Law & Ethics of Human Rights

Volume 2, Issue 1 2008 Article 4

D EMOGRAPHY AND H UMAN R IGHTS

Liberal Laws V. the Law of Large Numbers, or How Demographic Rhetoric Arouses Anxiety (in Germany)
Jos Brunner e

Tel Aviv University

Copyright c 2008 Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.

Liberal Laws V. the Law of Large Numbers, or How Demographic Rhetoric Arouses Anxiety (in Germany)
Jos Brunner e

Abstract
This paper presents the metaphysics of liberal rights reasoning on the one hand and that of demographic reasoning on the other, as exemplifying two worldviews that both compete and complement each other in the contemporary German public debate on demographic decline. First, this essay outlines the way in which liberal theorists of various outlooks, perfectionist and neutralist alike, assume that a wide range of rights serves not only the interests of those individuals who possess them, but that it constitutes the foundations of a just and stable political order in general and therefore is to the advantage of everyone. Second, the essay explains how demographic reasoning questions the assumption of harmony shared by the liberal approaches. Third, it provides an impression of the way in which demographic arguments have been deployed in the public sphere in Germany in the last few years. These arguments associate the autonomy of women with the demise of Germany. They claim that by encouraging women to pursue selfrealization as self-interested individuals, the modern secular ethos of Germany as a democratic welfare society may be self-destructive in the long run, since it leads to sub-replacement fertility. Finally, the essay stresses that liberal and demographic perspectives share a blindness of historical events. In response, the conclusion brings history back in, by historicizing both demographic reasoning and demographic developments in Germany, with the aim of defusing some of the anxieties that may have been aroused by the current debate.

I am grateful for all the comments I received on two occasions on which I presented this paper. I am especially indebted to Shai Lavi, the anonymous reviewer, and the Editors of Law & Ethics of Human Rights for their detailed and fruitful criticisms of an earlier draft.

Brunner: Liberal Laws V. the Law of Large Numbers

LIBERAL LAWS V. THE LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS, OR HOW DEMOGRAPHIC RHETORIC AROUSES ANXIETY (IN GERMANY) Jos Brunner*
This paper presents the metaphysics of liberal rights reasoning on the one hand and that of demographic reasoning on the other, as exemplifying two worldviews that both compete and complement each other in the contemporary German public debate on demographic decline. First, this essay outlines the way in which liberal theorists of various outlooks, perfectionist and neutralist alike, assume that a wide range of rights serves not only the interests of those individuals who possess them, but that it constitutes the foundations of a just and stable political order in general and therefore is to the advantage of everyone. Second, the essay explains how demographic reasoning questions the assumption of harmony shared by the liberal approaches. Third, it provides an impression of the way in which demographic arguments have been deployed in the public sphere in Germany in the last few years. These arguments associate the autonomy of women with the demise of Germany. They claim that by encouraging women to pursue self-realization as self-interested individuals, the modern secular ethos of Germany as a democratic welfare society may be self-destructive in the long run, since it leads to sub-replacement fertility. Finally, the essay stresses that liberal and demographic perspectives share a blindness of historical events. In response, the conclusion brings history back in, by historicizing both demographic reasoning and demographic developments in Germany, with the aim of defusing some of the anxieties that may have been aroused by the current debate. .
Professor of Philosophy of Science and History of Ideas, Buchmann Faculty of Law and Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. I am grateful for all the comments I received on two occasions on which I presented this paper. I am especially indebted to Shai Lavi, the anonymous reviewer, and the Editors of Law & Ethics of Human Rights for their detailed and fruitful criticisms of an earlier draft.
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INTRODUCTION
This paper presents the metaphysics of liberal rights reasoning on the one hand and that of demographic reasoning on the other, as exemplifying two dispositions or worldviews that both compete and complement each other in the contemporary German public debate on demographic decline. Liberal theorists of various outlooks, perfectionist and neutralist alike, assume in one way or another that a wide range of rights serves not only the interests of those individuals who possess them, but that rights for individuals also constitute the foundations of a just and stable political order and therefore are to the advantage of everyone. They tend to defend universal liberal principles of individual freedom not only by arguing that they are a necessary prerequisite for making autonomous individual choices, but also by praising them for being self-sustaining and bringing about a desirable and free society, thus ensuring the continued existence and development of the collective as a whole both in the short run and in the long run. The rst section of this essay briey outlines the manner in which this optimistic and harmonious outlookin which the aggregate of autonomous and selfinterested choices of life-plans that are taken on the micro-level of the individualis to have a stabilizing and thriving effect on the macrolevel of society as a whole. In contrast to the abstract principles of liberal rights reasoning, the language of demography speaks of the nitty-gritty of society: It invokes the brute facts of corporeal life, such as food, sex, life, death, and territory, or to use more academic terms, nutrition, fertility or reproduction, mortality, and migration. Perhaps this is the reason that demographic reasoning presents the world as less harmonious and thereby may arouse anxiety. The second section shows how demographic reasoning questions the assumption of harmony that is shared by the various liberal approaches. The third section provides an impression of the way in which demographic arguments have been deployed in the public sphere in
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Brunner: Liberal Laws V. the Law of Large Numbers

Germany in the last few years. As this section shows, it is above all the autonomy that women have achieved by gaining access to the labor market and their rights and choices, which are targeted in demographic arguments concerning the detrimental long-term effects of the low fertility rate in present-day Germany. These arguments associate the autonomy of women with the demise of Germany as a vibrant nation, by arguing that giving women autonomy and allowing them to choose whether to have children or not and at what age, has led to sub-replacement fertility in Germany. The main focus of this essay is directed at the way in which this rhetoric presents womens rights and autonomy as the source of Germanys purported decline, for the demographic discourse prevalent in Germany creates the impressionthat by encouraging all individuals, including women, to pursue self-realization as selfinterested individuals, the modern secular ethos of Germany as a democratic welfare society may be self-destructive in the long run. Thus this article explores the intriguing combination of a liberal perspective on the one hand, which conceives of humans as autonomous agents driven by rational self-interest, and of a demographic outlook on the other, which refers to humans as mutually dependent members of a population, rather than a society or a people with a historically evolved culture and social institutions. The fourth section argues that although liberal and demographic perspectives look at individuals from opposite angles, as it were, as independent atoms or as interdependent members of a population, they share blindness for history. Thus in the fourth section history is brought back in, by historicizing both demographic reasoning and demographic developments in Germany, with the aim of defusing some of the anxieties that may have been aroused by the German public debate.

I. LIBERAL HARMONY
The political theory of liberalism is based on an individualist moral ontology that regards individuals as fundamentally equal and as the
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exclusive ultimate bearers of political and social rights. Therefore, liberalism seeks to support and enhance individual autonomy, that is, the capacity of all persons to make their own choices and develop their own individual life plans.1 Because they value autonomy, liberals are committed to tolerating a wide variety of individual life-plans.2 Thus in the liberal view the purpose of the state is to facilitate the varied projects of its citizens, rather than to impose ends of its own by coercive means. One can distinguish two basic positions among contemporary Anglo-Saxon liberal theorists with respect to the question as to how a liberal state can legitimately and effectively foster and protect individual autonomy: Some leading liberal theorists, such as Ronald Dworkin,3 Charles Larmore,4 and John Rawls,5 argue that in order to allow individuals to make their own life choices and ourish, the state has to remain neutral concerning competing conceptions of the good life. The aim of such liberal neutrality is to express equal respect for all conceptions of the good and to protect the equal freedom of individuals to pursue the good they have chosen. This view is, of course, expressed most prominently by Rawlss rst principle of justice: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.6 According to this neutralist or anti-perfectionist position, if government or other state institutions favor some ideas of the good while denigrating others, they infringe upon the equality of citizens in making autonomous choices. This point of view has been summed up succinctly by Ronald Dworkin:
ATTRACTA INGRAM, A POLITICAL THEORY OF RIGHTS (1994); Rogers M. Smith, The Constitution and Autonomy, 60 TEX. L. REV. 175 (1982). 2 Francesco Biondo, Two Types of Liberal Perfectionism, 18 RATIO JURIS 519, 523 (2005). 3 RONALD DWORKIN, A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE 181-204 (1985). 4 Charles Larmore, Political Liberalism, 18 POLITICAL THEORY 339 (Aug. 1990). 5 JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (1971); JOHN RAWLS, POLITICAL LIBERALISM (1993). 6 RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE, supra note 5, at 302.
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The theory of equality supposes that political decisions must be, so far as is possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life. Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions, the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to another, either because the ofcials believe that one is intrinsically superior, or because one is held by the more numerous or more powerful group.7 The neutralist position has been opposed by theorists such as William Galston,8 Joseph Raz9, George Sher,10 and Stephen Wall,11 who argue that rather than remaining neutral, liberal states can and should actively promote the democratic dispositions, beliefs, values, and practices on which liberalism depends. Together with other proponents of perfectionist liberalism, Raz suggests that a liberal state favor certain conceptions of the good life while disapproving of others, so as to encourage people to realize their capabilities and preferences autonomously and successfully. Thus, although perfectionist liberals advocate proactive state policies, they do so in the name and for the sake of individual autonomy. Rather than veering toward a defense of oppression and coercion, or even totalitarianism, they stress, like Raz, that to be autonomous a person must not only be given a choice but he must be given an adequate range of choices, specifying that it is not numbers but variety that matters, for to be autonomous and to have an autonomous life, a person must have options which enable him to sustain throughout his life activities which, taken together, exercise all

