Arab Society in Revolt

The West's Mediterranean Challenge

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

Copyright © 2012 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2396-7

Contents

Chapter One

PHILIPPE FARGUES

Demography, Migration, and Revolt in the Southern Mediterranean

For the people of the Mediterranean, the early 2010s will be remembered as a period of great change. In the south, Arab citizens' claims to fundamental freedoms and dignities have toppled—or at least seriously shaken—decades-old dictatorships, while in the north the market's failures have confronted governments with an unprecedented crisis concerning the equally old and unsustainable production and welfare systems. The two crises, political in the south and economic in the north, have no common origins except that they are both partly rooted in the progressive, inexorable transformations brought about by demographic change.

Historians will certainly highlight the crises' concomitance with a radical demographic turning point that is barely noticeable in real time, as shifts in population evolve slowly and therefore invisibly for those who focus on the short term. The period around 2010 will indeed be remembered as the time when the population of young adults peaked in the Arab world while an enduring population decline gained momentum in Europe. Demography offers a key to understanding changes that separately affect the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean while, at the same time, linking them together through international migration.

This chapter will, first, briefly review how demographic trends challenge Europe's ambitious economic, social, and political goals and will ask to what extent immigration can help in addressing demographic challenges. The rest of the chapter focuses on Europe's closest neighborhood, the Arab Mediterranean region, from which large flows of recent immigrants have originated. It describes the lack of economic prospects, political freedom, and individual agency that young adults—more numerous but more excluded than ever—suffer in the context of the powerful social changes that accompany such a demographic shift, such as women's empowerment, the spread of education, and, for the first time, the birth of the individual in societies that have been based, since time immemorial, on families and communities.

The chapter then offers an interpretation of emigration and revolt as two possible responses of the young, whose new aspirations are frustrated by the patriarchal order of both the family and the polity, which largely negates individuals' aspirations. After recalling that Arab countries have their own "œsouth" and thus constitute a migrant receiving as well as a sending region, the chapter finally examines what happened when migration and revolt met in the course of 2011. By way of conclusion, it will speculate on the future of migration in relation to long-term demographic and short-term political changes in the Arab region, as well as on the future of European policies regarding Arab migration.

Generational Contracts at Risk

For the first time in history, Europe must prepare for a long-term decline in population that will not be the result of wars or epidemics, as in the past, but rather the outcome of individual choices freely made by its own people over the last half century regarding procreation. Demographic recession cannot be stopped unless the downward trend is offset by large-scale immigration. Moreover, below-replacement fertility rates will combine with continuous gains in life expectancy to produce unprecedented population aging. While this process is potentially universal, it will affect Europe first and more acutely than any other part of the world.

Europe's demographic recession will have three facets. The first will be a shrinking Europe. While the total population of Europe will decrease or stabilize, depending upon migration scenarios, the number of people in most other regions will continue to increase so that the relative weight of Europe in world population terms will dwindle. Europe's closest neighbors will continue to follow their own demographic paths. For example, if the members of the League of Arab States eventually accomplish the dream of its founders and build one Arab nation, this nation will have 633 million inhabitants in 2050 (versus 357 million in 2010), whereas the twenty-seven member states of the European Union (EU27) are projected to have only 448 million inhabitants in 2050 (versus 506 million in 2010) if no immigration takes place.

The second facet will be a fast decline in Europe's workforce, endangering its wealth. If no immigration occurs between 2010 and 2050, the EU27 will lose 84 million working-age persons, a relative change of -27 percent (compared with an absolute gain of +1,349 million working age individuals, or +34 percent, at the world level).

The third facet will be an unprecedented rise in the elderly population, jeopardizing Europe's social contract. Booming numbers entitled to pensions combined with shrinking numbers subject to taxation will soon make the whole welfare state unsustainable. With no further immigration, the EU27 old-age dependency ratio (population aged sixty-five and over divided by population aged fifteen to sixty-four) will jump from 0.256 in 2010 to 0.468 in 2050.

Europe has recourse to a range of strategies to address the consequences of these population trends. Pursuing enlargement by including new countries in the European Union would increase the weight of the EU in world population but hardly mitigate distortions in its age pyramid, even if new member states have younger populations (for example, Turkey). Adopting pronatalist policies, raising the retirement age, increasing economic participation among women and immigrants of former migration waves, and elevating labor productivity would partly address the consequences of an aging population. Finally, redesigning pro-immigration policies—instead of suspending them in response to rising unemployment with the economic crisis, as most EU states are doing at the time of this writing—is a strategy that states must not dismiss, keeping in mind that the economic crisis will pass, but the demographic recession is here to stay.

Not far to the south, the Arab world presents a demographic pattern that contrasts strikingly with that of Europe (see figure 1-1). Until the 1980s Arab populations were viewed as the epitome of the demographic explosion. The "œpopulation problem" was felt as early as the 1930s in Egypt, when intellectuals and scientists pointed at overpopulation and rapid population growth as a major cause of underdevelopment, and a fatwa allowing contraception was pronounced by Egypt's grand mufti in 1937, decades before the issue became a matter of debate for the Vatican.

From that time until the 1980s, the population problem centered on high birth rates, which caused the population to grow faster than the economy. A demographic measure—birth control—was seen as the solution, and family planning programs were initiated in the early 1960s in Egypt and Tunisia, then in the following decades across all the Arab world except the Gulf states (where governments considered national populations too small in relation to the size of their oil-driven economies). Finally, the annual number of births began to grow more slowly and stabilized between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s (dates varying slightly from country to country), the years during which the largest generations were born.

Twenty...