Population, Fear, and Uncertainty: The Global Spread of Fertility Decline - Hardcover

Winter, Jay; Teitelbaum, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300139063 ISBN 13: 9780300139068

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2013

Synopsis

The world's population has grown by five billion people over the past century, an astounding 300 percent increase. Yet it is actually the decline in family size and population growth that is the issue attracting greatest concern in many countries. This eye-opening book looks at demographic trends in Europe, North America, and Asia―areas that now have low fertility rates―and argues that there is an essential yet often neglected political dimension to a full assessment of these trends. Political decisions that promote or discourage marriage and childbearing, facilitate or discourage contraception and abortion, and stimulate or restrain immigration all have played significant roles in recent trends.

About this title

About the Author

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University.  Michael Teitelbaum is Wertheim Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program of Harvard Law School and  a Senior Advisor at the Alfred P Sloan Foundation in New York.  Together and separately they have written numerous scholarly works on history, politics, and sociology.
 
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Global Spread of Fertility Decline

Population, Fear, and Uncertainty

By JAY WINTER, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Yale University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-13906-8

Contents

ONE Globalization and Demography...........................................
1
TWO European Population: Interpretations and Anxieties.....................
40
THREE Islam in Europe......................................................
74
FOUR The China Trajectory..................................................
110
FIVE Population and Politics in India......................................
139
SIX Japan: Family Structure, Abortion, and Fertility since 1945............
169
SEVEN North America and NAFTA..............................................
207
EIGHT Conclusion: Putting the Politics Back In.............................
245
APPENDIX A UN Projections of Total Fertility Rates for Selected Countries..
251
APPENDIX B Effects of and Adaptations to Changing Demographic Composition: 
A User's Guide.............................................................
272
Notes......................................................................
287
Index......................................................................
323

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Globalization and Demography

Over the past decades, there has been an ocean of ink spilledabout the process that has come to be known as "globalization."While the term itself rose to high public and academicvisibility during this period, some have argued thatthe process that it denotes goes back centuries, even millennia.

Globalization has become a highly contentious subject, withthe word itself carrying diverse meanings that are deployed as cudgelsby proponents and opponents alike. It is now common to seeone or another position characterized as "pro-globalization" or "anti-globalization,"and in some cases activists describe themselves as such.

But what does it actually mean? While the term is sometimes usedvery broadly to connote simultaneous integration of the world's peoplesand systems along dimensions of economics, politics, technologies, andcultures, it is more often discussed in more narrowly economic terms.In the 2004 book In Defense of Globalization, a title indicative of thegrowing attacks then underway, trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati concentratesupon the relatively recent integration of national economies intoa nearly global international economy, marked by free trade, free flowsof capital, expanded foreign direct investment, increasing internationalmigration, and the dissemination of technologies. These, he argues, haveled to increasing prosperity and well-being. We share many of theseviews but aim in this book to add a demographic dimension to them.Declining fertility and rising international migration are both features ofglobalization to which we need to attend. To understand contemporaryfertility and migration, we need to focus on significant political as wellas economic phenomena.

This book is intended to help put the politics back into our understandingof the shape, timing, and ramifications of globalization in theparticular setting of fertility decline and international migration. Doingso helps us distinguish between recent history and earlier phasesof globalization, marked by very different political and demographicregimes.

By politics we mean that network of power relationships extendingfrom the family to the neighborhood to the village or city to theregion and to the nation/state beyond it. It is in these networks of unequalactors that the linkages among economic forces, social structures,and cultural practices are negotiated. Politics certainly means governmentalaction and policy, but the outcomes of such initiatives alwaysentails interpretation, implementation, and deflection. Intentions andoutcomes are never perfectly aligned, especially when considering delicateand complex questions associated with fertility decisions. Thoughit is true that state actors now have unparalleled tools of communicationand intelligence gathering, we should not assume that they and theyalone dictate events, however much they would like to do so. Resistance,misinterpretation, and inertia on the part of individuals, families, clans,religions, bureaucracies, and others have their roles to play in populationhistory, as in other domains. The key point is that politics mattersin this field as in all others; in a nutshell, we present an alternative tothe view that in any straightforward way economic change "produces"demographic outcomes.