DWORKIN, supra note 3, at 191. WILLIAM A. GALSTON, LIBERAL PURPOSES: GOODS, VIRTUES AND DIVERSITY IN THE LIBERAL STATE (1991). 9 JOSEPH RAZ, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM (1986); JOSEPH RAZ, ETHICS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN (1994). 10 GEORGE SHER, BEYOND NEUTRALITY: PERFECTIONISM AND POLITICS (1997). 11 STEVEN WALL, LIBERALISM, PERFECTIONISM, AND RESTRAINT (1998).
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the capacities human beings have an innate drive to exercise, as well as to decline to develop.12 While disagreeing on the means, neutralist and perfectionist liberals agree on the end. Their visions of the autonomous person, whose options, choices, interests, and capabilities they seek to protect, resemble each other. They all refer to an individual capable of rationally choosing from among valuable options and goals, of leading a life around these choices, and taking responsibility for them. Thus, although neutralist in design, not even Rawlss theory of justice is supposed to protect all and every choice that people may want to make. As he puts it, the principles of justice cover all persons with rational plans of life, whatever their content.13 Finally, both Rawls and Raz maintain that an individuals well-being or happiness depend on the successful realization of his or her autonomous choices. Rawls states, [a] person is happy.During those periods when he is successfully carrying through a rational plan and he is with reason condent that his efforts will come to fruition.14 According to Raz, Success and failure in the pursuit of our goals is in itself the major determinant of our wellbeing.15 Raz explains this among other factors by the social context of modern society. In his words, Since we live in a society whose social forms are to a considerable extent based on individual choice, and since our options are limited by what is available in our society, we can prosper in it only if we can be successfully autonomous.16 However, in addition to the link between autonomy, rationality, individual rights, and happiness, there is a further element that all varieties of liberalism share with each other: Ever since Adam Smith set out the mechanism of the invisible hand in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,17 by which he contended
12 13 14 15 16 17

RAZ, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, supra note 9, at 373-375. RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE, supra note 5, at 253 (emphasis added J.B.). Id. at 550-551. RAZ, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, supra note 9, at 291, 297. Id. at 394. ADAM SMITH, AN ESSAY ON THE WEALTH OF NATIONS 456 (1976).
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the modern economy operated, liberal thinkers have adopted this principle into their theoretical framework in one way or another. Implicitly or explicitly, they claim that by making autonomous choices and enacting their rational life-plans on a micro-level, individuals pursue not only their individual happiness, but also further a stable, self-sustaining and fair social order on a macro-level. Thus liberal thinkers imply or afrm that safeguarding and acting out individual autonomy means simultaneously also to advance the general interest. With some, this liberal vision of a harmony between micro-level decisions and macro-level effects is based on assumptions concerning the mechanisms of voluntary exchange in the free market, perhaps with some welfare mechanisms added on. With others, it is more a matter of hope concerning the possibility of instilling liberal values in all citizens. In other words, liberal theorists assume that the protection of individual interests will bring about the achievement of long-term collective goals, either as an unintentional, unwitting byproduct of furthering individual aims, or with the help of additional educational measures that further certain lifestyles and hinder others. By this logic John Stuart Mill developed not only the far-reaching utilitarian defense of the freedom of speech in On Liberty, for which he has become famous, but in parallel also justied a plurality of diverse experiments of living. He claimed that just as a diversity of opinions is necessary to reach truth, society at large, and not only the individuals directly involved, would benet from a diversity of ways to live. As a utilitarian he held experiments of living not only to be intrinsically valuable, but also advocated them since they maximized utility by demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of different roads taken: As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when
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any one thinks t to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.18 While the 19th century utilitarian liberal Mill argued that liberal pluralism would lead to progress for all, the 20th century Kantian liberal John Rawls defended the two principles of justice that he presented in A Theory of Justice in part, at least, by an appeal to stability, arguing, a society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable: other things being equal, the forces making for stability increase (up to some limit) as time passes.19 In his words, justice as fairness will be the basis of a stable society, because it generates its own support... it is likely to have greater stability than traditional alternatives, since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology.20 The assumption that it is part of the essence of a liberal society to engender harmony between individual and collective, private and public, is soothing, since it projects an image of a society in which people with incompatible values and life plans can live together peacefully, and where short-term and long-term interests do not conict with each other in a fundamental and irreconcilable fashion, as long as one manages to prevent individuals from harming each other.

II. DEMOGRAPHIC ANXIETIES

How, then, is a liberal to respond when it is claimed that women in Western liberal societies are no longer willing to bear the children needed to ensure the long-term survival of their society, because they consider having and raising children to be a burden that might impede
JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY 114 (1910). RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE, supra note 5, at 498. 20 Id. at 456. For discussions of Rawlss views on stability, see Brian Barry, John Rawls and the Search for Stability, 105 ETHICS 874 (1995); Mary Lyn Stoll, Rawlsian Stability and Feminism, available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Gend/GendStol. htm.(last visited Oct. 8, 2007).
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the realization of their self-interested life-plans and the pursuit of their individual happiness? This question has been posed in public debates in the course of the last decade in the German media, where it has given rise to heated debates in which demographic arguments have been advanced against the liberal assumption of an in-built harmony between individual life-plans and collective goals. The German debate arose against the background of analyses conducted by Western demographers, which have shown that during the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century the West has been marked by a drastic lowering of the fertility rate and less stable marital patterns. Moreover, leading researchers have suggested that once fertility decline has begun, it does not stop until birth rates have sunk to replacement level or lower.21 It has been claimed that this decrease was motivated by new ideas that place the individual and individual choice at the core of the unfolding life course; the contemporary challengeis for individuals to construct a meaningful life in the absence of a clear normative life course (one not necessarily including parenthood).22 This transition has been interrelated with a change of social and cultural values that affected women in the developed world, where they could achieve a higher self-esteem and social status through success in the labor market rather than in their role as mothers. Thus, it has been argued, for many women in the developed world children

