Autor: Weigel, George

Buch: The Cube and the Cathedral

Titel: The Cube and the Cathedral

Stichwort: Fragen (Perspektive eines US-Intellektuellen) an Europa; demographische Daten

Kurzinhalt: ... why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls the greatest "sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century"?

Textausschnitt: 16a Why, in the aftermath of 1989, did Europeans fail to condemn communism as a moral and political monstrosity? Why was the only politically acceptable judgment on communism the anodyne observation that it "didn't work"?

16b Why, to come to the present, do European statesmen insist on defending certain fictions in world politics: like the fiction that Yasser Arafat was interested in peace with Israel; or the fiction that the Kyoto protocol on climate change would be rigorously observed by the nations that signed the Kyoto agreement; or the fiction that the leaders of Iran are to be taken at their word when they pledge not to develop nuclear weapons; or the fiction that there is something meaningfully describable in political terms as an "international community," the highest expression of which is the U.N. Security Council as presently configured?

17a What accounts for Europe's fideism, its will to believe, about international organizations? Why, as historian John Keegan put it, did Europeans in the early twenty-first century often espouse "a philosophy of international action that actually rejected action and took refuge in the belief that all conflicts of interest were to be settled by consultation, conciliation, and the intervention of international agencies"?1

17b What accounts for disturbing currents of irrationality in contemporary European politics? Why did one of every five Germans (and one-third of those under 30) believe that the United States was responsible for 9/11, while some 300,000 French men and women made a best-seller out of L'Effroyable imposture (The Appalling Fraud), in which the author, Thierry Meyssan, argued that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by the U.S. military, using remote-controlled airliners?2

Why did a rock concert crowd in Dublin in June 2004 applaud when Morrissey, an aging pop singer, announced the death of Ronald Reagan? Why did he receive an even larger ovation when he said that he only wished it had been George W. Bush who had died?3 Why did 25 percent of the French (and 30 percent of those under 35) tell pollsters that they wanted Saddam Hussein, an acknowledged mass murderer, to win the Iraq War?4

18a Why did voters in Spain give a de facto victory to appeasement in their March 2004 elections, days after al Qaeda operatives killed hundreds and wounded thousands by bombing a Madrid train station?

18b Why is European productivity dwindling? Why does Germany, rightly renowned as the economic engine of the European Union, have a per capita gross domestic product equivalent to Arkansas and only slightly higher than West Virginia and Mississippi? Why does Sweden have a considerably higher level of its population living below the poverty line (calculated at an annual household income of $25,000) than the United States?5

18c Why, in the process of enlarging the European Union, is Europe retreating from democracy and binding itself ever more tightly in the cords of bureaucracy, with Brussels bureaucrats calculating the appropriate circumference of tomatoes and prescribing the proper feeding procedures for Sardinian hogs?

19a Why do European states find it virtually impossible to make hard domestic political decisions-as on the length of the work week or the funding of pensions?
Why do European courts seek an expanded international jurisdiction that defies the democratically agreed-to arrangements made by free people in other countries (as in the Pinochet case, when a Spanish judge sought to overturn the democratic decision of the people of Chile about the fate of the former dictator) ?

19b Why is Europe on the way to what French political philosopher Pierre Manent calls "depoliticization?" Why, as Manent puts it, does Europe "[drug] itself with humanitarianism in order to forget that it exists less and less politically"? Why does Manent have "the impression today that the greatest ambition of Europeans is to become the inspectors of American prisons"?6

19c Why are so many European public intellectuals "Christophobic," as international legal scholar J. H. H. Weiler (himself an observant Jew) puts it? Why are crude caricatures of Christianity (the Eucharist mocked on television as a "religious snack," Christ on the cross depicted as a dispenser of toilet paper) tolerated in European popular culture in a way that similar defamations of Judaism and Islam would never be?7 Why did so many of Europe's political leaders insist that the new constitution for Europe include a deliberate act of historical amnesia, in which a millennium and a half of Christianity's contributions to European understandings of human rights and democracy were deliberately ignored-indeed, denied?

20a Why, in addition to its "Christophobia," is European high culture so enamored of the present and so contemptuous of both religious and secular tradition, as French philosopher Remi Brague has pointed out? What accounts for this cult of the contemporary?8
Why do certain parts of Europe exhibit a curious, even bizarre, approach to death?

Why did so many of the French prefer to continue their summer vacations during the European heat wave of 2003, leaving their parents unburied and warehoused in refrigerated lockers (which were soon overflowing)?

