The global population crisis—that is, the sharply declining birth rate, which has hit nearly every country on earth, absent (for now) those in sub-Saharan Africa—is perhaps the greatest threat facing civilization. But it’s the one few people want to talk about.
Well, that’s not quite true. In Europe, where birth rates have been below replacement levels for many years, political leaders have no choice but to talk about it. The problem is that most of them only want to say, and hear, one thing: that mass migration from more fertile countries is the only possible solution.
In January, when the European Commission presented its ‘Demography Toolbox,’ conservative European parliamentarians criticized it for prioritizing migration over other potential solutions to the crisis. Left-wing MEPs predictably denounced them as racist, hateful, and xenophobic—still confident, one assumes, that they can make unpleasant truths magically disappear with progressive buzzwords.
But can anyone plausibly deny that mass migration is tearing Europe apart? Oh, it certainly is denied—not only by establishment leaders, but by the millions of voters who still support them, out of terror of voting for the so-called ‘far right.’ The right-wing AfD was held off in Germany’s recent election, despite it doubling its numbers, but no serious person expects the centrist establishment coalition that will now govern Germany to solve its grave crises.
The same is true across Europe, but it won’t be true for much longer. In an unsparing analysis of the death of the old order, liberal Northern Irish commenter Gerry Lynch poleaxed the Left for its smug unwillingness to accept that real-world conditions had changed radically, such that its old certainties no longer held. Lynch writes, “Paradigms depend on faith; loss of faith kills them.”
His point is that the managerial-liberal paradigm that has framed and guided politics in the United States and Europe since the end of World War II is dead. Europeans have idealized their model of transnational governance, with its welfare-statism, its hardline secularity, its cultural liberalism, its hostility to national sovereignty, its sentimental humanism, and its openness to mass migration. Europeans have been living in a dream world, underwritten in part by the willingness of America to pay for its defense.
The mounting cost of living inherent in this paradigm has been denied for many years by European leaders and those who vote for them. On the migration issue, as in America, politicians have consistently acted against the wishes of their publics, but they mostly haven’t had to pay a price for it. Those days are coming to an end, and the regime change—the paradigm shift—in America will accelerate the collapse of what you might call the Brussels Utopia.
It must be said, though, that this is not only a problem with the Eurocratic ruling class. Europe really does depend on cheap migrant labor. France’s economic minister recently claimed on national television that France needs more migrants. The massive cultural cost of this structural economic policy is paid by ordinary Europeans who are dealing with skyrocketing violent crime, including terror murders by Islamists. And it will be paid by future generations of Europeans, who will inherit nations perhaps irreversibly changed—de-Europeanized—by the presence of these migrants and their children.
All honest Europeans know this. And they hate it. Everybody else either lives in denial, or, like the far-left French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, cheer for the Great Replacement as a good thing (“We are destined to be a Creole nation, and so much the better”).
And yet, the stark reality remains: without Europeans, Europe has no future. If mass migration is an unacceptable solution, then the only thing for Europeans to do is to have more children. There is no third choice.
Enter Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, who has just announced a radical new pro-natal policy: a lifelong exemption from income tax for women who have two or more children.
The pro-family Fidesz government has long been at the forefront of using tax policy to stimulate childbearing. Now the Orbán government is making a huge leap in its pro-natalist policy, despite considerable cost in public spending.
Orbán’s ambitious priorities are correct: there can be no European future without Europeans, and European governments must make incentivizing births a top priority. Unfortunately, results have been decidedly mixed, as pro-natalist demographer Lyman Stone explained in 2022.
“Hungary’s policies thus far point to a grim reality: Policy changes, even dramatic ones, are simply not enough to create the world that many conservatives want,” he wrote.
That’s because the main reason mothers aren’t having children isn’t financial. Nicholas Eberstadt, one of America’s leading demographers, points out that depopulation is happening in both rich countries and poor ones. What is happening, said Eberstadt, is a global cultural revolution in family formation. When women perceive that they don’t have to have large families, they typically choose not to. He wrote:
People the world over are now aware of the possibility of very different ways of life from the ones that confined their parents. Certainly, religious belief—which generally encourages marriage and celebrates child rearing—seems to be on the wane in many regions where birthrates are crashing. Conversely, people increasingly prize autonomy, self-actualization, and convenience. And children, for their many joys, are quintessentially inconvenient.
As every parent knows, raising children requires sacrifices that aren’t simply material. Creating a family requires surrendering autonomy to an enormous degree. In 1999, when my then-wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, my sister, who already had two little ones, told me, “You are both going to lose the freedom you have enjoyed. There’s no getting around that, and I think you know that. But what you don’t know is how much joy you are going to have as parents. That’s something you can’t know until you do it.”
She was right. We had two more children, only stopping because of medical issues. Raising children was the most difficult thing we had ever done, but also the most rewarding. My sister was right, though, to say the blessings that come from the sacrifice of one’s autonomy and convenience are very hard to communicate to the childless. My kids’ mother and father came to understand that our “self-actualization” was primarily in being parents.
