Last week, columnist Mark Steyn wrote a dire-sounding piece in the Wall Street Journal expressing a fear that declining Western fertility, combined with rapid Muslim growth, will eventually lead to a radical Islamic takeover of the West (especially Europe) and the decline of our modern liberal society. Steyn backs his claims with numerous alarming statistics, such as Western fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman; Muslim rates far higher (over 6 children per woman) in countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Niger; continued Muslim immigration into Western nations; and those Muslims' propensity towards extremism. Islamic dominance, according the piece, is practically inevitable; as Steyn writes, "It's the demography, stupid."
But I wouldn't be so sure. Steyn is usually on the mark geopolitically, but here I believe his conclusions are premature.
Why? Factually, the numbers he cites are correct. But upon closer examination, he actually leaves out a number of key points that reveal a far weaker Islam than he describes.
First, Western nations aren't the only ones with falling birthrates. The Muslim world is seriously declining as well. Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Albania, Lebanon, and Malaysia are all below the 2.1 replacement line, while Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, and the Muslim parts of India are close behind and falling rapidly. A few Muslim nations do indeed have high fertility, but the common denominator is not Islam itself, as Steyn implies, but a lack of modernization. Many non-Muslim countries that also haven't fully modernized have high rates as well, such as Laos, Uganda, and Paraguay.
Steyn mentions that developed nations have declined from 30% to 15% of the world's population in the last 35 years, while Muslims have increased from 15% to 20%. True enough, but that also means the non-developed, non-Muslim world has increased its share at a greater number: from 55% to 65%. And this growth has come largely at Muslim, and not Western, expense.
You see, Islam's recent growth has come almost fully from natural increase (which is now falling), and not from conversions. On the other hand, Christianity is growing just as fast by gaining far more converts. These aren't coming from the developed world, which is already predominantly Christian, but from places like China, India, and especially Africa, where over 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity each year.
Muslims will not overwhelm the world demographically; if anything, the world will grow less Muslim in the forseeable future.
Europe, on the other hand, is admittedly a trickier case. Native fertility is indeed low, while Muslim growth rates and levels of extremism have remained high. Over the next 50 years, Europe projects to lose about 100 million people, while European Muslims will double their numbers to about 20% of the total European population. If Turkey joins the EU, Muslim numbers will rise even further.
But will this bring Sharia law, as Steyn fears? I don't think so. Even under the most high-growth projection (which is by no means certain), Muslims will remain a minority on the Continent. Their radicals may want Sharia law, but they won't get it at the ballot box.
Much more worrisome, though, is the prospect of increased terror and violence as the Muslim population expands. Best case, they'll assimilate smoothly, but based on recent history, I'm concerned that Europe could end up in a horrible civil war. A war, I might add, that radical Muslims will most certainly lose, but a war nevertheless, with possibly devastating loss of life and destruction.
Europeans can, of course, easily avoid this scenario by taking a few basic steps: limit Muslim immigration, export radicals who preach violence, and cut off the Saudi petrodollars financing extremism. These actions alone won't solve the Continent's fertility-based worker shortage problem (although this might), but should at least prevent Islamists from taking advantage.
Steyn's conclusions may be flawed, but his urgent advice that the West must awaken to this problem is nevertheless entirely on the mark.
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5 comments:
I think Steyn's main point was to try and alert Westerners about Islam's apparent demographic threat. Demographics can't really be easily discerned much of the time (i.e. if you live in a big city, birthrates may be low, but you wouldn't really know it and may even think the opposite because there's so many people around in general), so many people might not otherwise realize the facts without people like Steyn reporting them.
Thing is, native European demographics themselves are much less of a problem than radical Muslim immigration. Even if Europe at this very moment had, say, twice as many native people, it wouldn't solve the Islamist problem, because the same Muslims would still be there too.
Increasing the native European population (or getting immigrants from the non-Muslim world) is certainly vital for Europe's economic health. But the only thing that will solve the jihadist threat is to deport radicals, limit Muslim immigration, and crack down on extremism.
There's also one other thing I don't understand too - Europe says it needs these Muslim immigrants to fill jobs created by its low native population growth. Fair enough, but if that's the case, then why are so many of the Muslim immigrants unemployed? It doesn't really make sense; with Europe's labor shortage, you'd think there be jobs in abundance for them.