Instead of economic determinism, we emphasize the significanceof uncertainty—political, social, and economic uncertainty—in thehistory of fertility decline. We place the perception of risk, understoodin political, social, and economic terms, at the center of this study. Asdefined by Ulrich Beck, a "risk society" is one in which there is no wayindividuals and couples can anticipate accurately the risks they face inan uncertain world. Among those risks are the consequences of childbearingfor a man and a woman whose futures are clouded with doubton many levels. Women who forgo childbearing entirely or who decideto have only one child may well do so to manage the risks of an uncertainfuture, which could be constrained by family responsibilities. Thereis no way to know how great these risks are; that is part of the problem.But it is hard to deny that they exist and are evident at many levels—ecological,economic, and political—in places and at times in whichsupports for the well-being of individuals and families are either absentor under severe threat in many parts of the world. The "risk society,"Beck argues, is not an option but an inescapable structural conditionof industrializing or industrialized societies, now stretching across theglobe. One facet of the unfolding of the "risk society," understood inmany ways, is—with notable exceptions—the globalization of fertilitydecline.

Two Globalization Waves, Divided by a Century

While they acknowledge earlier periods of increased international integrationprior to the mid-nineteenth century, historians generally agreethat there have so far been two modern "waves" of globalization, dividedby a century: from 1880 to 1914, and from the mid-1980s to the present.The "first wave" of globalization was a dominant phenomenon at theturn of the twentieth century. By convention it is said to have originatedgradually and incrementally beginning in the 1880s, and to have endedwith a bang in 1914—as the Great War exploded into massive destructionof the globalized order that had grown rapidly during the precedingthree decades.

The drivers of the powerful forces of the first wave took manyforms: political, military, economic, technological, cultural. During thatperiod much of the world was dominated by Great Britain and its semi-globalBritish Empire. The Royal Navy, larger and more powerful thanany other fleet, assured the peace and the relative safety of internationaltransport and expanding global trade. Late-nineteenth-centurytechnologies played a central role, too, as new modes of transportationand communication sharply reduced the cost and time involved in internationaltrade. The global service sector—shipping, insurance, andbanking—was based in London, the financial capital of the world, andBritish know-how and manufacturing techniques helped to industrializethe world.

Expansion of international trade was very substantial, driven bynew and far more efficient means of bulk transport via steam power,and by the rising attractiveness of international investment that couldbe protected by the political power of the hegemon, Great Britain. Between1850 and 1913 the carrying capacity of British (and world) shippingincreased more than tenfold, with more than one-third of thatincrease occurring in the thirteen years before the Great War. The volumein merchandise exports as a percent of GDP rose in western Europefrom 8.8 percent in 1870 to 14.1 percent in 1913. In the same periodEuropean per capita income rose by 1.3 percent per year, compared to0.5 percent per year in the classical period of the industrial revolution,between 1820 and 1870. From the late nineteenth century onward Europeanproduction and trade outstripped population growth, and incomeinequality increased between the less-developed and the industrializedworld.

Then as now, British bankers and businessmen tended to workin English, which, given Britain's imperial power, was the language inwhich most of the world's trade was conducted. Both economic necessitiesand the substantial outflow of British people to countries of Europeansettlement, from Australia and New Zealand to Canada and SouthAfrica, created a British diaspora linked by family ties and a commonculture. In this period, English became a world language for business, afull century before the Internet reinforced the hegemony of English asthe lingua franca of international exchange.

The beginning of the "second wave," of globalization may be(somewhat arbitrarily) located in the mid-1980s, and it is still in motiontoday. Like the first wave, it too was undergirded by forces that weresimultaneously political, economic, technological, and cultural.