Yet we were probably the last generation in America raised with the idea that marriage and children were a primary good—that is, something one simply did as part of the good life. It mattered, too, that we are Christians and consider childbearing, with its sacrifices, to be a divine calling. Today, American culture, like European culture and most other global cultures, considers family formation as a relative good. That is, kids are fine, but only if they can be made to fit into an overall picture of a good life—one that does not make marrying and begetting the next generation the telos of life, but rather subordinates it to the ultimate goal of achieving personal fulfillment and “well-being.”
In this way, Hungarian society is no different from others. A Catholic friend in Budapest—a mother of three, in her thirties—once lamented that her generation of Hungarians want nothing more than for their country to be a Magyar version of Sweden. She meant that for all the overt conservatism in Hungary, deep down, younger Hungarians share the pan-European aspiration for a life of secularism, consumerism, and comfort. They are not, in her view, motivated by higher ideals that call them out of their individual selves. This is not just a Hungarian problem, but a European one, an American one, and indeed a global one.
This is a hard but necessary lesson to learn. I am fond of quoting a Viktor Orbán speech from years past about the limits of politics. Politicians, he explained, can provide the material basis for cultural change and renewal, but they cannot force it to happen. That can only be done when other institutions—families, churches, schools, civic organizations, artists, and the like—take advantage of the space created by politics to do what only they can do.
The greatest challenge facing Europe is reversing its catastrophic demographic decline without surrendering to civilization-destroying mass migration. In this crisis, politics are necessary, but not sufficient. Orbán is far, far ahead of most European politicians in grasping the severity of the crisis and its long-term consequences and putting every available resource of his government toward addressing it in a way that guarantees the survival of Hungary as Hungarian, and Europe as European.
But, as I think even he would admit, unless Orbán can find pro-natalist partners outside of politics to lead a cultural revolution, all his extraordinary efforts will be in vain. No political leader can force unwilling people to have babies and welcome them into functional families. A culture that has come to believe that individual happiness is its highest goal is a culture that is on its way to barrenness and extinction.
Think about it: the reason any of us are here today is because our ancestors, in a time of far greater material poverty and often instability, believed that family formation was worth it. They chose life, despite it all. Yet here we are, the richest and safest generations that ever lived, and what do we do? We choose a very comfortable death. This is a paradox that cannot be resolved by politics.
Without Europeans, Europe Has No Future
Photo: Muthaiga32, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The global population crisis—that is, the sharply declining birth rate, which has hit nearly every country on earth, absent (for now) those in sub-Saharan Africa—is perhaps the greatest threat facing civilization. But it’s the one few people want to talk about.
Well, that’s not quite true. In Europe, where birth rates have been below replacement levels for many years, political leaders have no choice but to talk about it. The problem is that most of them only want to say, and hear, one thing: that mass migration from more fertile countries is the only possible solution.
In January, when the European Commission presented its ‘Demography Toolbox,’ conservative European parliamentarians criticized it for prioritizing migration over other potential solutions to the crisis. Left-wing MEPs predictably denounced them as racist, hateful, and xenophobic—still confident, one assumes, that they can make unpleasant truths magically disappear with progressive buzzwords.
But can anyone plausibly deny that mass migration is tearing Europe apart? Oh, it certainly is denied—not only by establishment leaders, but by the millions of voters who still support them, out of terror of voting for the so-called ‘far right.’ The right-wing AfD was held off in Germany’s recent election, despite it doubling its numbers, but no serious person expects the centrist establishment coalition that will now govern Germany to solve its grave crises.
The same is true across Europe, but it won’t be true for much longer. In an unsparing analysis of the death of the old order, liberal Northern Irish commenter Gerry Lynch poleaxed the Left for its smug unwillingness to accept that real-world conditions had changed radically, such that its old certainties no longer held. Lynch writes, “Paradigms depend on faith; loss of faith kills them.”
His point is that the managerial-liberal paradigm that has framed and guided politics in the United States and Europe since the end of World War II is dead. Europeans have idealized their model of transnational governance, with its welfare-statism, its hardline secularity, its cultural liberalism, its hostility to national sovereignty, its sentimental humanism, and its openness to mass migration. Europeans have been living in a dream world, underwritten in part by the willingness of America to pay for its defense.
The mounting cost of living inherent in this paradigm has been denied for many years by European leaders and those who vote for them. On the migration issue, as in America, politicians have consistently acted against the wishes of their publics, but they mostly haven’t had to pay a price for it. Those days are coming to an end, and the regime change—the paradigm shift—in America will accelerate the collapse of what you might call the Brussels Utopia.
