No more soldiers: European big debt for defence, yet young men are vanishing

One of the biggest problems in today’s politics (at least in the West) is the tendency by politicians to compartmentalise everything. Now the optimist could say this is clear evidence that they are not totalitarian. That is at least partially true: Hitler and Stalin did not accept the idea that there is a private sphere separated from the state, that whatever the individual does must be evaluated in light of what this would mean for the Volkskoerper. They took an organic view on all societal matters, meaning that there was no true individual choice, only options that the state would offer – or revoke.

There is a telling anecdote from the last months of the war, when Hitler proposed to switch the Wehrmacht onto a vegetarian diet plus supplements. He only relented from this idea after one of his general staff officers conducted these new dietary guidelines in a self-experiment, leading to such an obvious health deterioration that even the Fuehrer abandoned his original plan. A few years earlier he also proposed a smoking ban in the army, another proposal that took a lot of convincing from his generals to be discarded. For the totalitarian mind, everything is connected and therefore – at some point – everything will become an issue for the state. Or, as Benito Mussolini once said: “”Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

It is of course easy to mock Hitler and the other totalitarians over all of this, but the temptation to tell people what to eat, what to drink, and when and where to smoke (except marijuana, the smell of which has become unbearable in cities like Washington, DC) is alive and well in most Western nations. It is therefore even more surprising that most political leaders – who are so keen on micromanaging their citizens – appear to be entirely unable to see the connection of the big picture issues. Take, for example, the issue of demographics. In Germany, the median age in 1990 was 36 years (meaning that 50 per cent of the population were below 36 years of age and 50 per cent were above). In 2020 this number has increased to 44 years, an eight year increase within a generation. If this trend continues, in two generations more than half of all Germans will be above the age of 60 and close to retirement age. I would argue this is going to happen sooner, since those under the age of 40 will have no interest in financing the retirement claims of half the population.

This picture is similar all over Europe, with birth rates nowhere even near the required 2.1 fertility rate to keep populations stable. Even Hungary, which spends an impressive 5.5 per cent of its GDP on family support can barely crack the 1.5 children per woman threshold. Sure, it is not as bad as in Taiwan (1.11) or Ukraine (1.22), but at current trends the common European will soon find himself or herself on the endangered species list. There is an almost morbid cynicism in the European attempt to take out more debt for its military when it is entirely obvious that from Portugal to Poland there will not be enough tax payers or soldiers in the future. But it gets even more absurd, since Brussels apparently believes that you can get men that are either halfway towards retirement or already retired going to fight willingly for the defence of either Taiwan or Ukraine, two countries that have all but given up on procreation. The idea that the few young people the West still has are to be sacrificed in a war for the freedom of two countries with the lowest fertility rates on the planet is absurd.

Like every sane person I condemn the Russian invasion and hope that cooler minds in China will prevail, but even without the threat from Moscow and Beijing the future will see ever fewer Taiwanese and Ukrainians. The Russians and the Chinese are in equally bad demographic shape, but they are starting from a higher baseline. That notwithstanding, the world we are entering is one where human beings are the most important and scarcest of all resources. But it is not just the numbers, it is also how people are interacting. Western Europe has been running the grand experiment of replacing the babies they did not want to have with children from the non-Western world.

Even if that should help stem the aging problem, it is unlikely to lead to functioning societies. If 21-year-old Franz is not willing to fight for Germany in a war, do you really think that 21-year-old Ahmed will? According to a 2006 study by the Vienna Institute for Demography, by 2051 the majority of Austrians under the age of 15 will be Muslim. We are moving towards a situation where one-half of the population is native retirees who believe that young migrants will come with nothing in mind but working for their pensions. In order to have a social solidarity, people must share a common past and the belief that they are part of a larger history that creates obligations for past, present and future generations. These conditions are simply not met by most migrants from non-Western parts of the world, and they have no interest in financing Europe’s debt or fight its wars. 

It is even worse, since given current migration trends, those Germans with a German passport would die in the trenches, while the migrants would stay back, often in the welfare systems that are now being drained by contributors who are called to the front. 

Yes, I am aware that this is the most pessimistic future scenario, and maybe it will not turn out as bad as I describe it, but it will be some variation of the above scenario. The peoples of Europe are disappearing, and no none talks about it or acts as if this is not happening. One cannot postpone the collision with reality forever, but the longer one tries the more painful it will be.