The end of the demographic transition: relief or concern?

摘要

In 1870, imperial France, crushed by Prussia, lost Alsace-Lorraine and was overrun by fear of decline. The culprit was quickly identified: "depopulation." Throughout the nineteenth century, while demographic growth had given neighboring countries anunprecedented dynamism, France, the most populous European country at the time of its Revolution, had seen its population stagnate. To exorcise this fear, in 1896 Jacques Bertillon and others created the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population. In 1936, after the terrible losses of life in 1914-18 and 40 years of low fertility, it was renamed the National Alliance against Depopulation. In the disputes between nationalist ideals, pessimism had won out over the willingness to act. Eventoday, despite the baby boom between the early 1940s and the early 1970s, one can detect traces of this great fear of depopulation and related nationalist sentiments, strengthened by the fear of massive immigration. Another time, another fear: at the endof the 1950s, even as the industrial countries were in the midst of the baby boom, Western public opinion felt pressure from an entirely new threat, that of the population explosion of the developing world. The first world population projections published by the United Nations came as a bombshell: 6 billion people by the year 2000! A new menace was discovered, that of overpopulation. The population growth of developing countries had become, over and above the real problems that it posed, an object of xenophobic fantasies, all the more so because it was attributed to an excess of procreation: "the bed of misery is fertile," wrote Josue de Castro. This paved the way for Cartierism, but also for the cult of zero population growth and the follies of someecologists who assert that mankind would be happier if the population of the world were only a few hundred million.