John Bongaarts, Fertility Decline in the Developed World: Where will It End? 89 AM. ECO. REV. 256 (1999); John Bongaarts & Rodolfo Bulatao, Completing the Demographic Transition, 25 POP. & DEV. REV. 411, 515-529 (1999). 22 Philip S. Morgan & Miles G. Taylor, Low Fertility at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, 32 ANNUAL REV. SOC. 375, 388 (2006). See also Dirk J. van de Kaa, Europes Second Demographic Transition, 42 POP. BULLETIN 1 (1987); Ron Lestaheghe, The Second Demographic Transition: Theory and Evidence, in GENDER AND FAMILY CHANGE IN INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES 17-62 (Karen Oppenheim Mason & An-Magritt Jensen eds., 1995); Joshua Goldstein, Wolfgang Lutz, & Maria Rita Testa, The Emergence of Sub-Replacement Family Size Ideals in Europe, 22 POP. RESEARCH & POLY REV. 479 (2003); see also ANTONY GIDDENS, MODERNITY AND SELF-IDENTITY (1991).
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no longer seem to be as central to their lives as they used to be even a few decades ago.23 In addition, the decrease in fertility has also been explained partially by the fact that the social security and pension systems of the Western welfare states have created a safety-net for old age, thereby decreasing the economic motivation for an extended family that previously served as an informal social insurance mechanism. In other words, in addition to changing values, it is claimed that people started to have fewer children because social security made fertility economically unnecessary or even imprudent. This form of reasoning, which synthesizes liberal reasoning concerning individual choices with demographic analysis, is not only typical of the German debate, but characteristic of contemporary Western demography in general. Contrary to the view of liberal political theorists, it suggests that providing individualsand above all womenwith a wide range of options and protecting their ability to make autonomous choices by an extensive system of rights, liberties and welfare mechanisms may be self-destructive. Rather than ensuring the long-term stability and survival of Western liberal societies, encouraging people to prefer their career or other pursuits that may seem more valuable to them than bearing and raising children is said to lead to the decline of the societies that allow their members to envisage a full and happy life without feeling the need to have children. On the basis of this approach, the ecologist Garrett Hardin, for instance, has argued that in fertility choices the selsh deeds of individuals can lead to the ruin of the whole system.24 Demographers deal with humans as part of a population, a concept which in the most general sense of the term refers to organisms of
GRAN THERBORN, BETWEEN SEX AND POWER: FAMILY IN THE WORLD, 19002000 (2004); An-Magritt Jensen, For the Childrens Sake: Symbolic Power Lost?, in CHILDREN AND THE CHANGING FAMILY: BETWEEN TRANSFORMATION AND NEGOTIATION (FUTURE OF CHILDHOOD SERIES) 134-148 (AN-MAGRITT JENSEN & LORNA MCKEE eds., 2003). 24 Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, 162 SCIENCE 1243 (1968).
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a particular species inhabiting a given territory. This perspective endows demographic forecasts with the capacity to arouse anxiety in liberals by pointing to the long-term and large-scale effects of the unhindered pursuit of life-plans by large numbers of autonomous individuals. Rather than looking at life-choices such as who to marry, where to live, whether and when to bear children and how many, as the realization of individual rights and freedoms, demography looks at them from a naturalistic perspective, delineating general tendencies by statistical computations and pointing to trends by means of probabilistic arithmetic. Thereby demography draws attention to the fact that a system of rights may protect the autonomy of individuals in a given population, but that since the population is composed of a large number of individuals, and since all individuals make autonomous choices time and again throughout their lives, they add up to an aggregate that is subject not only to liberal laws, but also to the law of large numbers, that is to statistical reasoning and regularity. However, before becoming depressed by the apparent dead-end into which liberal societies are allegedly driven by their own logic, one should note that there exists a large and sophisticated body of research on fertility ratios and demographic trends, which has shown that although there may be a lot of demographic data, it is exceedingly difcult to establish clear-cut causal relations and other unequivocal correlations among them. Interrelations are multidimensional and often circular; hence there exist a number of divergent and often contradictory models and rationales that explain the complex dynamics of fertility patterns and their uctuations, as well as their interdependence with socio-economic conditions, technological development, institutional frameworks, cultural values, and policies.25
See, e.g., Catherine Hakim, A New Approach to Explaining Fertility Patterns: Preference Theory, 29 POP. & DEV. REV. 349 (2003); Jean-Claude Chesnais, Fertility, Family, and Social Policy in Contemporary Western Europe, 22 POP. DEV. REV. 729 (1996); Karin L. Brewster & Ronald R. Rindfuss, Fertility and Womens Employment In Industrialized Nations, 26 ANN. REV. SOC. 271 (2000); Morgan & Taylor, supra note 22; HANS PETER KOHLER, FERTILITY AND SOCIAL INTERACTION: AN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE
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Nevertheless, as will be detailed below, in much of the contemporary public demographic discourse in Germany it is argued that in modern Western societies, where women possess political and social rights and can rely on basic economic safeguards, the choice whether to have children and how many, is ultimately theirs alone. Since it is viewed through this lens, womens realization of their autonomy has become associated with images of the death of the nation in the recent lively and often highly polemical public debate on the fertility ratio of Germany, with which the German media have been abuzz in recent years.26 Before turning to the debate in the German press, one has to be aware that the theoretical and conceptual framework of research into fertility decline is highly complex and rich with speculations, conjectures, and hypotheses. Moreover, as has been mentioned, fertility decline and sub-replacement ratios are by no means a specically German problem, but part of a much wider, global development. Finally, though German fertility ratios are undoubtedly low, even in Western Europe, they are above those of Italy and Spain. They are also higher than those of many Eastern and Central European countries, such as Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovenia, Poland, and the Ukraine. In fact, European statistics reveal that most central and eastern European countries face a population decrease and that there is no country of the European Union whose fertility rate reaches replacement level, which demographers set at about 2.1 children per woman.27 What may be particular to the German-speaking part

(2001); Karen Oppenheim, Mason, Explaining Fertility Transitions, 34 DEMOGRAPHY 443 (1997); Herbert L. Smith, Integrating Theory and Research on the Institutional Determinants of Fertility, 26 DEMOGRAPHY 171 (1989). 26 See, e.g., Ist Deutschland noch zu retten? FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG (FAZ), AUG. 28, 2006, No. 199, at 32-33; Weniger dramatisch, 34 FOCUS 36-38 (2006); Unter Wlfen DER SPIEGEL, 10/2006, 76-87. Several special issues of AUS POLITIK UND ZEITGESCHICHTE were published on demographic topics, such as Alter und Altern 49-50 (2005) and Kinderarmut 26 (2006). All translations from German are by the author. 27 Population in Europe, available at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_ OFFPUB/KS-NK-05-015/EN/KS-NK-05-015-EN.PDF (last visited May 25, 2007).
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of Europethough by no means to Germany aloneis that the ideal family size that young Germans (and Swiss and Austrians) mention, when they are asked in opinion polls, is well below replacement.28