The origins of the second wave can be traced to the end of WorldWar II. In 1944, a General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) wascreated as part of the "high politics" of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreementsamong the soon-to-be-victorious Allies. The GATT was one ofthree new global institutions constructed to avoid the mistakes of thepost-1918 period and to manage international monetary and financialaffairs after the Second World War. The other two were the InternationalBank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonlyknown as the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).The intent of the GATT was to facilitate international cooperation viatrade liberalization; its most immediate targets were the protectionisttariffs and other measures of the 1930s that were then still formally ineffect.

The first wave of globalization was protected by British power forthe benefit of British prosperity. The second wave was similar, with theUnited States being the shield and a beneficiary of postwar recoveryand rapidly expanding investment and trade. The political stakes wereheightened by the early onset of the Cold War, which made economiccompetition between the two power blocs a "test" of which systemworked better. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communistsystem failed that test, and that outcome was both a reflectionof intrinsic problems in the way "state socialism" operated and of thestrength of the competing, increasingly globalized system constructedoutside the Soviet Bloc after 1945. International trade politics in thenon-Communist world prepared the ground for the leap forward beginningin the 1980s in information technology and other developmentsassociated with the second wave of globalization.

This outcome was not at all inevitable, nor was it a seamless storyof capitalist success and Communist failure. The Cold War made multilateraltrade policy politically difficult to sell in the highly charged domesticpolitical arena of the 1950s in the United States. Not surprisingly,the GATT had a notably "hesitant start" (in the delicately phrased wordsof the World Trade Organization—WTO—which inherited its role).The GATT agreement contained provision for a proposed new internationalregulatory agency, the International Trade Organization (ITO), asa specialized agency of the United Nations. The draft ITO charter wasambitious. It extended beyond world trade disciplines to include ruleson employment, commodity agreements, restrictive business practices,international investment and services. The aim was to create the ITOat the UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana, Cuba,in 1947.

The effort floundered, and by 1950 the ITO was effectively stillborn.This premature death followed a decision by the United Statesgovernment, the postwar hegemon that had led the campaign for postwartrade liberalization, to decline even to seek ratification of the GATTby the US Senate in view of clear indications that a ratification votewould fail.

Notwithstanding the failure of the ITO, the GATT weathered thestorm. In particular, its small secretariat persisted, organizing a decades-longseries of "trade rounds"—a set of agreements reached via lengthyand often difficult international negotiations and conferences. A list ofthe many "rounds" is provided in table 1.1.

As is evident in table 1.1, the early rounds focused on reduction ofthe protectionist tariffs adopted during the prewar Great Depression;these discussions included only small numbers of participating countries.The 1964–1967 Kennedy Round in Geneva, named after the assassinatedUS president, addressed antidumping measures as well. Italso engaged considerably more country participants than the earlierrounds, including some former colonies that had only recently becomeindependent states.

It was not until the Tokyo Round, a series of conferences and negotiationsthat stretched over much of the 1970s, that agreements regardingreduction of "nontariff" barriers to trade were negotiated. TheTokyo Round also addressed so-called "framework agreements," whichprovided more ambitious strategies and principles for dialogue aboutliberalizing trade and investment. In addition to tariffs, nontariff barriers,and framework agreements, the Tokyo Round also addressed tradein services, protection of intellectual property, dispute settlement, andcontroversial provisions regarding trade in textiles, garments, and agriculture.The Tokyo Round included participation for the first time ofmore than one hundred countries. It was the gradual accession by increasingnumbers of countries to agreements reached during the TokyoRound that ushered in and helped sustain the second wave of globalization,beginning during the first half of the 1980s and accelerating in thefollowing decades.

The Tokyo Round was followed by the even more ambitious politicalagreements to facilitate economic globalization embodied in theGATT's Uruguay Round. At these meetings a broader range of issueswas included under the rubric of trade. The Uruguay Round also createdthe World Trade Organization, a formal organization that replacedthe small secretariat that had staffed the GATT; the GATT was not an organizationper se but instead an agreement on rules. In effect, the WTOrepresented the final triumph of those who had failed in 1950 to establishthe International Trade Organization.

