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Brower 1968; Emmott 2013). Today, they hear about demographic troubles in
their own continent, which, against this backdrop, is all the more frightening.
Moreover, the problems they hear about are not part of their perceptible
present, but of their (children’s) prospected future, making their unease even
more difficult to appease. The fact that we have no personal influence on
these developments at an individual level gives the impression of facing the
‘forces of nature’ or ‘destiny’. Nevertheless, as demographers never omit to
underline, demography is not destiny: we are not the victims but the masters
of our demographic future.
We will only focus here on basic demographic trends in contemporary
European societies and their impacts on European politics. When doing so,
we follow Massimo Livi-Bacci’s diagnosis, who identified decreasing mortality
and increasing life expectancy; declining fertility rates below the replacement
level; rapidly ageing societies; the end to emigration from, and the beginning
of immigration to our continent; and the related changes in social norms
and behaviours as the core components of Europe’s ongoing demographic
transformation (Livi-Bacci 2000, 166 quoted in Berend 2010, 222).
a. Demographic transition
In order to understand the present European demography, we need to look
into its past through the concept of demographic transition (even if this
concept is being increasingly challenged among demographers). The classic
model of demographic transition is composed of four stages. Its early phase
is characterised by high birth and death rates in a relatively stable community
(phase one). Then, improving life conditions lead to decreasing mortality,
which combined with continued high fertility results in a rapidly growing
population (phase two). In the next step, dropping fertility converges with
low mortality, and population growth slows down (phase three). Finally, a
new balance between low mortality and fertility rates produces a relatively
stable but ageing population (phase four).
Europe was the first continent that started its demographic transition back
in the 18" century, and has basically completed it. Some demographers talk
about a second, or even a third demographic transition today. The second
transition is understood as a new cycle of demographic change, with fertility
rates well below the replacement level, leading to a declining and ageing
population; while David Coleman describes an eventual third transition as
“a change in the composition of the population itself, the universalisation
of new ethnic diversity, leading possibly to the replacement of the original
population by new ones through immigration and differential fertility” ¬
adding that this “may never truly arrive” (Coleman 2012, 191, 193). However,
this scenario is already present in the imagination of the European public,
with a significant political impact.