III. WOMENS FATAL CHOICES

The aim of this section is not to provide a complete and exhaustive account of the public debate on the declining fertility rate that has been going on in Germany for the last few years. Its goal is to sketch its contours and highlight the combination of liberal and demographic reasoning that guides its arguments, as they have appeared in the leading German transregional printed media, focusing on the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as the two weeklies Die Zeit and Der Spiegel. What, then, is the prevalent explanation of the decline of the German fertility rate, as it appears in public discourse in Germany? In 2005 Herwig Birg, one the most inuential gures in the German debate, was invited by the leading transregional daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) to provide an introductory course into demography, divided into ten lessons, which were published in February and March.29 In the articles Birg presents demographic explanations and forecasts to explain trends that he describes as irreversible, tracing one hundred years of birth decline back to the late nineteenth century, when Germany took the lead in social legislation, establishing the groundwork of the modern welfare state with a safety net of social security, pension funds, health, and accident insurances. While in
Wolfgang Lutz, Vegard Skirbekk, & Maria Rita Testa, The Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis: Forces that May Lead to Further Postponement and Fewer Births in Europe, VIENNA Y.B. POP. RESEARCH 167 (2006). 29 Herwig Birg, Grundkurs Demographie, FAZ, available at http://www.faz.net (last visited May 25, 2007). Birg is Professor Emeritus of the Chair for Demography at Bielefeld University, a past president of the German Association for Demography and member of the United Nations Expert Group on Policy Responses to Population Ageing and Population Decline.
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earlier periods Germans had children to insure themselves against various risks of life, such as unemployment, illness, and injury, and even against the loss of a spouse, they now could rely on the state instead. State support for German citizens, which was guaranteed by a broad set of comprehensive social rights, allowed Germans to make their life choices freely, without the constraint of planning for their old age. Thus Birg presents the realization of the liberal welfare state, in which not having children seemed to have no possible detrimental consequences at a later stage in life, as the reason that more and more Germans chose not to have children, or to have them at a later age, in order to increase their career chances and income at a younger age. His argument is that the higher the income a woman can earn by pursuing a professional career, and the less she has to worry about being supported at a later stage in life, the higher the price tag on having children who might get in her way of moving up the career ladder even further. Hence, he takes an increase in social rights for women, combined with an increase in earning capacity, to account for a drastic decrease in German fertility.30 As we see, according to Birg, declining German fertility is an unintended but self-destructive consequence of the German welfare system and a liberal array of womens rights and equality, which allows choices without having to worry about support in old-age. Birg notes that while German fertility sank continuously throughout the second half of the 20th century, the average size of families with children hardly changed, remaining almost constant around 2.1. What increased dramatically, he stresses, is the number of women who chose not to have children at all.31 In his view, German women who choose to remain without children may already have brought about a predicament in which the German population as a whole produces too few children who can become parents in the future, for this trend to be reversed.32
HERWIG BIRG, AUSWIRKUNGEN UND KOSTEN DER ZUWANDERUNG NACH DEUTSCHLAND: GUTACHTEN IM AUFTRAG DES BAYRISCHEN STAATSMINISTERIUMS DES INNERN (2001). 31 Id. at 4. 32 Id. at 7, 8; Inge Kloepfer, Auf immer kinderlos, die deutsche Extratour, in FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE SONNTAGSZEITUNG 33 (2006).
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As a rule, the beginning of what Meinhard Miegel has called the deformation of German society, dates back to 1972, the rst year German mortality gures were higher than those of births.33 On March 14, 2006, the FAZ internet edition reported that Germany reached the peak of post-war fertility in 1964, when 1.357 million children were born in both German republics. The paper states that with 676.000 births in 2005, fertility had decreased by half and was substantially lower even than 1946, when 922.000 children were born. The article quotes Michael Hther, Director of the Cologne Institute of German economy as saying: This is dramatic, we are running into scissors. Hther explained that this is a result of the fact that combining a professional life and child-rearing was still not regarded as normal for women in Germany.34 The FAZ repeatedly explains the accelerated decrease in fertility since the early seventies by the increasingly individualistic and careerist values that are said to have led German women to choose professional careers and non-traditional intimate relationships over childrearing, while contraception and legal abortions have enabled the realization of those choices.35 A similar attitude governs a piece published in January 2004 in the prestigious high-brow weekly Die Zeit, entitled Freedom and its Price, which bemoans the loss of family values.36 Time and again demographic arguments are used to point out that the decision of German women not to have children or to have few and to have them late, may have serious consequences for the political order in Germany, while rhetorical hyperboles like time bomb or

MEINHARD MIEGEL, DIE DEFORMIERTE GESELLSCHAFT, WIE DIE DEUTSCHEN DIE WIRKLICHKEIT VERDRNGEN (2002). 34 FAZ.NET, Mar. 14, 2006. 35 Der Kinderwunsch nimmt weiter ab, FAZ, May 2, 2005, available at http:// www.faz.net. See also Herwig Birg, Die zwingende Logik der Demographie, in DEMOGRAPHIEDEMOKRATIEGESCHICHTE: DEUTSCHLAND UND ISRAEL (J. Brunner ed., 2007) [hereinafter DEMOGRAPHIEDEMOKRATIE]. 36 Sabine Rckert, Die Freiheit und ihr Preis, DIE ZEIT, Jan. 22, 2004, available at http://images.zeit.de/text/200/05/Demographie (last visited May 25, 2007).
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demographic implosion serve to warn that Germany in its present form may disintegrate. A lone voice that puts at least part of the responsibility on the shoulders of men, is that of Susanne Gaschke, whose essay The Childless Country was published in Die Zeit. Gaschke defends family values by explaining that the often quoted female search for self-fulllment could not account on its own for the decline of fertility in Germany and that men, too, had to bear part of the responsibility, since they had become uncertain of their role as fathers.37 Finally, all newspapers are concerned with the fact that ever since the Wall fell and Germany was reunited in 1989 there has been a strong internal migration from the East into the West, depopulating the industrial centers in the East by more than 1.5 million people since 1990. Again, the choices made by women in search of a career are highlighted in the debate. In an article stating that Germany has the lowest per capita birth rate in the world, Die Zeit warns that the Eastern parts of Germany lack about 10 per cent of women who have left for the Western provinces in search of jobs, summing up the predicament of the Eastern part of Germany succinctly with no women, no children, no future.38 In this as well as in many other articles Eastern Germany is portrayed as a place of unqualied, uneducated, and frustrated single men with low chances to nd a marriage partner, a place which should, some of the demographers suggest, be turned into a National Park.39

Susanne Gaschke, Das kinderlose Land, DIE ZEIT, Jan. 15, 2004, available at http://images.zeit.de/ 2004/04/Demographie (last visited May 25, 2007). 38 Hans Schuh, Systematischer Frauenklau, DIE ZEIT, Mar. 16, 2006, available at http://images.zeit.de/text/2006/12/Demographie, (last visited May 25, 2007). Stephan Lwenstein, Im Jahr 2015 Schock in Ostdeutschland, FAZ, Mar. 16, 2006; Frank Pergande, Erst fehlen die Kinder, dann die Eltern, FAZ, Oct. 19, 2006. 39 Berlin Institut fr Bevlkerungsentwicklung, quoted in FAZ, Sept. 20, 2006. See also Andreas Sentker, Der letzte mach das Licht aus, DIE ZEIT, Apr. 22, 20004, available at http://images.zeit.de/text/2004/18/demo (last visited May 25, 2007). Frank Schirrmacher, Ein heilloser Mnnerberschuss, FAZ, Sept. 20, 2006. For a historical analysis of the discourse of East-West migration in Germany, see Christian
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As we can see, this rhetoric combines the two strands of reasoning that have been portrayed in the rst two sections of this essay. On the one hand there are the demographic images of the German population as an organic unit and gloomy prophecies about its chances of survival. On the other hand there is the liberal image of individuals acting as autonomous agents, furthering primarily their own well-being. But in this case the latter are German women and their self-interested behavior is blamed for the decline of the nation. Though womens autonomous choices gure prominently in the debate in which the specter of German disintegration is raised, it would be simplistic and inaccurate to reduce it entirely to a homily against women. Some media commentators blame the government, tracing the negative birth balance of Germany to the absence of a decisive family policy, which in turn is explained by the political impossibility of a government policy encouraging reproduction in post-Holocaust Germany, due to the memories that such a policy would stir.40 Others put the low birth rate in the context of a general cultural climate that is unfriendly to children, as well as a severe lack of institutional support, such as state-sponsored, public child-care centers, all of which make the decision to have children one that deviates from the mainstream of German culture, rather than being part of it.41 Migrants from Eastern Europe and from developing countries are often mentioned as a possible replacement for unborn Germans.

