A very interesting op-ed titled “Europeans’ flight from Europe” caught my eye in yesterday’s Washington Times. While the Belgian author of the piece, Paul Belien, is not exactly part of the European political mainstream–the editor of the conservative-libertarian blog The Brussels Journal wants to curb Muslim immigration to Europe, is pro-life, favors Flemish independence, and has home-schooled all of his three children with his wife, a Belgian MP for the far-right Vlaams Belangparty–he has a very interesting perspective on the Old Continent’s ticking demographic time bomb. (Belien has also written for THE DAILY STANDARD.) According to Belien, Europe’s lavish welfare system–supported by high taxes–has led to a massive brain drain among the young and well-educated elites in Germany, France, and other European countries who increasingly “vote with their feet” and move to the United States, Canada, or Australia in pursuit of better opportunities. The situation is compounded by relatively high rates of unemployment and a sense of social/cultural decline in Europe:
The Old Continent’s demographic trend is even more worrisome when you take into account that in Germany, between 30 and 40 percent (there are different statistics floating around) of all university-educated German women do not have any children at all. This different kind of “brain drain” should be a source of serious concern for a resource-poor country that prides itself on being the “Land of Ideas,” a driver of innovative technologies, and the world’s top exporter.
To their credit, Germany and other European countries are finally trying to counter the on-going demographic decline and rapid over-aging, which, if left unchecked, could pose a fundamental threat to Western civilization. On January 1 of this year, for instance, the Merkel government introduced “parents’ money“–a new, tax-financed scheme that provides parents with up to two-thirds of their most recent net income for a period of 12-14 months after the baby is born. Since these new transfer payments vary according to the respective parents’ financial situation (the payments are capped at EUR1,800 per month, though) they provide for the first time a financial incentive for better-educated, higher-income Germans–who previously may have been reluctant to have a child because of the negative impact on their earnings–to procreate. Another crucial ingredient for any successful strategy to reverse Europe’s demographic decline is the provision of a sufficient number of daycare spots that allow parents to effectively combine work and family life. In Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, similar government-supported schemes have had a positive impact on fertility rates across the board. While the European welfare state can indeed cause, as Belien put it, “a perverse process of population replacement,” one should not forget that carefully crafted government policies can play an important role in encouraging women and couples of all socio-economic backgrounds to have children and thus lay the foundations for a country’s future. However, the varying levels of government support are not–and should not be!–the determining factor when young Europeans make decisions for or against having children. Arguably the most important demographic factor in all of this is whether young men and women are optimistic about their own future as well as that of their potential offspring. It is in this context that Belien attributes Europe’s demographic decline to “a loss of confidence in the future of nations which have taken in the Trojan horse of Islamism.” In the case of Germany, at least, a recent report by the conservative daily Die Welt provided reason for cautious optimism, as it suggested that the number of children born in major German cities (other areas were not included in the analysis) in the first quarter of 2007 may have increased by up to 21 percent. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this recent “baby boom” is the result of the “new parents money” scheme or rather the belated, positive effect of Germany’s “summer dream” during the 2006 World Cup, when the country experienced a healthy surge–some would say, normalization–of national pride and can-do optimism about the future.
