From Palladium Magazine, May 10:
Is demography destiny? At the very least, it is one of the foundations of national power. If the United States of America has risen to global preeminence over the last century, demographic growth was, without a doubt, among the necessary conditions. Until recently, U.S. population growth could be taken for granted. However, over the past decade, we have witnessed a collapse in fertility previously assumed reserved for countries like Germany and Japan. This fading demographic momentum is an eventual threat to both sustained prosperity and maintaining hegemony.
The historian Paul Kennedy argued in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that all successful empires stand or fall on their overall economic capability. The economic capabilities necessary for maintaining a great power in turn depend upon the empire’s people: the size of population—especially the working-age population—and the population’s quality, especially that of the smartest and most capable. Both of these must be sufficient before the necessary social trust and market organization can unlock otherwise untapped human potential, which may then be harnessed to develop national capabilities and be deployed in foreign policy.
Population size is obviously important enough for national power, but quality is often overlooked. Examples such as the Netherlands, Japan, and Singapore show that resource-poor and land-scarce countries can enjoy enviable prosperity, even as some vast resource-rich lands remain impoverished. In all three cases, the poverty of national soil was overcome by actualizing the potential of their intelligent and educated populations.
Since the 18th century, the growth of first British and American power was in large part due to the extraordinary demographic growth of these societies. In 1750, France had an estimated population of 24.5 million and England a mere 5.8 million. A century later, England had reached 16.7 million, or over half the French population. By 1901, England almost doubled again to 30.5 million while the population of the United Kingdom, including Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, had reached 41.5 million, just overtaking France.
For France, the consequences of this demographic reversal were geopolitically catastrophic. By her demographic weight and successful state organization, France had assumed a position of political preeminence and cultural hegemony in Europe in the age of Louis XIV and Napoleon. The collapse in fertility coincided with secularization and the ideological drive of the Enlightenment to dismantle Catholicism intellectually and organizationally.
As the 19th century progressed, France would find herself reduced to a position of severe vulnerability to a demographically and economically ascending Germany. Because of this persistent centuries-long trend, France had to turn first to the United Kingdom and eventually to the United States for support....
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