Saehrendt, 100 Jahre Abwanderung aus dem deutschen Osten, in DEMOGRAPHIE DEMOKRATIE, supra note 35. 40 For National Socialist policies on the family and fertility see Claudia Koonz, MOTHERS IN THE FATHERLAND: WOMEN, THE FAMILY, AND NAZI POLITICS (1987). ELIZABETH D. HEINEMAN, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES A HUSBAND MAKE?: WOMEN AND MARITAL STATUS IN NAZI AND POSTWAR GERMANY (1999). 41 Susanne Gaschke, Wo sind die Kinder?, DIE ZEIT, Aug. 14, 2004, available at http://images.zeit.de/text/2003/34/01 (last visited May 25, 2007); Warum die Deutschen keine Kinder mehr bekommen, FAZ, Feb. 21, 2005. See also Josef Schmid, Die Bevlkerungsfrage und das wiedervereinigte Deutschland, DEMOGRAPHIE DEMOKRATIE, supra note 35.
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Thus an external inux is sometimes referred to as life saving, though mostly, when the possibility of opening Germanys doors more widely to migrants is brought up, it also tends to be dismissed as unsatisfactory, such as when the FAZ proclaimed in June 2005 that migration into Germany cannot make up for its low birth rate.42 It is pointed out that the inux required to provide the demographic boost that Germany supposedly needs, due to the cascading effect of its low fertility ratio, would be so huge as to entirely transform the German nation.43 Finally, readers are reminded that labor migration, which brought a large number of Muslims with a high birth-rate to Germany, already created problems of social integration and changed the character of Germany from a rather homogenous Western, liberal, and secular nation into a multi-cultural society. Therefore a supplementary inux of labor migrants from non-Western countries is depicted as leading to a further change of German society away from a liberal ethos by creating a parallel society of immigrants. Thus, whatever compensatory demographic effect a substantial number of labor migrants might have, they are regarded as entailing high social costs and severe social problems for Germany. In the words of Herwig Birg: At a certain point the process of integration turns into one of self-reinforcing disintegration.44 Of course, in a modern democratic society such as Germany it is quite impossible to advocate interfering with the autonomy of citizens concerning marriage and birth in order to increase fertility (the negative, as it were of the policies deployed in developing

42

Zuwanderung kann geringe Geburtenrate nicht ausgleichen, FAZ, June 29,

2005. For this argument newspaper commentators often rely on the Report of an Independent Commission appointed by the German Government, known as the Sssmuth Commission Report, see ZUWANDERUNG GESTALTEN, INTEGRATION FRDERN (2001). 44 See supra note 30, at 26. See also Max Wingen, Immigration to the Federal Republic of Germany as a Demographic and Social Problem, 29 INTL MIGRATION REV. 710 (1995).
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countries to lower fertility45), even if demographic forecasts cast a shadow on the long-term existence of the nation. Under these conditions a decline in fertility may induce a feeling of powerlessness and paralysisespecially in menand provoke strong fears of social disintegration and anxieties evoked by images of national death, especially if demographic trends are perceived or portrayed as irreversible. However, not all is gloom in the German papers. In 2006 Die Zeit put forward a markedly different position under the rhetorical title Less ChildrenSo What?. The provocative article, written by the editor, opens with the statement [w]hen demography is at stake, impostors and hype-artists are not far away.46 Arguing against the fashion in which the demographic self-destruction of Germany is portrayed, the essay provides gures to show that the future of Germany is not endangered. A few months later Die Zeit published a four-part series, questioning the common knowledge concerning the data on the demographic decline of Germany, explaining the problems that vitiated the measures used by German demographers.47 Die Zeit dismissed many of the prevalent correlations and explanations as unfounded or simplistic, explaining to its readers that demography is an underdeveloped science, especially in Germany.48 A commentary, published toward the end of 2006, claimed that when closely examined, the predictions indicated in fact that the German population would

Amy Ong Tsui, Population Policies, Family Planning Programs, and Fertility: The Record, 27 POP. & DEV. REV. 184 (2001). Andre Caetano & Joseph Potter, Politics and Female Sterilization in Northeast Brazil, 30 POP. & DEV. REV. 79 (2004); Amartya Sen, Fertility and Coercion, 63 U. CHI. L. REV. 1035 (1996). 46 Josef Joffe, Kinderschwundna und? DIE ZEIT, Mar. 23, 2006, available at http://images.zeit.de/text/2006/13/DEUTSCHE (last visited May 25, 2007). 47 Pokerspiele an der Wiege, DIE ZEIT, June 14, 2006, available at http://images. zeit.de/text/2006/25/Demographie-2 (last visited May 25, 2007). 48 Jede hat einen Grund, DIE ZEIT, June 22, 2006, available at http://images.zeit. de/ text/ 2006/26/Demographie-3 (last visited May 25, 2007).
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remain stable over the coming decades and even might be slightly growing.49 After having provided its share of anxiety-inducing demographic rhetoric, the prominent weekly Der Spiegel more recently countered some of the fear-provoking demographic hyperboles, warning its readers already by the wording of the title, The Fairy-tale of the Dying Germans that one should distrust demographic warnings.50 In another piece, Der Spiegel provides a detailed account of an article in Nature, where two researchers suggest that a novel approach to the measure of aging in terms of standardized life expectancy, rather than absolute age would lead to a radical revision of pension laws and transform the image of Germany into a younger society.51 In October 2006 Der Spiegel opposes the juxtaposition of lowering fertility rates and the increasing age of the German population as a catastrophic phenomenon. In a subtitle it quotes a comment of the prominent Munich sociologist Ulrich Beck, dismissing fear-mongering demographic selfexaminations as leading to false alarmism, false causality and false recipes. Responding to depictions of Germany as located at the bottom of the fertility ladder, it suggests that one has to get rid of prejudices and half-truths before one can cope with the countrys demographic problems.52 In another recent issue Der Spiegel extensively quotes a study of the Robert-Bosch Foundation that suggests that the shrinking numbers of pupils would lead to substantial savings in expenditures for schoolsaround 13 billion Euros by 2020which could be used to

Bjrnt Schwentker, Schwarzmalen nach Zahlen, DIE ZEIT, Nov. 7, 2006, available at http://images.zeit.de/text/2006/45/Demographie-Kommentar (last visited May 25, 2007). 50 Die Mr von den aussterbenden Deutschen, SPIEGEL ONLINE, Aug. 23, 2006. 51 Die Alten werden jnger, SPIEGEL ONLINE, June 9, 2005, available at http:// www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,359646,00.html (last visited May 25, 2007). 52 Norbert F. Pltzl, Schluss mit dem Methusalem-Spuk, SPIEGEL ONLINE, Oct. 24, 2006, available at http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,443787.html (last visited May 25, 2007).
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improve the German school system and its higher education. In total, Der Spiegel claims, Germany could expect to save almost 100 billion Euros by 2020 due to its demographic transformation.53 Portraying the demographic development of Germany as leading to savings in expenditure runs diametrically against what is taken to be the common demographic wisdom in Germany today, which depicts Germany as developing into a society in which, due to the increasing longevity and declining fertility of its population, a continuously shrinking labor force will have to carry an ever-increasing burden of pension payments.54 As we see, there are critical voices in the German print media today, although for about a decade they have been fostering anxiety concerning the future of Germany as a nation. This was done by means of a simple causality composed of demographic gloom based on a low fertility rate, which was depicted as the inevitable consequence of the access to the labor market gained byabove all educated middle-classGerman women in the course of the sixties and seventies. According to this line of reasoning, when they achieved autonomy, German women started to prefer careers to cradles, thereby making a choice that, although selsh, is economically rational. Methodologically, the focus of increased female autonomy follows the work of Gary Becker55 and other neoclassical economists, who have argued that the entrance of women into the labor force increased the opportunity costs of childbearing to the family economy, thereby leading to falling fertility ratios. This doomsday discourse is marked by an elision of history, which has to be brought back in, to provide a better understanding both of the causes of German fertility trend and of the logic and tone of the
Kinderschwundprmie nicht verfrhstcken, SPIEGEL ONLINE, July 19, 2006, available at http://www.spiegel.de/unipsiegel/studium/0,1518,427370,00.html (last visited May 25, 2007). 54 Ludwig Greven, Altes Deutschland, DIE ZEIT, available at http://images.zeit. de/text/online/2006/45/Demographie (last visited May 25, 2007). 55 GARY BECKER, THE ECONOMIC APPROACH TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR (1976).
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demographic discourse accompanying it. German women, as well as men, are not free-oating atoms driven by self-realization. They take their decisions in the context of historical processes, experiences and events through which they live, historically evolved cultural norms and ideals of their society, as well as social institutions and structures with a history. Moreover, in order to evaluate the warnings of demographers and their popularizers in the press, they too have to be placed in a historical context.

