Europe's Demographic Future: Determinants, Dimensions, and Challenges

Europe shares, to a varying degree in different countries, common demo-graphic processes with the rest of the post-transitional world. These are the familiar characteristics of developed societies: fewer babies, longer lives, older populations, diverse households, more immigrants. These trends differ in important ways from those across the Atlantic. In Europe fertility is lower than in the United States despite more pervasive welfare programs in the former. In parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union numbers have been heading down, not up. Europe’s 40-odd countries are diverse, not unified or even convergent. Current patterns and trends preserve or ac-centuate demographic diversity and its challenges, despite the influence of the European Union and of the allegedly pervasive effects of ”globalization.” A brief pause is needed to consider the definition of Europe to be used here. Endless geo-political fun can be had in debating the merits of various cultural, political, racial, and geographical definitions of Europe: who is in, and who is out (Huntington 1997; van de Kaa 1999: 24). For the sake of simplicity Europe will be considered within its traditional geographical bound-aries: that is, from Iceland to Russia. Most emphasis will be given to Western Europe, where, in a less crisis-laden atmosphere than further East, it is easier to make demographic generalizations. The temptations offered by institutions such as the Eurovision Song Contest, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe to include more exotic additions