Central and Eastern Europe are undergoing major demographic decline. We’re talking low birth rates, aging populations, and decades of youth emigration to Western Europe. So, what does this all mean?
We’re seeing a broad emptying zone with shrinking labor forces and weakening state capacity. In the past, this brought about systemic change or uneven regional power shifts. And we’ll likely see some version of the latter, as control over the region begins to fragment.
Since most European powers won’t be able to project power eastward, Turkey is really the only viable option to become a dominant regional actor.
Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to do another demographic talk this time about kind of what’s next. From a state survival point of view, regional stability point of view. the data is pretty clear has been for, I would argue, a half century. People are living longer. That’s a subset of technology.
People are having fewer kids, which is a subset of urbanization. When you’re in the country, kids are free labor. You have a bunch when you’re in town. Kids are an expense. You have fewer. But there’s more going on than that in every part of the world. And the story changes based on where you are.
So today we’re going to talk about the area where Europe bleeds into Eurasia. So the Inter Mariam block of Estonia, through the Baltics, down into Central Europe, down into the Balkans. This is arguably the part of the planet outside of China that has been hit hardest by the demographic. Halloween out. We have three reinforcing trends. Number one, these were all former Soviet states or satellites.
And so they benefited from the Soviet industrial experience, which was harsh, which crowded people into small living conditions, drastically reduced the desire for kids, and in general gave you infrastructure that wasn’t up to what we considered normal standards, generating the lower standard of living that could not be alleviated by having kids could only be alleviated by having fewer kids.
Second, in the post Cold War environment, with NATO and especially the European Union, all of these countries eventually ended up joining both institutions. That meant that from a security point of view, they started getting assistance against the Russians. And from an economic point of view, we had a tug of war between two forces. Number one is the economic modernization and expansion that could occur when they were part of what was the world’s second largest economic block.
And number two is the free movement of people. And these two forces oftentimes found themselves at odds, because if you’re in your 20s and you’re skilled and you’re not nailed down to a family or property, then it makes a lot of sense for you to pack a suitcase and go to Germany or France or wherever, and work in a job that might be below your skill set, but would earn you a wage that is far better than your skill set would have earned you back home.
As a result, people under age 40 really flowed out of all of these places. On the flip side, as the Europeans integrated their supply chains further east into the former Soviet bloc, they discovered skilled workforce, decent, if not great infrastructure and lower costs. So in many ways, this whole area became a kind of like Mexico was to the United States.
The Central Europeans would do the stuff that was more labor intensive, more industrial, whereas the Western countries would do things that were more technological and higher value added. So you’ve got this ebb and flow and this integration. The problem is building that infrastructure, training the workforce is integrating the supply chains took time, and the only country in the West that truly took advantage of it was Germany because it bordered Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and so within that core Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, the personnel drain wasn’t as extreme, whereas the countries that didn’t directly border a major industrial economy.
Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Slovenia Bulgaria. Romania. Tended to lag because for them, the pull of the people leaving was more powerful than the retention capability by industrialization. Both trends happen in all the states, but the imbalance between those in core central Europe was very different from those that are on the periphery. As a result, we have already seen the populations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria dropped by over a fifth, about a quarter, actually, since the post-Cold War era began.
And they’re probably going to drop by that much again over the next 10 to 15 years, because the problem is when the young people left and only the old people remained. The birth rate functionally went almost a zero, and repopulation became technically impossible. Also within this band of countries are Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Now Belarus we can’t talk about because they’ve never done a census.
We really don’t know what it looks like. Ukraine has done a census and it’s God, it’s bad. Their population outflows reflected basically what was going on in the Baltics and the Balkans before the war. And then with the war, anyone who was a single woman or who had kids generally tried to get out. And so we’ve seen a 15% drop in Ukraine’s population just since the war began four years ago.
There’s very little reason to expect this war to be over soon. War, if it ends in Russian victory. You know, none of these people are going to come back. In fact, the outflow will be even bigger. Russia, Russia’s statistics. The last time they honestly updated them, which was in the early 2000, they showed having a demographic picture that was the worst in the world in terms of death rates and birth rates.
