Chris Bertram at Junius has translated an important interview with Bernard Kouchner from Le Monde. Kouchner was a founder of Medecins sans Frontieres and former French health minister.
“I detest war, of which I have more experience than anyone, over a 40-year period. War is a really bad solution. But there is a worse one. That’s to leave in place a dictator who massacres his people. I wish that we might hear the most important protagonist in this crisis, the most directly threatened: the people of Iraq who are subjected to dictatorship.”
The population decline of Europe (and of Japan) is clearly going to have dramatic consequences in the coming decades. Oxford’s Stein Ringen provides a worrying analysis in the Times Literary Supplement (only part of the story is on the web) and Martin Wolf offers some policy suggestions in the Financial Times (subscribers only).
By 2050, the European population is predicted by the UN Population Fund to be down to 600 million, from 725 million today (those figures include estimates for immigration). If the trend continues, Europe would be down to 475 million by the end of the century.
The scale of this goes beyond decline; Ringen terms it a “population collapse”. As both Ringen and Wolf point out, it is likely to spell the end of economic growth. Ringen extends this disturbingly. “In three centuries of progress, Europe has produced an outstandingly rich culture of architecture, art, literature, music, freedom and democracy. What happens if Europe falls into economic decline? Will there be a surplus from which architecture and art can be commissioned? Will governments be able to support museums, operas, theatres and orchestras? What will happen to attitudes, confidence and trust? Will we be able to afford freedom? Will democracy survive if economies collapse?”
Wolf suggests four steps: “public resources must be shifted from helping the old to assisting families with children”; “as part of pension reform, there must be an across-the-board attack on obstacles to higher labour force participation, particularly by people over 60 years of age”; “obstacles to productivity growth must be removed”; and “immigration must be managed”.
Ringen echoes these prescriptions, but he isn’t optimistic about their effect. Encouraging bigger families would probably mean lowering female participation in the workforce, which would run counter to decades of societal transformation. He notes that Sweden, which instituted family-friendly policies well in advance of the looming crisis, has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.
On immigration Ringen writes, “To think we can solve our population problem by immigartion is superficial and careless. There is something disturbingly arrogant in seeing the rest of the world as available for Europe to harvest for our needs.” He goes on to note that “serious demography does not envisage immigration to make up for low birth rates”.
Ringen isn’t, however, providing a counsel of despair. “While it may not be the answer to Europe’s population problem, Europeans need to embrace the fact that the world’s people are on the move. The future belongs to dynamic mixed-population societies. Europe is allowing itself to grow old in structures and mindsets. It would make matters worse if we were to shut ourselves off from the vibrant community of transnationalism. That is a matter of opening up borders, of course, but that we can only do if we learn to want to change and escape from our fear of what is young in today’s world.”
The left may not be very good at creating talk radio hosts, but it’s a damn sight better at poetry.
According to the Today programme, Poets Against the War has signed up 12,000 participants. The rival Poets for the War has 69. Whatever your politics, any literary sense will send you fleeing to the doves for your poetry. Today is an international day of poetry against the war and the UK poets are delivering a petition with 10,000 anti-war poems to Tony Blair.
This is exciting. Amitai Etzioni, the sociologist responsible for developing communitarian thinking, has started a weblog, where he plans to post personal and communitarian reflections. Amitai was spurred after meeting, in fairly rapid succession, Larry Lessig and Eugene Volokh.