IV. BRINGING HISTORY BACK IN

A historical examination of demographic warnings of disaster and destruction makes clear that in one way or another they have been part and parcel of political discourse for two centuries. With the exception of its very early days, demography has a tradition of being declinedriven or apocalypse-oriented, although in the eighteenth century, statisticians dealing with issues of population still assumed a preexisting, divinely designed harmony that they sought to reveal. The Prussian Pastor Johann Peter Sssmilch, who is considered one of the founders of modern demography, published tables in Die gttliche Ordnung [The Divine Order], that were probably the most widely-read, but by no means the only statistical evidence that sought to prove the presence of an all-wise, all-powerful and good God, while also being usable for actuarial purposes well into the nineteenth century.56 The stability of statistical ratios, such as of male to female births, was taken to be inexplicable by chance and hence as an expression of the will of God, who governs the length of human life. 57

Jacqueline Hecht, Johann Peter Sssmilch: A German Prophet in Foreign Countries, 41 POP. STUD. 31 (1987). 57 Lorraine J. Daston, Rational Individuals Versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics, in 1 THE PROBABILISTIC REVOLUTION, IDEAS IN HISTORY 295, 302 (L. KRGER, L.J. DASTON, & M. HEIDELBERGER eds., 1990).
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Thomas Malthus was probably the rst demographer to substitute conict between nature and government for a preordained order and harmony, postulating in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population that the constant tendency in all animated life [is] to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it.58 Malthus highlighted the limits of emancipatory politics, arguing that attempts to improve society by political means were bound to fail since they contradicted basic biological tendencies in humans. He suggested that workers had more children whenever their economic conditions improved. Since the following generation of workers was more numerous, employers could lower wages: The poor, Malthus wrote, consequently must live much worse, and many of them be [sic] reduced to severe distress.59 Due to their poverty this new generation of workers were not able to marry or raise their children easily, many of whom died in infancy, leading to a population decline. Since this meant that fewer workers made it to an adult age, there was less competition for workplaces, salaries went up again, and what has since become known as a Malthusian cycle took another turn.60 Malthuss conclusion was that unless workers could be convinced to reduce their fertility, infant and childhood mortality would rise periodically.61 Ever since Malthus, demographers have focused on cycles, tendencies, and empirical regularities in populations or subpopulations, and on contrasts between subpopulations with reference to certain natural indicators, such as fertility and mortality. Like Malthus, they have tried to disclose processes of population changes and transitions and to warn of probable decline. Focusing on menacing signs of disasters in population trends and transitions, calculating the probability of future

THOMAS R. MALTHUS, AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION 14 (1798). Id. at 25. 60 See id. at 25-26. See Jedediah S. Purdy, The New Biopolitics: Autonomy, Demography, and Nationhood, 1 BYU L. REV. 101 (2006). 61 John C. Caldwell, Demographers and the Study of Mortality: Scope, Perspectives, & Theory, 954 ANNALS OF THE NY ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 19 (2001).
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crises, demography has become more and more associated with dire forewarnings and forebodings rather than dreams of progress and eternal peace. The professionals and intellectuals who make demographic arguments never merely sought to be prophets of doom. They have continuously made the double claim that their gures are both scientic and objective on the one hand, and practical and policy-oriented on the other.62 Ever since the 18th century, they have presented demography as an essential part of planning in modern societies.63 For more than a century Western population policies have been the result of a close cooperation of governmental and administrative institutions on the one side, and the scientic endeavor for demographic data collection and construction on the other. Many of these policies have been decidedly and bluntly anti-democratic and anti-liberal; often they involved the denial of rights to certain subsections of the population. Population policies, which relied on principles of social Darwinism, ranged from eugenics and selective immigration restrictions, through racist discrimination, to the Holocaust. Anti-democratic demographic policies, designed to cope with a population problem of one kind or another, have taken a severe toll on those regarded as threatening others. However, since the manifold ways in which these policies led to fatal effects have been researched from a variety of angles and are well-known, they hardly need to be retold here.64
See NANCY E. RILEY & JAMES MCCARTHEY, DEMOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF THE POSTMODERN (2003); Dennis Hodgson, Demography as Social Science and Policy Science, 9 POP. & DEV. REV. 1 (1983). 63 DIANA HUMMEL, DER BEVLKERUNGSDISKURS, DEMOGRAPHISCHES WISSEN UND POLITISCHE MACHT (2000); Diana Hummel, Demographisierung gesellschaftlicher Probleme? Der Bevlkerungsdiskurs aus feministischer Sicht, in DER DEMOGRAPHISCHE WANDEL. CHANCE FR DIE NEUORDNUNG DER GESCHLECHTERVERHLTNISSE 27-51 (Peter A. Berger & Heike Kahlert eds., 2006). 64 Michel Foucaults work has been inuential in drawing attention to the growth of population science and the regulation of national populations. MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON (1977); 3 Michel Foucault Governmentality, in POWER: ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT, 1954-1984
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However, while the forecasts of demographers are concerned with the longue dure, some of them display surprisingly little historical consciousness and fail to place their dramatic predictions in the context of a discipline that has been making them time and again, while the forewarned nations seem to survive them, and not necessarily because they adopted the suggested policies.65 Demographers and those adopting their arguments seem to have forgotten that while subreplacement fertility keeps on feeding fears of various kinds, it is by no means an extraordinary feature in history, and not even in recent times.66 The 1930s and 1940s were also marked by dire demographic projections all over Europe, which never came true. Moreover, when fertility rates rose in the West after World War II, leading to the baby-boom, and some years later attention was drawn to the high fertility rates in developing countries, this gave rise to neo-Malthusian warnings of an imminent global population bomb or explosion, such as the one voiced by Paul Ehrlich, who in the late sixties predicted

201-222 (James D. Faubion ed., 2000); for a critical discussion of Foucaults contribution see Bruce Curtis, Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Discovery, 27 CAN. J. SOC. 505 (2002); Stephen Legg, Foucaults Population Geographies: Classications, Biopolitics and Governmental Spaces, 11 POP., SPACE & PLACE 137 (2005); GTZ. ALY & K.H. ROTH, DIE RESTLOSE ERFASSUNG: VOLKSZHLEN, IDENTIFIZIEREN, AUSSONDERN IM NATIONALSOZIALISMUS (2000); BERNHARD VOM BROCKE, BEVLKERUNGSWISSENSCHAFT QUO VADIS? MGLICHKEITEN UND PROBLEME EINER GESCHICHTE DER BEVLKERUNGSWISSENSCHAFT IN DEUTSCHLAND (1998); DANIEL. SCHMIDT, STATISTIK UND STAATLICHKEIT, VERLAG FR SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTEN (2005); RICHARD WEIKART: FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY (2004); RICHARD A. SOLOWAY: DEMOGRAPHY AND DEGENERATION: EUGENICS AND THE DECLINING BIRTHRATE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN (1995); WILLIAM H. SCHNEIDER, QUALITY AND QUANTITY: THE QUEST FOR BIOLOGICAL REGENERATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRANCE (1990); PETER BACHRACH & ELIHU BERGMAN, POWER AND CHOICE: THE FORMULATION OF AMERICAN POPULATION POLICY (1973). 65 John C. Caldwell, Pat Caldwell, & Peter McDonald, Policy Responses to Low Fertility and Its Consequences: A Global Survey, 19 J. POP. RESEARCH 1 (2002). 66 MICHAEL S. TEITELBAUM & JAY M. WINTER, THE FEAR OF POPULATION DECLINE (1985).
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a mass famine.67 At the same time, more or less, the Club of Romes widely read study Limits to Growth also cautioned that overpopulation would lead to a depletion of the planets resources.68 Thus, although demography is concerned with long-term consequences, it makes its predictions in order to have an effect on present policy. In the contemporary debate in Germany, demographic experts like Herwig Birg try to present themselves as latter-day knights clad in a shining armor of statistics and predictions, seeking to help their society overcome a monstrous threat. Interestingly, although the animated debate in the German papers is supplemented by endless discussions in the electronic media, a plethora of reports produced by research institutes, foundations, and governmental agencies, and an immense stream of popular books that have been published on the theme in recent years,69 demographic predictions are by and large ignored by German policy makers. Thus those making demographic arguments are caught in a Cassandra Syndrome, where as in the story of Troy,