Those are some interesting considerations. I think the decline in birthrates has many different causes, and they're often different from country to country.
I agree that worldwide, much of the decline has come from industrializtion, because now that people become successful primarily by getting an education instead of working on a farm, parents want to raise only as many kids as they can affordably educate.
But in addition to this, secularization has further contributed to the decline, because liberal secular people seem to be much less family oriented (on average) than their religious counterparts. This, I believe, is why the more religious U.S. has a higher fertility rate than the more secular Western Europe, despite similar levels of industrialization.
Based on this, for example, I believe that Eastern Europe, because the people are more religious, will experience rising fertility over the next few decades along with economic growth. I don't think this will occur among the more secular populations of Japan and Western Europe.
Of course you never know, though, as the only thing we truly know about fertility rates is that they're always changing and quite unpredictable. Virtually no one predicted the U.S. baby boom after World War II, and so for all we know, something similar might occur again at any time.
This comment by a reader:
Re "But in addition to this, secularization has further contributed to the decline, because liberal secular people seem to be much less family oriented (on average) than their religious counterparts."
Firstly, there is little evidence that Eastern Europeans are more religious than Western Europeans. Indeed, many nations therein - such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Russia itself - are even less religious than Western Europe. Have you read Eamonn Kelly's informative but passionless book "Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World"?? He clearly shows how secularised most ex-Stalinist nations are??
Secondly, the question of exactly WHY the US and to some degree Australia are much more religious than most of Europe and hence have higher fertility rates even if they are (as is actually true to some degree of the more religious regions of the Western US when compared to the secular yet ecologically robust Northeast) more ecologically fragile and cannot support larger populations still seems a sort of taboo topic among both demographers and ecologists. It even seems taboo among these groups to suggest that in fact the ratio of sustainable population denisities of Europe, East Asia and New Zealand on one hand to that of Australia on the other are in fact MUCH GREATER than the ratio of actual population densities today. Yet, Flannery, Diamond and Australia's leading hydrologist Tom McMahon show Australia to be so ecologically different from other developed nations that it is utter fallacy for ANY demographer to treat Australia in the same way as Europe, East Asia, Canada or New Zealand.
It will be an enormous breakthrough when demographers worldwide are aware of this and are perhaps willing to ask why ecologically fragile regions should be more religious than ecologically robust ones. Whilst I have some understading from Flannery's work on Australian and American history, he (and others) really should go into the topics with many times more depth.
I haven't read Kelly's book, but religion (both Christianity and Judaism) is growing dramatically in Eastern European countries. Of course, 70 years of Communism made these nations ultra-secular, and they are still mostly secular today. But when Communism fell 15 years ago, there was virtually no religion there at all. Today, a significant portion of the populations of all of these countries are practicing their religion(s) again. Sure, it's not everyone, but religion has a very positive growth rate there, especially as compared to the dramatic decline in religious belief in Western Europe over the last 40 years. For these reasons, I think Eastern European fertility will rebound along with the region's economies.
As for your second point, I don't know that ecology makes much of a fertility difference. I have read Jared Diamond's work on the subject, and while I agree ecology may have made a difference in the past when people lived in pre-industrial societies, I think that in today's modern societies, the major factors determining fertility are necessity, opportunity, and culture.
In the past, culture didn't matter so much, because children were a necessity on the farm, and there was no effective opportunity for contraception. Today, however, children are not needed for family income (and, in fact, they do the opposite, as bringing them up costs money), and contraception opportunites are there if people want.
So really, a nation's fertility depends on its culture, the major question being: is having kids considered important in the nation's culture, or is it not? Religiosity plays a large part in creating a family-oriented culture, but other factors exist as well, such as the country's economy and worker salaries, housing prices, male-female social norms (i.e. ultra-feminism as a social norm is bad for fertility), national optimism, and the status of mothers in the workplace.
Both the U.S. and Australia, I believe, have more family-oriented cultures that Europe does, due to a combination of these factors such as a more religious population, cheaper land and housing prices, more traditional female social norms, and higher national optimism over the future.
This, I think, can explain the fertility difference.
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