Gunnar Heinsohn
Söhne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen
Zürich, Switzerland: Orell Füssli Verlag, 2020 (2003)
Robert Malthus’s essay on population growth is widely known and widely refuted, mostly by commentators who have not read it. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that population growth undermined the achievements which technology had brought and was bringing to human society and ironically had first made that population growth possible. Populations, he wrote, increased faster than the rate of increase in food production necessary to keep pace with the demand for more food. According to Malthus, this discrepancy between supply and demand would lead inevitably to a decline in living standards and to famine. That Malthus’s prediction proved (broadly) not to be the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is largely due to the fact that human societies have vastly improved agricultural efficiency and available agricultural land far in excess of the slow growth in food production which Malthus had projected. This improvement in food production to meet the demands of growing populations could only be achieved, and was only achieved, by improved logistics, improved science, and exploiting nature — not only more efficiently, but also more extensively. The fear of famine and outbreaks of famine have continued down to the present day, however, and although Malthus is officially repudiated, his ghost has not been lain to rest. The burden put upon nature incurred by meeting the challenge of the appetites of the human population increase continues to this day. Has Malthus been proved entirely wrong, and is his thesis applicable in relation to challenges other than that of famine?
Söhne und Weltmacht by Gunnar Heinsohn, professor at the University of Bremen, is written in the Malthusian tradition of seeking in demographics the key to understanding social and political challenges. It is the principal argument of Söhne und Weltmacht that it is neither a struggle for resources, nor of religion, nor a conspiracy, that is the principal driving force of terror and war, but rather a surplus of young men who, by virtue of a demographic spike, are too many competing for too few positions in their own communities.
More exactly, according to Heinsohn, it is a diminished opportunity to obtain “property benefit” (Eigentumsprämie), a key term in Heinsohn’s argument. This book is Walt Whitman’s cry of “Go West, young man!” with a vengeance. A society whose population increase, or more exactly, increase in young men, cannot be met by a commensurate increase in opportunities for those young men to thrive by obtaining property benefits and social standing, is the major trigger of terrorism, war, colonialism, and mass emigration. This is a startling thesis, but it is argued cogently and with abundant recourse to evidence. Indeed, Heinsohn’s work abounds with references, citations, and graphs and tables to support the main thesis.
Here is one historical case which Heinsohn examines: Nepal. How could it be, he asks, that Nepal changed almost overnight from a happy hippy Mecca, where the stardust children of the West sought enlightenment and inspiration in the 1960s and 1970s, into a land racked by civil war, strife and terrorism in the 1990s? What was the cause of the Maoist rebellion? Standards of living? The oppression and solidification of the proletariat, in accordance with Marxist theory? The desperation of famine, in accordance with Malthusian theory? None of that. The people were not starving and living standards were in fact rising. The population was not desperate or threatened from outside. Journalists speculated on Chinese influence undermining the small land by infiltrating it with Maoist revolutionary theory. Heinsohn comments on the theory of Maoist subversion laconically:
If Bakunin’s work had been widely read in Nepal instead of Mao’s, the media might be reporting about anarchists against the police instead of Maoists against the police. Young people will always find something. Irony to one side, the killers took great chunks out of their differentiated convictions. They not only attacked feudalists and fascists but the national Marxist-Leninist movement as well as the united Marxist-Leninists and finally, the Indian army. (p. 105)
The real reason for the upsurge in conflict is clear to Heinsohn:
Rising from 8.5 to 26 million, the population tripled from 1950 to 2005. In 1995 and 2000 the children bulge was at 41%. With over 4000 deaths between November 2001 and January 2003 talks over a ceasefire between the authorities and the insurgents began. Were the talks to collapse, so the Minister of Culture Kuber Prasad Scharma at the end of May 2003, the country would be facing “Cambodian relations” viz. genocide. Peace was finally concluded on November 21st, 2006. The conflict had cost near to 18,000 lives.
Then Heinsohn throws in his final comment, the fact which for him is decisive and not brought into calculations of war and peace: namely, the falling birth rate. “From 6 children per woman between 1950 and 1985, the birth rate had fallen to under two by 2020.” (pp 105-106).
What is the “children bulge” referred to here? Heinsohn has much to say about what he calls demographic “bulges”: youth bulge, baby bulge, children bulge. A bulge refers simply to a disproportionate dominance by one age group in a nation’s or group’s demographic structure. A youth bulge is defined by this writer as follows:
The existence of a youth bulge results from the places which are becoming available to the number of places which sons who are becoming adults demand.” (p. 55) It is the existence of a baby bulge becoming a youth bulge (a baby bulge does not necessarily become a youth bulge if there is a high infant mortality rate) which is the prime course, Heinsohn argues, of “migration, crime, mass flight, prostitution, forced labor, murder, gang crime, terror, putsches, revolutions, civil war, expulsions of groups, genocide. . . As a rule of thumb: nations with 30 to 50% of their populations under 15 years of age will be experiencing one or more of these. (p. 115)
The Biblical tale of Cain and Able is, for Heinsohn, a fable that tells the story of a fundamental truth. Two brothers competing for one position, one recognition, one property benefit, must emigrate, colonize or kill one another.
Heinsohn also refers to what he calls the Kriegsindex (war index). This is the yardstick he has devised to measure the military potential of a group in terms of its manpower by comparing the number of 55 to 59 year-olds to the number of youths between 15 and 19 in the studied group. If the number of 15-19 year-olds is higher than the number of 55-59 year-olds, the war index is positive, and negative in the reverse case. So if there are 1000 old people to 2000 youths, the war index is 2+. The US-Vietnam conflict cost nearly a million lives, of which an astonishing 95% were North Vietnamese, but the Vietnamese war index was 4 to the American 2. The North Vietnamese could afford their losses better than the Americans.
