Writing at Via Meadia, Walter Russell Meade comments on Europe’s accelerating slide into toothless decrepitude. As an example, he gives us France, who would like very much to intervene in Syria, but lacks the military oomph to do so. This is of course due to Europe’s having had, under the postwar U.S. security umbrella, the enfeebling luxury to ignore the cost of its own national defense in favor of extravagant social programs. (There’s some irony there: while it was fostering the degenerative and etiolating effects of dependence on its own people, Europe’s general dependency as a security client of the U.S. has in turn weakened that once-great array of nations to the point of global impotence. We could call it “trickle-down debilitation”.)
You can read Meade’s piece here. One quibble — he writes:
Project some trends out a bit and interesting changes appear. Not since the 1600s has Turkey been able to claim a place as the leading military power in Europe. On the present course, the Turks could become the most populous country with the most powerful military on the continent well before the end of the current century.
I’m not sure what trends Meade is referring to here (other than the general decline of Europe); Turkey, at least as an ethnonation, is itself facing a general demographic collapse. As David “Spengler” Goldman writes in How Civilizations Die:
Turkey is locked in a demographic trap: to compete in the world economy, it must educate and employ its women. The more years of education a Turkish woman receives, however, the fewer children she is likely to bear. According to demographer Sutay Yavuz, improvements in female education have suppressed fertility. “The proportion of women aged 15 to 49 that have completed at least the second level of primary school increased from 15 percent in 1993 to 24 percent in 2003,’ he wrote in a recent study. As in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, the consequence is a sharp decline in the birth rate: “Fertility differentials among women with different educational backgrounds are striking; the mean number of children ever born (a measure of completed fertility) among women aged 40 to 49 without formal education is 5, while the same figure is only 2 for women at the same ages who have completed high school or higher level education.’5
That’s half the problem. During the period 1995”“1998, overall Turkish fertility was 2.29 children per woman, while Kurdish fertility was 4.27 children per woman.6 The Kurds comprise 18 percent of the Turkish population by the narrowest definition (Kurdish rather than Turkish as a mother tongue), which means that the Turkish fertility rate excluding the Kurds during the late 1990s was only 1.5, as low as Europe’s. For native Turkish-speakers in Turkey, fertility has been in a death-spiral for the past fifteen years. Erdogan is right: if the trend continues until 2038, the Turkish economy will collapse under the strain of caring for its dependent elderly, while the country’s young people will be concentrated among minorities demanding independence from the hard hand of the Turkish state. According to a recent study in Population Policy Review: “Fertility levels of Turks and Kurds are significantly different. At current fertility rates, Turkish-speaking women will give birth to an average of 1.88 children during their reproductive years. The corresponding figure is 4.07 children for Kurdish women. Kurdish women will have almost 2 children more than Turkish women.’7 The study adds, “Results show that despite intensive internal migration movements in the last 50 years, strong demographic differentials exist between Turkish and Kurdish-speaking populations, and that the convergence of the two groups does not appear to be a process under way. Turks and Kurds do indeed appear to be actors of different demographic regimes, at different stages of demographic and health transition processes.’
The Kurds of Turkey’s undeveloped east, in short, continue to bear four children while Turkish citizens whose cradle tongue is Turkish have one or two.
Europe’s decline is farther along, of course. Perhaps Meade just sees Turkey as becoming the “last man standing” for a while, before its own troubles get the better of it.
12 Comments
“to compete in the world economy, it must educate and employ its women.”
After a statement like that, I wouldn’t trust anything else he wrote. This is the same sort of globalist, neocon ideology that tells us that we must take in unlimited numbers of immigrants in order to remain “competitive”, when very nearly the opposite is true.
He then states that educating women leads to demographic decline; how is that “remaining competitive”?
Just whizzing through Meade’s piece Malcolm, I consider your concluding sentence likely, doesn’t seem much context depth (maybe Meade is just using a recently updated source for demographics):
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tu.html
The French should perhaps, prior to testing their “Force of Arms” in Syria – do a test run in Mali.
Hi Johann,
I don’t think he’s wrong about that, if you accept his narrow criterion of economic competitiveness. If there are any nations with high illiteracy rates among women that are also major players in the world’s economy, I’m not aware of them (Saudi Arabia might be the best example, with a significant disparity between male and female literacy, but its whole economy is based on a single commodity).
