Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
We live in a strange time marked by widespread and ongoing depopulation. The entire world is grappling with a crisis of childlessness. By 2015, the global fertility rate had dropped to half of what it was in 1965, and most people now lives in societies with fertility rates below replacement levels. Populations are shrinking across rich and poor nations, secular and religious societies, democracies and autocracies alike.
As the eminent American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt recently observed in Foreign Affairs, “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation.” The last major episode of large-scale depopulation resulted from the bubonic plague that devastated Eurasia 700 years ago. But what history clearly shows is that depopulation always has political effects. These include a potential increase in warfare—fighting motivated by the desire to compensate, directly or indirectly, for population loss.
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