Since then, they’ve gone out of their way to manufacture some data. Looks pretty good and we just don’t know how bad it is. But the idea that it has gotten significantly better is a bit of a stretch. They may may have managed to get some other causes of mortality down. Things like alcoholism, accidents, drug abuse. Those may well have moderated and that will make the numbers nudge up a little bit.
But it’s difficult to imagine that the birth rate has recovered at all. Anyway, you pull all this together and we’ve got this wider region that is basically depopulating. So the question is what happens next? There aren’t a lot of historical examples. Let me put out two just to kind of frame this. Not that they’re predictions, but number one is that we all go down together.
During the dark Ages we had the Black Death Black Plague, which killed third to half of most populations across Europe. But because it killed everyone across international borders, everyone was kind of in the same boat, and the demographic picture had more economic and cultural outcomes than it did military or strategic. Because if you all of a sudden have a labor shortage, then labor starts to get paid more and you start developing the technologies that are necessary to operate with less labor.
And that led directly to the Renaissance. You know, I don’t want to say that can’t happen this time around. Just keep in mind that last time, it took a century and a half before that really manifested. So if you’re looking for the silver lining in the dark cloud, I guess there it is. But you won’t live to see it.
Second option we don’t all fall together. Some places fall faster. That’s definitely the story of this region. And the last time we had something like this at this scale, it actually was in this region. We had the Mongols who came through and disrupted systems and killed lots of people and basically depopulated large portions of the territory that we now identify as northern Ukraine and southwestern Russia.
That’s the part of Russia that’s closest to, say, Belarus. And then, of course, Belarus itself. These areas experienced depopulation and well in excess of three quarters in a very short period of time. And if you go just a little further to the west, you get out of the steps and planes of the Russian space and you hit the forests of Europe.
Well, at that point, what we discovered is that cavalry charges like the Mongols were famous for really didn’t do anything against a castle wall or in a forest. If they entered the forest, they had to dismount and all of a sudden it’s just a one soldier against lots of peasants with pitchforks. And so the Mongol invasion just kind of broke at that point.
And then the Mongols had internal political problems, and everybody went home. And so the Lithuanians were the first ones to kind of peek out from the forest like, hey, where everybody go? And they went out a mile and then two miles and then ten miles, like, there’s nobody here. And so Lithuania steadily expanded over the next century to become one of the most powerful countries in Europe.
They merged with Poland eventually, which was another country that benefited from the the shift into force and fortresses and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became the most powerful country in the world at the time, didn’t last because eventually the few people that were left across these vast sweeps had kids. The population rose and eventually pushed the Poles and Lithuanians out. But not before the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth conquered Moscow, among other things. Some version of that seems to be the more likely outcome here. The problem is, is that all of the countries that are bordering these zones are also in demographic decline. France looks pretty good, but it’s on the wrong side of Europe. You have to go through Germany. Germany’s demographics are not as bad as, say, Estonia’s or Bulgaria’s, but they are awful.
And regardless of what the German government, under whatever iteration it happens to be in five, ten, 15, 20 years happens to be just won’t have the manpower to go out and hold the land. There’s one exception and obviously Russia to similar situation. It’s just it’s crumbling from within demographically. The one exception is Turkey. Here’s a country that is still relatively early on, the aging process, the raging rapidly, kind of like the Mexicans or the Brazilians, but they have a minimum of another 40 years before that hits any sort of break point.
And that assumes that there’s no slowing of recovery. So the last time the Turks went on an expansionist period, they went north through the eastern Balkans into what is today Bulgaria and Romania. They punched through into the Pannonian plain, which was now Hungary, and they went up into what is today Crimea and Ukraine until they’ve hit resistance from the Russians.
But if we’re fast forwarding 20 years, there’s probably not going to be much of a Russia, and there’s probably not going to be much of a NATO or a Germany. And in that scenario, really, the Turks can go until they hit a country that has some density to it, and they won’t hit that until they hit Poland. That doesn’t mean that a war with Poland is guaranteed.
We’re talking about an inference on an inference and inference here, but the idea that there is a northern limit to what the Turks can do in this sort of demographic scenario, which is kind of hard locked in at this point. It’s pretty far north. So we’re looking at a broad rewriting of what is possible and this part of the world.
And considering the time frame, a lot of us, whether we’re watching from the outside or the inside, are going to live to see it, because that’s not that far from now.
