Page 75 [75]
OCR
Demography and migration | 73 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.