But I agree that you are right about immigration, and right in a broader sense: as civilizations advance, their elites — the ones who carry in their heads the accumulated culture, learning and lore necessary for the civilization’s continuation — reliably tend to have fewer and fewer children, thereby thinning out the stock of people in the next generation who are of sufficient innate quality to shoulder the load. The whole thing becomes fatally top-heavy, and collapses. It has happened throughout history in the same way, and it’s happening in Europe now. So as you point out, the changes that lead to greater participation in the modern economy for nations like Turkey come with a “poison pill”, demographically speaking.
To the extent that nations DO compete in the modern global economy, they must expose themselves to modernity in general, and that seems in nearly every case to lead to better-educated women, and from there to rapidly declining fertility.
Another thing: a key factor in this sort of demographic decline is secularization (another contagious feature of the modern world). As religiosity declines, so do birth rates, and educated women in Turkey provide a striking example.
The persistently high rate of religiosity in the U.S. is almost certainly a key factor in its relatively resilient birth rate.
I’m not sure if the provenance of Goldman’s nickname is Oswald Spengler, but it’s worth noting that the original Spengler’s predictions were so far wide of the mark that he ranks with Paul Ehrlich and Harold Camping at the bottom end of the prescience-o-meter.
Yes, and that may be the case here. I cited him only because he correctly points out that Turkey is undergoing a sudden decline in its fertility rate as more of its women become literate and educated.
His general thesis is that this demographic collapse is a general feature of the modernizing, secularizing world. He cites the U.S. as being almost uniquely less affected, and focuses on religiosity as the best-correlated social attribute.
David P. Goldman aka “Spengler” is a Jewish supremacist. One of his major themes is about how all gentile nations are doomed to collective death soon and how nationalism is a futile attempt to escape this collective death. The intimation here is that any serious nationalism will be smashed down by some imperial project or other that is acceptable to Goldman. Only the Jewish nation will survive, and deserves to survive, according to Goldman, because of the covenant i.e. bc/ yahweh said so. It’s a nakedly malevolent, hostile, supremacist attitude that’s right there for everyone to see.
All the gentiles are doomed to death (he literally labels them “zombies”, “the walking dead” from time to time in his pieces), Goldman smugly says, but if you want to be “saved”, the only salvation is via some sort of non-nationalistic, universalistic, pro-Jewish/Israel Christianity or secular imperial neoconservatism acceptable to Goldman.
Dave,
I haven’t read a lot of Goldman aside from How Civilizations Die, but from my small sampling I wouldn’t characterize him quite as dramatically and one-dimensionally as you just have — although his strong self-identification as a religious Jew, and his deep sympathy for Israel and support for a strong alliance between Israel and the U.S. are of course plainly on view. (Perhaps I’m just reacting to that highly charged word “supremacist”, which implies not only a belief in superiority, but also in the justification of domination.)
He uses the term “zombies” to refer to those nations that he sees as being in the throes of irrecoverable demographic collapse, which seems to me not an unreasonable metaphor. In this book he speaks more in terms of national suicide than the smashing down of nations by imperial projects acceptable to him.
I also think, on further reflection, that it isn’t really accurate to refer to Goldman as a neoconservative, as I did in a (now deleted) comment above; the central themes of neoconservatism are that A) American values and the essence of the American system are universally aspired to, and B) that a forward-leaning foreign policy that presses always to instill our values and system in other nations is in America’s best interest, and the world’s. Goldman explicitly rejects this in the final chapter of his book, and describes our nation-building escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Western enthusiasm for the Arab Spring, as deeply misguided.
(I will say this, though: he shares with neoconservatives the view that the United States is nothing more than a “proposition nation”.)
That said, the point here wasn’t really Goldman at all, anyway. As I said above, I just quoted him, contra Meade, in the specific context of Turkish demographics.
JK,
Taking a wiz through Meade’s piece sounds a bit crude, n’est-ce pas?
In hindsight I suppose it may’ve been a poor choice Henry.
The IT department in any case, banned such for the foreseeable future.
I’ve read much of Goldman’s writings over the years, and I’d say Dave’s characterization is justified.
This post and its accompanying comment thread are a good exposition of this aspect of Goldman’s worldview:
http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/spenglers_denouement_world_historical_judaeo_supremacy