by Giulio Meotti
“Wanted: New Soldiers for Europe’s Shrinking Armies,” headlines the Financial Times.
The German government is worried: its army is small and decrepit. In Germany, the average age in 1990 was 36. Today it is 44, an increase of eight years in the space of a single generation. If the trend continues, in two generations more than half of Germans will be over 60. And today Germany must convince “Generation Z” to take the army seriously (judging by the levels of sympathy for Hamas, that will be difficult).
Spain has an army of old men: more than 34 percent of non-commissioned officers are aged 50 or older.
The inability of European countries to rebuild solid armies reflects the great taboo that grips the old continent: Europe is the demographic Titanic.
Italy continues to fall in an endless descent. This is from last year:
Births: 370,000
Deaths: 651,000
Immigrants: 435,000
Emigrants: 191,000
The average age of Italians has risen to 46.8 years (a European record), fewer and fewer children are being born (1.18 children per woman, a new negative record since 1861), young people are increasingly fleeing abroad (up 36.5 percent compared to 2023) and families are getting smaller.
Italy is becoming, at best, the tourist hospice of Europe.
Who will we call to close ranks of the army, the grandparents?
This is the same great demographic question that was at the center of the obsessions of the French elites between 1870 and 1940. The French had almost no children left, coffins outnumbered cradles, and the “hereditary enemy” Germany proved more prolific than the devil. The massive losses suffered by France in the First World War prompted Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister known as “the tiger,” to say a phrase that all Western leaders should keep in mind: “Children win wars, not generals.”
Eastern Europe is collapsing.
Poland in 2050 will have 40 percent of its population over 60. You don’t go to war with a population pyramid that looks like a mushroom cloud. You go to the hospice. Let’s take another country under threat, Moldova. Since 1991, the country has lost 1.5 million inhabitants and will lose another 40 percent of its population of just 3.5 million by 2050. Estonia will collapse below 1 million, Latvia is “the disappearing nation” (it lost 8 percent of its population in just one year) and Lithuania is “the fastest shrinking country in the world”.
Just look at the countries in Asia that are part of the Western axis: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Japan’s unprecedented aging is having a frightening impact on its military: the number of young people between 18 and 26 – the age for conscription – has been falling since 1994. In 2015, there were 11 million in that age group, a 40 percent drop from 1994.
The same in South Korea, the Wall Street Journal reports: “The declining birth rate has become a challenge for national security, with fewer young people available for military service. That’s why Seoul officials have said the army will be reduced to half a million from the current total of 600,000”. In South Korea, it is the old men who now hold the rifles: “I don’t remember them being this heavy”.
And then Taiwan: “It has long lived with the terrifying prospect of invasion by China, but one of the biggest threats to its security comes from within: the world’s lowest birth rates”, the Telegraph reports. Taiwan now has the lowest birth rate in the world and by 2050 will have just 20 million inhabitants, with the average age from 39 today to 57. It will be so insignificant that China may not even have to invade it. “Analysts estimate that the number of pets – 3 million – has exceeded the number of children under 15. Now on the streets of Taipei, strollers carry more dogs than children.” Taiwan has already decided to recruit residents rejected for their short height into the army.
Demography and geopolitics have always been inseparable. Along with its geographic location and economic power, a country’s population is one of the main factors that determine what military capabilities it can develop.
As Gunnar Heinshon, a professor at the University of Bremen and author of the book “Söhne und Weltmacht” (Sons and World Domination), wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the percentage of young Europeans in the world, which was 27 percent in 1914, is now lower (9 percent) than it was in 1500 (11 percent). The new clothes of European ‘pacifism’ and its ‘soft power’ hide its naked weakness. In the 16th century, Spain called its young conquistadors Segundones, second-borns, those who did not inherit. Today there are Islamic Segundones.”
We should learn from the only country of European and Western culture that has understood this, and moreover a country completely surrounded by countries that do not recognize its existence: Israel. While European countries will halve in a generation, the Jewish state will double from 9 to 17 million. In addition to the atomic bomb, its army, its identity, its ideology and its courage, Israel has always known that a society lives and resists only thanks to what, in bureaucratic jargon, they call “human resources.” Children.
Israel is experiencing a baby boom even after October 7.
On one side there are the withered clothes of European military and demographic pacifism; on the other Israel, the only affluent society that lives in a permanent war regime and that knows no demographic collapse. Quite an extraordinary paradox to decipher. And a lesson for the Western Titanic.