people will be halved in 47 years, and in 177 years it will decrease to 8 percent, fifty-five million people. And this process has already begun.
Our young people will see the extinction of European peoples.
- What could be the reason why young Europeans do not have children?
- The fertility rate of 2.1 is achieved by only one westernized country in the world, namely Israel. In Korea, Japan and China, they do not reach the level of self-reproduction either, but due to the high population there are huge reserves that are not available in Europe.
Many things can be mentioned among the reasons: the entry of women into work, the facilitation of contraception, the radical transformation of perceptions about sexuality, etc.
Just think about it: while in the Middle Ages reproductive sexuality prevailed, i.e. it was possible to live a sexual life only in marriage and only for the purpose of procreating children, today this is not the case in most of the world. The terrifying thing is that the "achievements" of modernization are causing our extinction.
"Isn't it worth having a child?"
"Unfortunately, modernization processes work against having children." Oswald Spengler writes in The Twilight of the West: "Children are left behind not only because they are not born, but above all because the intelligence stretched to the limit no longer sees any reason for their existence."
In other words, it is not a rational thing for the stripped individual to have a child, not only because it is not "practical" and financially disadvantageous, but also because the self-sacrifice associated with parental duties does not fit into the program of the self-fulfilling self.
I note here that Pope Francis has drawn attention several times to the fact that the demographic winter taking place in Europe is a very serious problem, and that families must confront the "dictatorship of the ego".
Urbanization also reduces the number of births to an enormous extent in all parts of the world. All the connections of this are not fully known even to researchers, but it is a fact that from East Asia to Western Europe, far fewer children are born in the cities of the world than in the rural areas surrounding the megacities.
"Then it's a disease of civilization."
- Obviously. The Hungarian government is making a lot of efforts to increase the willingness to have children. There is no doubt that while the fertility rate was 1.25 in 2010, this value is now 1.6 children/woman.
The rate of growth is impressive and gives us hope of survival.
Of course, there are demographers who believe that this is only a consequence of early childbearing and does not represent a permanent trend change. It is a fact that long-term demographic processes are difficult to influence with government instruments. For example, no government can influence the number of women of childbearing age, which has been declining rapidly over the past decade. This is a legacy that, unlike the fertility rate, cannot be influenced.
The conditions are therefore bad, despite this, the current government is at least trying to stop the extinction of Hungarians.
- So is government support for those who have children justified?
– In any case, if the government did not make such efforts to increase the desire to have children, the population loss would be much greater. We would witness such shocking processes that can already be experienced in many countries of Eastern Europe. Nobody says it, but the situation in Eastern Europe is more than dramatic. The population of Bulgaria, which was almost 9 million in 1988, is currently 6.5 million.
So, in the last 30 years, Bulgaria has lost 30 percent of its population.
And this process will not stop, in fact the population in the aging Balkan country will most likely decrease at an accelerating rate. The demographic agony sooner or later leads to the agony of the economy and society as well.
- He mentioned that the fertility rate is not higher in Western Europe either. So why are these problems not visible there?
- There, immigration replaces the aging and depleting native Europeans. The politicians of Western Europe do not see migration as a problem, but as a solution to demographic decline. That is why they do everything to ensure that the difference between natives and migrants cannot be seen or presented scientifically.
In the western part of Europe, they do not concern themselves with increasing their reproduction on their own.
The most important reason for this is that the ruling ideology, neoliberalism, simply forbids the problematization of the demographic winter, pronatalist thinking and politics. Therefore, the West sees the possibility of defeating the demographic winter in the acceptance of guest workers and immigrants.
Today, the population of Western European countries is not decreasing in quantitative terms due to migration.
However, these nations are rapidly and irreversibly transformed in their ethnic and cultural characteristics. Although the progressives don't like to talk about it, population replacement migration of this magnitude necessarily leads to population exchange. Today, Eastern European countries still mostly consist of native populations, which means that if a pronatalist turn were to occur, which is only being attempted in the Visegrád countries, then these peoples would still be able to stop the extinction process on their own. In the region, the Czechs have the best chance of remaining. This is also why it is important for Hungarians to continue on the path of family-friendly governance, because this is the only way we have a chance of a country in which we can feel at home.
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