Why is death increasingly anonymous in Germany, with no death notice in the newspapers, no church funeral ceremony, no secular memorial service-"as though," Richard John Neuhaus observed, "the deceased did not exist"? What are we to make of the Swedish company Promessa, which advertises a service in which cremation is replaced with human composting, the dead being immersed and frozen in liquid nitrogen before being smashed to smithereens by ultrasound waves and then freeze-dried and used for fertilizer?9

21a Above all, and most urgently of all, why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls the greatest "sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century"?10
Why do eighteen European countries report "negative natural increase" (i.e., more deaths than births)?11

Why does no western European country have a replacement-level birthrate? (The replacement level, according to demographers, is 2.1 children per woman; as of 2004, Germany's birthrate was 1.3, Italy's 1.2, Spain's 1.1, and France's 1.7; the higher French rate is due to Muslim immigration).12

22a
Why is Germany likely to lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany in the first half of the 21st century?14 Why will Spain's population decline from 40 million to 31.3 million by the middle of the century? Why will 42 percent of Italians be over sixty by 2050-at which point, on present trends, almost 60 percent of the Italian people will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, or uncles?15 Why will Europe's retired population increase by 55 percent in the next twenty-five years, while its working population will shrink by 8 percent-and, to repeat, why can't Europeans, either politicians or the public, draw the obvious conclusions from these figures about the impending bankruptcy of their social welfare, health care, and pension systems? Why, to cite Niall Ferguson again, is Europe's "fundamental problem ... senescence"?16
What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation?

Why do many Europeans deny that these demographics-which are without parallel in human history, absent wars, plagues, or natural catastrophes-are the defining reality of their twenty-first century?17/25 (Fs; s. Fußnote)

Fußnote:
25. Phillip Longman sums up the situation in these terms, with telling illustrations:
Today, most European countries have already passed a demographic tipping point that virtually assures not only rapid population aging, but also absolute population decline. In Spain, for example, the cohort now in its infancy (ages 0-4) is more than 42 percent smaller than the cohort now in its prime reproductive years (ages 30-34). What will happen when this tiny younger generation reaches adulthood? In order to replace all members of the previous generation, each female would have to bear close to four children, as compared to the average 1.15 children produced by their mothers. Since this hardly seems likely without an extraordinary transformation in both cultural values and the economic cost of children, Spain is all but fated to decline rapidly throughout at least the first half of this century... According to demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci, never in the past... has Europe's ability to renew and sustain its population been more compromised by a dwindling supply of youth. The United Nations projects that Europe as a whole will lose 3.2 million in population between 2000 and 2005. In the following ten years, the population will decline by more than 11.3 million. After 2025, population loss continues compounding. Even assuming a 33 percent increase in fertility rates over today's levels, the U.N. projects a loss of 28 million Europeans in just the 2040s.
If European fertility rates remain unchanged, the only European countries that will avoid population loss by 2050, according to U.N. projections, are France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Luxembourg, and even these countries will face rapidly aging populations. Without an increase in its fertility rate, France's working-age population (15-64) will decline by more than 9 percent by 2050, while its elderly population will increase by 79 percent.
The financial implications are staggering. In Europe there are currently 35 people of pensionable age for every 100 people of working age. By 2050, on present demographic trends, there will be 75 pensioners for every 100 workers. In Spain and Italy the ratio of pensioners to workers is projected to be one to one. Since in most major European countries pensions are financed out of current revenues, tax rates will have to soar if benefits are not cut. The Deutsche Bank calculates that average workers in Germany are already paying around 29 percent of their wages into the state pension pot, while the figure in Italy is close to 33 percent.
The social implications are also staggering. By mid-century, if current trends continue, Europe will be a society in which most adults have few biological relatives ...
Europe doesn't face the prospect of gradual population decline; it faces the prospect of rapid and compounding loss of population unless birthrates soon turn upward. Like population growth, population decline operates on a geometric curve that compounds with each generation. If Europe's current fertility rate of about 1.5 births per woman persists until 2020, this will result in 88 million fewer Europeans by the end of the century. To adopt a somewhat poignant metaphor: If Europe were a woman, her biological clock would be rapidly running down. It is not too late to adopt more children, but they won't look like her (The Empty Cradle, pp. 61-67).



23a These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily by reference only to Europe's distinct experience of the twentieth century and what Europe learned from it. Nor can they be answered by appeals to European shame. A deeper question has to be raised: Why did Europe have the twentieth century it did? Why did a century that began with confident predictions about a maturing humanity reaching new heights of civilizational accomplishment produce in Europe, within four decades, two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War threatening global catastrophe, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag? What happened? Why?