PAUL R. EHRLICH, THE POPULATION BOMB (1968). DONELLA H. MEADOWS, DENNIS L. MEADOWS, JRGEN RANDERS, & WILLIAM W. BEHRENS, THE LIMITS TO GROWTH: A REPORT FOR THE CLUB OF ROMES PROJECT ON THE PREDICAMENT OF MANKIND (1972); See also Matthew Connelly, Population Control is History: New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth, 45 COMP. STUD. IN SOCIETY & HISTORY 122 (2003). 69 WOLFGANG WALLA, BERND EGGEN AND HEIKE LIPINSKI, DER DEMOGRAPHISCHE WANDEL: HERAUSFORDERUNGEN FR POLITIK UND WIRTSCHAFT (2005); JULIANE ROLOFF, DEMOGRAPHISCHER FAKTOR (2003); PETER MERSCH, LAND OHNE KINDER: WEGE AUS DER DEMOGRAPHISCHEN KRISE (2006); KARL O. HONDRICH, WENIGER SIND MEHR: WARUM DER GEBURTENRCKGANG EIN GLCKSFALL FR UNSERE GESELLSCHAFT IST (2007); FRANK SCHIRRMACHER, DAS METHUSALEM KOMPLOTT (2005); STEFAN KRHNERT, FRANZISKA MEDICUS, REINER KLINGHOLZ, DIE DEMOGRAPHISCHE LAGE DER NATION. WIE ZUKUNFTSFHIG SIND DEUTSCHLANDS REGIONEN? DATEN, FAKTEN, ANALYSEN (2006); HERWIG BIRG, DIE DEMOGRAPHISCHE ZEITENWENDE, DER BEVLKERUNGSRCKGANG IN DEUTSCHLAND UND EUROPA; HERWIG BIRG, AUSWIRKUNGEN DER DEMOGRAPHISCHEN ALTERUNG UND DER BEVLKERUNGSSCHRUMPFUNG AUF WIRTSCHAFT, STAAT UND GESELLSCHAFT. FRANZ-XAVER KAUFMANN, SCHRUMPFENDE GESELLSCHAFT (2005); BERNHARD FREVEL, HERAUSFORDERUNG DEMOGRAPHISCHER WANDEL (2004); WINFRIED KSTERS, WENIGER, BUNTER, LTER (2006).
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their cries are heard but not acted upon. The experience of being lone voices in the desert for the last three decades undoubtedly adds to the intensity and urgency of their warnings. German demographers noted the downward trend in fertility already in the early seventies, realizing at the time that there were more deaths than births in Germany, but were rebuffed by political leaders who did not dare to formulate a pronatalist agenda or undertake any steps that could be tainted by associations with the campaign for motherhood in the Third Reich. If it is true that the Holocaust tabooed a possible family oriented policy in post-war Germany, which could have prevented decades of declining fertility, then one might understand this historical process as a kind of poetic justice, in that it is the political impact of the memory of its ghastly program of population annihilation, which prevents Germany from taking population specialists seriously today. These comments on the historical background of demographical discourse in Germany certainly do not present a comprehensive picture of the history of demography. However, even a quick a glance at some episodes in the history of demographic predictions, as has been provided here, should be enough to convince one to take such forecasts with a grain of salt, rather than frightened by the specter of purportedly irreversible sub-replacement fertility. Perhaps a greater interest in the historical experiences of Germans and their impact on the lives of Germans may also be in place. As in other instances of decline of fertility below replacement ratios, which surprised demographers, it may shown in this case too, that rather than focusing exclusively on womens autonomy and choices, historical experiences of various kinds need to be taken into account as factors having a major impact on German childbearing and childrearing practices.70

David I. Kertzer, Michael J. White, Laura Bernardi, Giuseppe Gabrielli, Italys Path to Very Low Fertility, The Adequacy of Economic and Second Demographic Transition Theories, 49 MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH WORKING PAPER (2006), available at http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2006-049.
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For instance, demographers have been shocked by the sudden and massive decrease of fertility in eastern Germany, which followed the demise of Communism. According to Nicholas Eberstadt: In the four years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Germanys population patterns have been jolted by dramatic, anomalous, and in some respects historically unprecedented shocks.By 1992, births amounted to a mere 44% of the 1989 total, and birth rates were 55% lower than they had been three years earlier.Such an abrupt and precipitous drop in fertility is unprecedented for an industrialized society during peacetime.71 Also under conditions of relative historical stability, demographic data seem to yield results that cannot be explained simply by the self-interested economic reasoning of women. There is no doubt that originally the German welfare state has encouraged gender differences, resulting in a relatively high level of employment for men and a low level of employment for women. Thus in the fties and sixties gender relations in Germany were dominated by a clear division of labor and power inequity within households, families and partnerships, with the man as the breadwinner. Even though a series of cultural and educational transformations started to blur these gender differences in the late 1960s, demographic data on the seventies still indicates a conict between the womens participation in the labor market on the one hand and childbearing and childrearing on the other, indicating that working women tended to have less children. In general, during

pdf (last visited Oct. 8, 2007); Francis F. Castles, The World Turned Upside Down: Below Replacement Fertility, Changing Preferences and Family-Friendly Public Policy in 21 OECD Countries, 13 J. EUR. SOC. POLICY 209 (2003). 71 Nicholas Eberstadt, Demographic Shocks in Eastern Germany, 1989-93, 46 EUROPE-ASIA STUD. 519, 520 (1994); See also Christoph Conrad, Michael Lechner, & Welf Werner, East German Fertility After Unication: Crisis or Adaptation?, 22 POP. & DEV. REV. 331 (1996).
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the seventies European countries with a high participation of women in the labor market ranked low in terms of fertility compared with other European countries. It seems that although the womens movement challenged established ideas of the traditional family structure, this challenge had an effect on behavior only for women and men who grew into adulthood after 1970. As a result of this transformation, most recent research documents that this pattern metamorphosed decisively in the mid-80s, when comparatively higher fertility rates in Western countries started to correlate positively with higher female labor force participation, a higher divorce rate, and a higher degree of gender equality.72 Surprisingly enough, it seems that for the last two decades the more countries allow women both to bear children and participate in the workforce, the more women want to have children. While institutional arrangements, such as child-care facilities, seem to be relevant to this development, historical changes in the cultural norms and ideals concerning the social role of women also appear to play an important role.73 Evidently, such historical developments are by no means reducible to self-interested economic reasoning. Moreover, they expose the fallacy of a rhetoric that claims that Germany is approaching demographic death due to the autonomy achieved by women. On the contrary, it seems that when appropriate social institutionssuch as public child