It must be said, though, that this is not only a problem with the Eurocratic ruling class. Europe really does depend on cheap migrant labor. France’s economic minister recently claimed on national television that France needs more migrants. The massive cultural cost of this structural economic policy is paid by ordinary Europeans who are dealing with skyrocketing violent crime, including terror murders by Islamists. And it will be paid by future generations of Europeans, who will inherit nations perhaps irreversibly changed—de-Europeanized—by the presence of these migrants and their children.
All honest Europeans know this. And they hate it. Everybody else either lives in denial, or, like the far-left French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, cheer for the Great Replacement as a good thing (“We are destined to be a Creole nation, and so much the better”).
And yet, the stark reality remains: without Europeans, Europe has no future. If mass migration is an unacceptable solution, then the only thing for Europeans to do is to have more children. There is no third choice.
Enter Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, who has just announced a radical new pro-natal policy: a lifelong exemption from income tax for women who have two or more children.
The pro-family Fidesz government has long been at the forefront of using tax policy to stimulate childbearing. Now the Orbán government is making a huge leap in its pro-natalist policy, despite considerable cost in public spending.
Orbán’s ambitious priorities are correct: there can be no European future without Europeans, and European governments must make incentivizing births a top priority. Unfortunately, results have been decidedly mixed, as pro-natalist demographer Lyman Stone explained in 2022.
“Hungary’s policies thus far point to a grim reality: Policy changes, even dramatic ones, are simply not enough to create the world that many conservatives want,” he wrote.
That’s because the main reason mothers aren’t having children isn’t financial. Nicholas Eberstadt, one of America’s leading demographers, points out that depopulation is happening in both rich countries and poor ones. What is happening, said Eberstadt, is a global cultural revolution in family formation. When women perceive that they don’t have to have large families, they typically choose not to. He wrote:
As every parent knows, raising children requires sacrifices that aren’t simply material. Creating a family requires surrendering autonomy to an enormous degree. In 1999, when my then-wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, my sister, who already had two little ones, told me, “You are both going to lose the freedom you have enjoyed. There’s no getting around that, and I think you know that. But what you don’t know is how much joy you are going to have as parents. That’s something you can’t know until you do it.”
She was right. We had two more children, only stopping because of medical issues. Raising children was the most difficult thing we had ever done, but also the most rewarding. My sister was right, though, to say the blessings that come from the sacrifice of one’s autonomy and convenience are very hard to communicate to the childless. My kids’ mother and father came to understand that our “self-actualization” was primarily in being parents.
Yet we were probably the last generation in America raised with the idea that marriage and children were a primary good—that is, something one simply did as part of the good life. It mattered, too, that we are Christians and consider childbearing, with its sacrifices, to be a divine calling. Today, American culture, like European culture and most other global cultures, considers family formation as a relative good. That is, kids are fine, but only if they can be made to fit into an overall picture of a good life—one that does not make marrying and begetting the next generation the telos of life, but rather subordinates it to the ultimate goal of achieving personal fulfillment and “well-being.”
In this way, Hungarian society is no different from others. A Catholic friend in Budapest—a mother of three, in her thirties—once lamented that her generation of Hungarians want nothing more than for their country to be a Magyar version of Sweden. She meant that for all the overt conservatism in Hungary, deep down, younger Hungarians share the pan-European aspiration for a life of secularism, consumerism, and comfort. They are not, in her view, motivated by higher ideals that call them out of their individual selves. This is not just a Hungarian problem, but a European one, an American one, and indeed a global one.
This is a hard but necessary lesson to learn. I am fond of quoting a Viktor Orbán speech from years past about the limits of politics. Politicians, he explained, can provide the material basis for cultural change and renewal, but they cannot force it to happen. That can only be done when other institutions—families, churches, schools, civic organizations, artists, and the like—take advantage of the space created by politics to do what only they can do.
The greatest challenge facing Europe is reversing its catastrophic demographic decline without surrendering to civilization-destroying mass migration. In this crisis, politics are necessary, but not sufficient. Orbán is far, far ahead of most European politicians in grasping the severity of the crisis and its long-term consequences and putting every available resource of his government toward addressing it in a way that guarantees the survival of Hungary as Hungarian, and Europe as European.
But, as I think even he would admit, unless Orbán can find pro-natalist partners outside of politics to lead a cultural revolution, all his extraordinary efforts will be in vain. No political leader can force unwilling people to have babies and welcome them into functional families. A culture that has come to believe that individual happiness is its highest goal is a culture that is on its way to barrenness and extinction.
Think about it: the reason any of us are here today is because our ancestors, in a time of far greater material poverty and often instability, believed that family formation was worth it. They chose life, despite it all. Yet here we are, the richest and safest generations that ever lived, and what do we do? We choose a very comfortable death. This is a paradox that cannot be resolved by politics.
READ NEXT
The Spectre of Populism Is Haunting the EU
Silenced German Right-Wing Voices Set to Speak Freely in the Voting Booths
The UK’s Shotgun Clampdown Is Indicative of Much More