Germany is a clear example of a nation suffering from underpopulation. The birthrate is perilously low, and the society is measurably shrinking.
Because this is happening to other countries, and because these communities are custodians of important cultures and civilizations, this trend is not a national problem: it is a global problem.
The causes of this phenomenon are complex and mysterious. One hypothesis is that these traditions exhausted themselves in the carnage of the two world wars, as Patrick Buchanan writes:
For ten years, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, Britons and Germans fought. By 1945, Germany was finished as a military power and Britain was finished as a world power. Now the Germans have begun to disappear. “Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year where the number of newborns exceeded the number of deaths,” writes Reiner Klingholz, of Berlin’s Institute for Population and Development.
Sociologists have speculated about a number of possible causes. Why would people choose to have fewer children? A birthrate of between 2.3 and 2.5 children per couple is sufficient to hold a population even.
Historically, children were a financial benefit, when societies were largely agricultural. Children helped to do farmwork, and provided care when aging parents eventually became unable to economically sustain themselves.
This pattern continued during the early years of the Industrial Revolution.
As economies shifted to the later phases of the Industrial Revolution, and then into more technology- and information-oriented patterns, children became less of a financial advantage, and in some cases could even be viewed as burden.
Reiner Klingholz earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology, but his career has taken him into the field of population statistics. Noting that the population problem was disguised by immigration, he writes:
Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year where the number of newborns exceeded the number of deaths. The creeping population-shrinking process was only masked by high immigration figures that could camouflage the natural losses — at least until 2003. Since then, the overall population of Germany has declined; the Federal Statistical Office expects that the nation will have around eight million fewer inhabitants by mid-century — a loss that is the equivalent of losing the populations of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt combined. Germany, along with Ukraine and Romania, presently lead the league of European countries with populations set to contract.
What does this situation mean for the world as a whole? Because some other countries are experiencing similar underpopulation problems, concerns arise that some aspects of civilization may be at risk.
These nations have been the caretakers of a set of worldviews, including notions that human life is valuable, that every human being has dignity and should be respected, that women have certain fundamental legal and social equalities with men, that war is better than peace, that rational dialogue is salutary, that human life should not be capriciously taken, etc.
Ironically, the psychology causing this depopulation may be triggered in part by those instances in which this civilization violated its own principles.
If these populations shrink, will they be able to sustain these cultural heritages and share them with the world? Will these social notions continue to have an impact on the globe?
A shrinking population means not only fewer people in some regions of the planet, but a poorer legacy for the world’s civilization.
