monograph · The End of Childhood?
The end of childhood?
Eduardo Zugasti
e.zugasti.euromind@gmail.com
The European Union is the largest single market on the planet, with 440 million potential consumers, the biggest provider of goods and services, and it still has the second most widely used currency globally, only behind the U.S. dollar. Europe is also the largest donor of humanitarian aid and presents itself as a power focused on the global expansion of democracy, human rights, and peaceful cooperation.
However, Europe’s position in the world is contracting as other blocs grow, particularly in demographic terms. According to the “white paper” on the future of Europe published by the European Commission in 2017, Europe accounted for 25% of the global population in 1900, while by 2060, it is projected to represent only 5%.
It is expected that this demographic contraction will contribute to reducing the economic power of the Union, lowering the European proportion to 20% of the global GDP by the next decade of 2030. It is likely that these changes in population structure will not leave European security untouched, compromising the demands of a ‘geopolitical Europe’ beyond traditional soft power, considering that a country’s demography remains a ‘latent power’ that conditions military prowess. It remains to be seen, as Guillaume Blanc suggests, whether the quality of European human capital can maintain its development expectations in a sustained context of low fertility.
As Manuel Arias Maldonado warns in this same monograph, we are far from global fears of a population ‘bomb’ about to explode, stemming from early warnings by Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich. Today, we know, through updated projections from the UN, that a slow but steady decline in the world’s population is expected from the second half of this century. Contrary to neo-Malthusian signals from previous decades, political scientist Darrell Bricker warns today of a likely ’empty planet,’ demographer Anna Rotkirch highlights the discrepancy between individual preferences and the reality of low birth rates, while visionary technology gurus like Elon Musk pose a drastic global contradiction between ‘pro-natalists’ and ‘extinctionists’ in the coming decades.
Another factor to consider is that the projected demographic changes, towards lower fertility, increased aging, and higher migration flows, are not globally homogeneous. While at the beginning of the 20th century, Europe’s population tripled that of Africa, by 2047, it is estimated that the African population will quadruple that of Europe. In more regional terms, and according to the UN population projections, Morocco’s population is expected to surpass Spain’s around the 2040s. The world population will continue to grow, but more than half of the estimated increase will be concentrated in just 8 countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the United Republic of Tanzania. Furthermore, it is expected that sub-Saharan African countries will continue to grow from 2100 onwards and contribute more than half of the global population, surpassing Asia.
The projections also point to an ’empty Spain,’ as demographer Alejandro Macarrón warns, who has once compared the decline in native births in recent times with an event as catastrophic as the civil war. With a current native fertility rate of less than 1.2 children per woman, comparable to alarming levels in Southeast Asia, our country is heading towards an uncertain landscape of an aging population and high non-European immigration.
Javier Nart and the Euromind Forum, led by Teresa Giménez Barbat since 2016, present a series of contributions from experts and analysts with perspectives based on insufficiently known evidence addressing one of the main existential challenges facing Europe in a global context. Both articles and videos of the presentations, coinciding with the event held at the European Parliament headquarters in Madrid, can be fully accessed online.