The current round of negotiations about globalization, known asthe Doha Round, has been underway since 2001. It has not (yet) beenable to achieve new agreements. As may be seen, the number of participatingcountries has grown still further, and the range of topics beingnegotiated has also become far broader. It is anyone's guess what theultimate outcomes will prove to be.

Like the first wave of globalization, the second wave since the early1980s has also been heavily influenced by, and in turn has heavily influenced,trends in technology, economics, and culture. If the archetypaltechnologies affecting the first wave were the telegraph, railroad,and steam-powered bulk shipping, those of the second wave have beentelecommunications, television, and cable; rapid and low-cost air travel;quantum improvements in shipping by both sea and air; and, ultimately,computers and the Internet. These in turn have contributed tothe growth and reach of truly multinational corporations, which maybe technically headquartered in a particular country but which in factoperate in a global manner.

The financial sector too has taken advantage of technologies thathave allowed development on a massive scale of split-second transfers ofcapital and currencies around the world, with very low-cost and secureelectronic linkages among hundreds of central banks and thousands offinancial institutions in all parts of the world. Meanwhile, in one importantdeveloped region the embrace of the euro as a common currencyfor most of Europe has lowered the costs and risks of trade, while atthe same time reducing the power of individual governments over thelevers of economic policy and, in particular, their previous control oftheir own currencies.

There can be no doubt that all of these forces and others sincethe 1980s have had very large impacts upon the volume of internationaltrade, capital flows, foreign direct investment, expansion of multinationalfirms and their reach, and constraints upon governments' abilityto regulate their own economic patterns. Here are a few quantitativeindicators:

• Total exports have increased by tenfold over those around1950.

• More than $1.5 trillion a day now moves across borders,versus only $15 billion per day in 1973.

• Foreign investment in 1997 exceeded $400 billion in 1997,or seven times the level in real terms of the 1970s.

• Between 1983 and 1993, cross-border sales of US Treasurybonds increased from $30 billion to $500 billion per year.

• International bank lending grew from $265 billion in 1975to $4.2 trillion in 1994.

One important question—one that cannot be addressed hereother than in rudimentary form—is whether the second wave of globalizationfrom the 1980s to the present may also be marked by someof the same unanticipated developments that contributed to the fadingof the first globalization wave around the turn of the twentieth century.In both cases, political leaders of the hegemonic power(s) believed thatthe palpable domestic prosperity created during the early liberalizingdecades of the globalization drive could continue to grow indefinitely,if only they could continue to spread the reach of globalization. In bothcase, increasingly prosperous private corporate and financial interestsexploited the short-term incentives provided by globalization to exporttheir technologies, manufacturing, and employment-generating andother activities to lower-cost settings. In both cases, free trade arguablyprovided the conditions for the creation of competitors, which threatenedto overtake the economic advantage of the prior hegemon. In 1914,that threat helped pave the way to war. In the early twenty-first century,international tensions are evident, though the risks of their precipitatingwar are less due to the common threat of nuclear disaster.

Demography and Globalization

For our purposes here, it is important to recognize that both the first andsecond globalization waves have had powerful impacts upon the volumeand pace of international migration. It is likely no accident that the firstwave of globalization, 1880–1914, was coterminous with the classical periodof mass migration, especially from eastern and southern Europe tothe New World. Over precisely this span of thirty-four years, from 1880to 1914, an estimated 30 million persons moved from their countries oforigin to another, representing some 2 percent of the estimated 1880world population of about 1.4 billion. For tens of millions of these, theprimary destination was the United States. Between 1880 and 1914, onthe order of 21 million immigrants were admitted to the United Statesfor permanent residence. Nearly all came from Europe, and primarilyfrom southern and eastern Europe.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300139063
• ISBN 13: 9780300139068
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288