An objection can certainly be made that Heinsohn ignores the factor of technical superiority — possession of the atomic bomb, for example — to counteract or even nullify the war index factor. However, in the great majority of conflicts that have taken place since the Second World War, the superiority of military hardware does not seem to have played the decisive role which might be expected of it. As for atomic confrontation, the wars since the Second World War have been wars of proxy insofar as the nuclear powers were involved. Arguably, Israel is the one country that keeps numerically superior forces at bay by its possession of the technology to destroy entire nations, but it also has a high war index.
The objection can be made that in terms of conflicts between major powers, the war index factor may play a less considerable role. My impression is that Heinsohn indeed tends to gloss over facts and factors such as firepower superiority which might weigh against his principle theory of youth bulges and war. However, it is questionable how far even a nuclear deterrent can stop a human tidal wave which has reached a vastly disproportionate superiority in numbers. Was it not Mao Tse Tung who once callously remarked that in the event of nuclear war, China would win simply by virtue of its huge population? One of Heinsohn’s many statistics, extrapolated from data provided by the World Bank for 2020, is that the proportion of children under 15 years old from nations with a children bulge (30-50% of the population) in relation to children in the United States is 1.3 billion to 61 million.
We should, of course, be aware of statistics. Heinsohn offers his readers an abundance of them, but are they conclusive? It may be that hikes in the population are not the direct cause of the factors he describes, but bring about developments which trigger them. Yet even to admit that populations hikes are the indirect rather than direct cause of war and famine is still to admit that they play a decisive role, and to argue that the effect is indirect would be to qualify Heinsohn’s thesis without in any way refuting it.
A further controversial argument of this book is that dictatorship and children bulges tend to accompany one another. Heinsohn notes that the Algerian military overruled unwelcome election results in 1991 at a time when the population had more than doubled, rising between 1960 and 1990 from 10 to 25 million. More people were killed in the course of internal conflict in Algeria between 1992 and 2002 (180,000) than in Arab-Israeli wars over the same period. (p. 116) Algeria used to record a birth rate of 6 to 8 children per mother; the birth rate has fallen in recent years to 3 children per mother. Heinsohn feels it unnecessary to point out that conflict has subsided in Algeria since the beginning of this century. The reader gets the point.
The core argument of the book is, therefore, that problems of war and famine are demographic — not climatic or economic in the traditional sense of rich and poor. It is certainly the case that the role of population is rarely treated earnestly by political and economic writers, professors, and journalists. This reviewer shares Heinsohn’s belief that exponential population growth lies behind many major global challenges, if not all of them, and the current system of ignoring population and seeking solutions to problems such as pollution in tackling secondary causes (e.g. global warming) is to evade the real challenge.
Heinsohn’s message about war can be summed up thus: “It’s population, stupid.”
A table on pages 120-127 highlights a remarkably regular congruence between nations where armed conflict dominates and/or the murder rate is higher than the global average, and nations with an above-average youth/children bulge. In fact, Heinsohn can find very few conflicts, widespread acts of terrorism, high crime rates, or acts of genocide which do not find their origin one way or another in the struggle of a youth bulge cohort to obtain their Eigentumsprämie.
This leads to the deeply pessimistic conclusion that populations without youth bulges — those either with declining birth rates or which achieve an equilibrium of births to deaths, a picture of stability — will be considerably more pacifistic than societies with a youth bulge, but such societies are victims waiting to be discovered. History would seem to bear this out: Societies with stable populations do seem to be more pacifistic than those with growing populations, and therefore more likely to fall victim to them. The Indians of the Caribbean falling victim to the Europeans or the Bushmen falling victim to the Bantu are obvious cases that come to mind. It seems to be that all human societies are condemned to take part in a sort of cradle race to outbreed and thereby dominate one another. Irish nationalists have long been aware of the population factor in overcoming Protestant and British rule and uniting Ireland, although they remain willfully ignorant of the cradle challenge Ireland is itself now facing from Black immigrants.
Söhne und Weltmacht may be criticized for being less than systematic in the development of its argument. The argument is based not so much on theory or a model of society as evidence. Historical cases accompanied by tables are presented to the reader and thereafter evidence is cited to show the validity of the argument, but the theory is not examined in depth, nor are contrary interpretations of the cause of war and terrorism examined at all. Heinsohn is saying in effect that the “coincidence” of correlation between youth bulge and war is so overwhelming that it would be the onus of a skeptic to provide an alternative interpretation.
The evidence of what Heinsohn is claiming is plentiful and strong. The reader may be forgiven for wondering why the argument has not been put forward previously, or even debated previously, if it is all so obvious. Heinsohn says (and here we are with Malthus again) that in societies or countries with soaring birth rates, there will be too few prestigious positions (defined in terms of property right) to content aspiring male youth, too little opportunity to devote energy to worthwhile enterprises, there will be diminishing resources available to rising numbers of young men, and that will lead to internal conflict over the scarce resources or emigration or both. It is not that favorite explanation offered by NGO charities, a “poverty trap,” which triggers mass emigration.
Against the belief that low living standards are the prime force prompting conflict, Heinsohn notes that the standard of living of the Ivory Coast, for example, was rising before it entered into its main period of conflict — in fact, the standard of living actually declined as a result of civil war. Conflicts negatively affect standards of living, and it is not poverty alone which causes conflict, so Heinsohn. Conflict, he argues, is caused by rising expectations that cannot be met fast enough.
Heinsohn also looks at the expansion and global dominance of Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. When Europe’s expansion began at the very end of the fifteenth century, the population was, as a result of widespread pestilence, actually lower than it had been previously (60 million in 1500 compared to 90 million in 1340). What took place was not a simple increase in total population compared to the past, but a dramatic change in the median age of European populations. Large numbers of chil
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