Weak economies, low fertility rates, and the Russia threat put Europe on the brink after a grim 2024

2024 was a pretty good year for America, in my opinion. However, it was a bad year for Europe.

In the early 2000s, when I started blogging, it was fashionable for liberals (and not just John Kerry) to hold up Western Europe as an example the U.S. should emulate. These liberals believed that Western Europe, now unified thanks to the EU, would surpass America as an economic force.

The liberals who held that view could not have been more wrong. Lee Hockstader, the Washington Post’s longtime observer of the European scene, has the details:

There is widespread worry that Europe is approaching a brink where the past’s comforting assumptions — about social stability, generous welfare benefits and broad prosperity — are fraying fast.

France got its fourth new prime minister of 2024 a few weeks ago; many believed he might not last as long as his predecessor given the nation’s fractured Parliament.

In Germany, the fertility rate for 2023 was reported to have tumbled below 1.4 children per woman, the threshold considered “ultra-low” by the United Nations. A grim milestone, no doubt, but less shocking than the free-falling birth rates in Spain or Italy.

The fertility data is very important, and not just because demography so often proves to be destiny. Liberal critics of the U.S. argued that even if the American economy continued to surpass Europe’s, the European model was superior because the European lifestyle and emphasis on social solidarity made it so.

That argument is very difficult to sustain when Europeans, to a greater degree than Americans, are electing not to reproduce.

As for the European economic outlook, it remains grim:

The euro area, hamstrung by overregulation, aging populations and labor shortages, is losing ground to the United States amid a widening transatlantic gulf in economic prospects.

The Stoxx Europe 600, a broad index that includes British companies, barely managed a 6 percent return this year. In the United States, the S&P 500 climbed nearly 25 percent.

That gap reflected a disparity between the buoyant U.S. economy, expected to grow by 2.8 percent in 2024, and the anemic one in the euro zone, projected to expand by just 0.8 percent.

The security outlook is also daunting:

Not since the Cold War has Europe faced such a menacing security environment. Alarm bells are ringing nearly everywhere — not only because of Moscow’s intensifying hybrid war of sabotage, propaganda and election interference across the continent, but also because Washington’s postwar promise of protection looks flimsier than ever as Trump prepares to return to the White House.

Sweden’s government, so frightened of Russia that it ditched two centuries of neutrality to join NATO last year, recently mailed out a booklet, “In Case of Crisis or War,” meant to help Swedes prepare for the worst. Norway and Finland have issued similar instructions. . . .

Elsewhere in the north, the Baltic republics — NATO members increasingly certain they are in the crosshairs of Russian aggression — are on course to spend a greater share of economic output on defense than does the United States. In the south, Romania and Moldova have been shaken by what appears to be massive Russian election meddling. . . .

The risk for Europe is. . .that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, building a full-time war economy to sustain his imperial appetites, will see in the continent’s impotence the potential for vassal states, ripe for the taking.

Liberal that he is, Hockstader neglects to note that Donald Trump caused Europe to increase its spending on defense by insisting that NATO nations honor their defense-spending commitments. But Hockstader’s general point — that Europe faces an increasingly menacing security environment — stands.

How did it come to this in Europe? Why did the optimistic forecasts of liberals prove to be so wide of the mark?

Hockstader provides part of the answer in the passage (quoted above) where he refers to “overregulation, aging populations and labor shortages.” The EU binds its members in an intricate web of oppressive regulations that far exceeds what the U.S. labors under. That’s one reason why American liberals liked the European model so much. As French president Macron has observed, it’s also one reason why the European model has failed to deliver prosperity.

The problems of an aging population and labor shortages bring me back to declining birth rates. Hockstader doesn’t offer an explanation for them and I’m not smart enough to explain them with confidence.

However, I think it’s generally accepted that low birth rates are associated with pessimism about the future. Why have children if you lack faith in the future?

Economic stagnation is one reason for pessimism about the future. However, even with Europe struggling economically, its nations are more prosperous than many others with higher fertility rates.

I suspect that European pessimism has at least as much to do with a gloom-and-doom attitude as with objective economic conditions. The view that climate change will kill us all, or at least turn the planet into hell, surely discourages having children. So too, the view that the West is an imperialistic, racist, patriarchy.

Needless to say, these views are held by many in the U.S. where birth rates are also declining. But my sense is that they are even more widespread in many parts of Europe.

Any discussion of faith in the future is incomplete without a discussion of religious faith. Christian faith has declined sharply in Western Europe (as in America), and it’s plausible to tie that decline to the rise in pessimism and the drop in birth rates.

Atheists can be optimists, of course, and many are. However, if one believes that a benign higher power governs affairs, one is more likely to be an optimist than if one rejects that belief. In addition, the Bible commands the faithful to be fruitful and multiply.

I have to admit, however, that there seems to be little correlation between the degree of religiousness in a given European nation and that nation’s fertility rate. France and Romania have the two highest fertility rates among EU nations. Romania ranks first among all European nations in the percentage of people who are considered highly religious (55 percent). But France (12 percent) is among the lowest. Croatia and Serbia are near the top in religiousness (44 percent and 32 percent) and also have relatively high fertility rates. But Greece and Poland are also among the most religious nations in Europe (49 percent and 40 percent) and among the least fertile. (America’s fertility rate is higher than all but Romania’s and France’s. Although I haven’t found a fully apples-to-apples poll of religiousness in America, it appears that our percentage of very highly religious people is around 40 , which would place us near the top in Europe.)

Despite the seeming lack of correlation of religiousness and fertility among European nations, I still believe that a decline in religious faith has contributed to low fertility rates across the board. In fact, the Pew Research Center, which conducted the polls I have cited here, found that:

Religiously unaffiliated women in the U.S. have tended to have fewer children than Christians and women of other religions. In this report’s models, the average unaffiliated woman is expected to have 1.6 children in her lifetime, while the average Christian woman will have 1.9 children, and the average woman of other religions (an umbrella category that includes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and many smaller groups) will have 2.0 children.

I assume this pattern holds true in Europe, as well.

Is there a way out of the demographic nightmare Europe faces? A religious revival might help, but one seems quite unlikely.

Immigration is the other answer. Right now, hard line anti-immigration views are becoming prevalent in Europe. But unless fertility rates rise, mass immigration may be inevitable.

The problem is that for Europe, mass immigration means an influx of Muslims from nations that don’t share, and to some extent disdain, European traditions and values. That’s not a recipe for smooth integration. Rather, it seems like a recipe for disunity, turmoil, and possibly disaster.

To quote Chuck Berry, “I’m so glad I’m living in the U.S.A.”