Henriette Engelhardt, Tomas Kgel, & Alexia Prskawetz, Fertility and Female Employment Reconsidered: A Macro-Level Time Series Analysis, 21 MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH WORKING PAPER (2001), available at http://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Working/wp-2001-021.pdf (last visited Nov. 11, 2007); Tomas Kgel, Did the Association Between Fertility and Female Employment in OECD Countries Really Change Its Sign?, 34 MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH WORKING PAPER (2001), available at http://www.demogr. mpg.de/publications/les/880_1068055127_1_PDF-Version.pdf (last visited Oct. 8, 2007). 73 Karin L. Brewster & Ronald R. Rindfuss, Fertility and Womens Employment in Industrialized Nations, 26 ANN. REV. SOC. 271 (2000).
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careand child-friendly social and legal norms provide women with the possibility of making a genuinely free choice, rather than conning them into an either-or decision, most women will not pursue an exclusively career-centered lifestyle, but seek to combine work with child bearing and raising, often giving priority to the latter.74 On a smaller scale, historical developments in family dynamics and structure have to be taken into account. Research indicates that actual fertility started to fall below replacement in the beginning of the seventies in Germany, at a time at which men and women, when asked in opinion polls, still mentioned more than two children as their ideal. If having children was simply a matter of womens autonomous choice and action, there would be no gap between ideal and practice. Thus it is important to inquire further into the historical reasons for the this gap and its uctuations, which of course still exists today, though recently young German (as well as Austrian and Swiss) men and women mention substantially less than two children as their ideal family size, so that the average Germany family ideal is around 1.7 children.75 Perhaps the younger generation of Germans derives its family ideal from the increasingly smaller family size in which they have grown up.76 In addition, men usually prefer to have fewer children and to postpone having them, while women want to have more children and to have them sooner. A focus that is exclusively directed on womens choices and decisions, remains blind to the fact that mostly decisions
Catherine Hakim, WORK-LIFESTYLE CHOICES IN THE 21ST CENTURY: PREFERENCE THEORY (2000). 75 Some researchers hold desired family size to be the most crucial determinant of fertility trends: John Bongaarts, Fertility and Reproductive Preferences in PostTransitional Societies, 27 POP. & DEV. REV. SUPPLEMENT: GLOBAL FERTILITY TRANSITION, 260 (2001); Dirk J. van de Kaa, Postmodern Fertility Preferences: From Changing Value Orientation to New Behavior, 27 POP. & DEV. REV. SUPPLEMENT: GLOBAL FERTILITY TRANSITION 290 (2001). 76 Joshua Goldstein, Wolfgang Lutz, Maria Rita Testa, The Emergence of SubReplacement Family Size Ideals in Europe, 22 POP. RESEARCH & POLICY REV. 479 (2003).
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on childbearing are taken by couples and that it is important for most women that both partners want the child. Contrary to much of contemporary demographic rhetoric, men continue to have inuence on reproduction and although they cannot enforce fertility in the West today, they can use their inuence to limit or block fertility.77 Of course, the dialogues and negotiations between spouses take place in a wider social and historical context, which can be inuenced by welfare policies of various kinds. Pronatalist policies that have been used include nancial incentives (such as tax-reductions and child benets), institutions providing support for parents to combine work and family (such as child care facilities and parental leave), as well as attempts to create children-friendly or family-friendly social environments (as promoted in the government campaign, Deutschland wird familienfreundlich [Germany becomes family-friendly]), to foster broad social and cultural changes that are to encourage fertility.78 Since it is assumed, wrongly, that the high opportunity costs are the main reason that highly-educated and well-earning German women have comparatively fewer children, Germany has been seeking to lower these costs primarily by paying the second highest rate of child benets in Europe (after Luxemburg), but without thereby achieving any signicant results.79 Hence more recently, a mix of measures has been recommended.80 However, in any consideration of policy

An-Magritt Jensen, Are the Roles of Men and Women Being Redened? Paper presented at the EuroConference on Family and Fertility Change in Modern European Societies: Explorations and Explanations of Recent Developments. Bad Herrenalb, Germany, June, 23-28, 2001, available at http://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/ workshops/010623_paper11.pdf (last visited Oct. 8, 2007). 78 Alena Heitlinger, Pronatalism and Womens Equality Policies, 7 EUR. J. POP. 343 (1991). 79 BERT RRUP, SANDRA GRUESCU, NACHHALTIGE FAMILIENPOLITIK IM INTERESSE EINER AKTIVEN BEVLKERUNGSENTWICKLUNG. GUTACHTEN IM AUFTRAG DES BUNDESMINISTERIUMS FR FAMILIE, SENIOREN, FRAUEN UND JUGEND (2003). 80 HANS BERTRAM, NANCY EHLERT, WIEBKE RSLER, NACHHALTIGE FAMILIENPOLITIK. ZUKUNFTSSICHERUNG DURCH EINEN DREIKLANG VON ZEITPOLITIK, FINANZIELLER
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instruments that are introduced, further factors, such as who shapes and manages them, have to be considered. Thus, in some instances, when child care facilities are in the hands of the Church, they are designed in a way that precludes full-time working women from making use of them.81 As Peter McDonald has stressed, while there are a large number of studies that describe the pronatalist tools available to policy makers, there are comparatively few studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of these policies.82 Interestingly enough, these studies all suggest some level of success for particular policy initiatives in a given place at a given time, while the same policy seems to have no effect in another place at another time. Thus it is questionable whether particular policies that have proven effective in one instance can be assumed to be effective in another instance. The reason for this phenomenon is that both the changes in the fertility ratio of a population and the effectiveness of any policy impacting on it, depend on their broader cultural and social setting. Hence the need to bring history back into debate on demography, in Germany as well as in other places.

V. CONCLUSION
This paper is concerned with the poverty of history in the public debate on demography, which has been conducted in the German press in the course of the last decade or so. This poverty is characteristic of the radically individualist methodology that guides much of the popular interpretation of fertility behavior of German women on
TRANSFERPOLITIK UND INFRASTRUKTURPOLITIK. GUTACHTEN IM AUFTRAG DES BUNDESMINISTERIUMS FR FAMILIE, SENIOREN, FRAUEN UND JUGEND (2005). 81 For a detailed discussion of the role of patriarchal religion with reference to womens rights, see Gila Stopler, The Liberal Bind: The Conict Between Womens Rights and Patriarchal Religion in the Liberal State, 31 SOC. THEORY & PRACTICE 191 (2005). 82 Peter McDonald, Sustaining Fertility Through Public Policy: The Range of Options, 57 POP. 417, 442 (2002).
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the one hand, as well as typical of the deterministic reading of data concerning population growth and decrease in Germany on the other. Max Weber pointed out that in order to explain large-scale social phenomena such as demographic trends it is necessary to show how they result from the actions of individuals. For Weber this meant that research had to aim at understanding the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals83 to be able to explain a social phenomenon. According to this Weberian precept the demographic macro-level phenomenon of a declining fertility ratio in Germany has to be explained by the micro-level interests and decisions of individuals. However, this by no means justies focusing exclusively on the interests and motivations of women, reducing them to self-interested atoms, whose main or only incentive for having or not having children are presumed to derive from strategic calculations of economic gain and loss.84 Of course, once an interesting, surprising, or troubling social phenomenon, such as a sub-replacement fertility rate, has been noted, a search is in place for an appropriate explanation. But inferring the motives of individuals, and thus the meaning of their behavior, from statistical data on the basis of prior rational-choice assumptions concerning the strategically and economically self-interested decisionmaking process of social actorsin this case German women certainly is a poor way of providing explanations.85 Liberal thinking takes the opposite direction: It starts from the individual, drawing inferences for the collective, but does so in an equally poor manner. It is true that most liberal theorists acknowledge that their hero, the deliberative, rights-bearing individual, entered the
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization 103 (trans. A. M. Henderson & Talcott Parson 1947). 84 Steven Lukes, Methodological Individualism Reconsidered, 19 BRIT. J. SOC. 119-129 (1968). See also Methodological Individualism, in STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodologicalindividualism (last visited Oct.10, 2007). 85 DONALD GREEN & IAN SHAPIRO, PATHOLOGIES OF RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY (1994).
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stage of political discourse in the West in the shadow of large-scale historical processes and dramatic events, such as the revolutions of 1776 and 1789. But although they may acknowledge that the liberal individual is a product of an historical process and of a particular form of culture, which is Western, modern, capitalist, pluralist, scienceoriented, tends towards secularism, and values individual choice, they show no particular interest in history and culture. Much of their theorizing is abstract, analytical, and assumes individuals to be strategically thinking self-interested agents. Moreover, they assume a harmony between micro- and macro-level, implying that by defending the supposedly self-interested choices of rational individuals by a broad arrangement of rights, they also promote collective welfare. As we have seen, demographic reasoning challenges this liberal vision by suggesting that the liberal way of life may be self-destructive, since it may lead individuals to make micro-level choices that will not allow their society to reproduce itself adequately over a prolonged period of time, across many generations. In a close reading of the German public debate this essay has also stressed that this demographic challenge to liberal harmony is based on composite discourse. On the one hand this discourse accepts the liberal image of individuals as selfdirected agents who are primarily driven by strategic reasoning, but on the other hand it tries to show that when it is adopted in aggregate by German women, its consequence is the end of the German nation as we know it. This synthesis is possible, among other things, because both modes of thinking, liberal and demographic alike, share blindness for history. For blindness to historyboth of demography as a discipline and of the context in which actual demographic processes happenis necessary in order to present demographic trends as irreversible and to explain them by womens self-interest.

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