The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (37 page)

Confrontations, sometimes murderous, between Muslim immigrants and their secular host countries have led to anguished debates about national identity and multiculturalism in many countries. There have been spectacular acts of violence: the terrorist atrocities in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005; the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh; the bizarrely disproportionate worldwide protests and embassy torchings in reaction to cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper. After the 2005 riots that rocked France’s immigrant suburbs, the cover of the British magazine
The Spectator
showed a red crescent superimposed over a map of Europe with the headline EURABIAN NIGHTMARE.

Beneath such newsmaking events there was the sense that cherished European values—including free speech, gay and women’s rights, and secularism—were threatened. In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn nearly became prime minister by railing against the danger that immigrants posed to his country’s famously tolerant culture. (He was assassinated in 2002, though, by an animal rights activist, not a jihadi.) Fortuyn was something unimaginable in the American context—a flamboyantly gay right-wing populist. His nationalism was intimately bound up with his homosexuality, his crusade against multiculturalism framed as a defense of liberalism. “I have no desire,” he told one reporter, “to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. There are many gay high school teachers who are afraid of revealing their identity because of Turkish and Moroccan boys in their classes. I find that scandalous.”
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Such anxiety about multiculturalism, once taboo, has moved into the center of European political debate. A 2006
New York Times
story began, “Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values.” In France, reported Dan Bilefsky and Ian Fisher,

a high school teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for writing an article calling the Prophet Muhammad “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist.” In Germany a Mozart opera with a scene of Muhammad’s severed head was canceled because of security fears. With each incident, mainstream leaders are speaking more plainly. “Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. “It makes no sense to retreat.”
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I
t’s a mistake to attribute these clashes entirely to demographics. Despite warnings of a coming Eurabia, Europe’s Muslim population is not very large. It comprises about 4.6 percent of the continent’s people, and that includes native European Muslims from Albania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, and Cyprus. “[O]nly in France is the Muslim share of the population sufficiently large—currently 8 or 10 percent, and growing—to raise immediate concerns about the cultural hybridization of the society,” wrote religion scholar Philip Jenkins.
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Muslims make up about 4 percent of the population of Germany, 3 percent of the population of England and Sweden, and 2 percent of the population of Italy.
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Muslim immigrants in Europe and their descendants do have more babies than native Europeans, but their fertility is falling fast and the differentials are getting smaller. In 1970, for example, German women had just over 2 children each, and Turkish women living in Germany had an average of 4.4. By 1996 Germany’s Turkish immigrants were having on average only about one more child than German women were.
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Meanwhile, the Muslim countries that neighbor Europe are developing European-style birthrates. In 2008, the average Algerian woman was estimated to have had 1.82 children, the average Turkish woman, 1.87, and the average Moroccan woman, 2.57.
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There is no reason to believe that these numbers won’t continue to diminish.

To be sure, the proportion of Muslims in Europe is going to grow, but Europe is not on the verge of being swamped. It will, however, have to better learn how to incorporate immigrants—including immigrant women—into its culture and society. Religion, after all, is just one factor leading to higher fertility; poverty and illiteracy are also significant.
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As the United States has shown, these need not be immutable parts of the Muslim immigrant experience. The more than two million Muslims in the United States are much more likely to be middle class than those in Europe, and they are significantly less supportive of Islamic radicalism.
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In the decades to come, Europeans are going to make up a smaller percentage of the world’s people. In 1900, a quarter of the people on the planet were European. In 2000, only 12 percent were, and the UN estimates that by 2100 Europe’s share of the world population will be 5.9 percent.
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When the twentieth century began, the population of Europe was three times that of Africa. In 2050, the population of Africa will be three times that of Europe.
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The future world will be increasingly dominated by Asians and Africans. Western conservatives may not like it, may even try to curtail women’s rights in furious reaction to it, but that doesn’t make it any less inevitable.

However, one can accept and even welcome the prospect of this new world and still want to see European birthrates increase enough to keep European societies functioning, and developing country birthrates decrease enough so that population growth doesn’t keep outstripping development. It need not be about maintaining Western hegemony, though that is surely how it will seem to some. The point, rather, should be to give women the freedom they need to find some kind of reproductive equilibrium, so that when societies do shrink or grow, they do so in a manageable way.

B
eyond questions about economics, national security, and the future of Europe, there is a simpler reason for concern over very low birthrates. In most European countries women tell pollsters that they want more children than they are having, although not as many as the right would like them to have. If German women were having as many children as they say they want, the country’s birthrate would be 1.75, close to Scandinavia’s.
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Even as Italian fertility fell to around 1.2, people told pollsters their ideal family had, on average, just over 2 children.
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Reproductive rights include the right to reproduce, and when huge numbers of women want to but cannot, it means their freedom is being curtailed. Their societies are not enabling their choices the way they can and should be. That’s both the cause of the problem—as it is the cause of almost every demographic imbalance—and a problem in and of itself.

The association between women’s rights and higher fertility is relatively recent. Until the 1980s, when the first generation raised with second-wave feminism came of age, conservative Mediterranean countries had more children than more progressive Nordic countries. Between 1970 and 1974, Italy’s average fertility rate was 2.35, and Sweden’s was 1.89. Italy fell behind Sweden in 1980 and has never come close to catching up. The noted French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais tried to explain why in a 1996 paper. “There has been an extraordinary improvement in female educational attainment in Italy during recent decades,” he wrote. “In the younger birth cohorts, girls now have higher average levels of schooling than boys. As a consequence, young women’s expectations and ambitions are very different from those that characterized earlier generations of women. The age-old division of labor between man (the provider) and woman (the mother tending the home) is no longer accepted.”

At least not by women. “Italian males, even the young, are ill-adapted to this new equality of genders,” wrote Chesnais. “Even those who shared school classes with girls from early childhood are not prepared for family life in which women are on equal footing with men.... The link between these attitudes and fertility behavior is direct. A woman who engages in repeated childbearing runs the risk of being relegated to roles from which young Italian women struggle to escape.”

Italian social policy has made the situation worse. Financial support for families has dwindled, and there’s little public day care. “Consequently,” Chesnais wrote, “the standard of living of a family is markedly reduced with the arrival of each additional child.”
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Similar dynamics are at work in very different countries, from Germany to Japan, that don’t accommodate women’s desire to have both a career and a family. Germany, which had an estimated fertility rate of 1.41 children per woman in 2008, sometimes seems like a fairly liberal society, but it has evolved policies that tend to force women to choose between children and careers. In the 1960s, a labor shortage in Sweden led to the mass recruitment of women into the workforce. West Germany also had a labor shortage, but the state, committed to the defense of the traditional family, responded by importing temporary guest workers from Turkey and Yugoslavia instead. Meanwhile, German unions opposed the expansion of part-time work, partly because they feared it would subvert their demands to pay men a “family wage” that could support a homemaking wife.
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(Interestingly, Allan Carlson and other World Congress of Families conservatives also call for the institution of a “family wage.”)

Germany’s tax system, like Italy’s, favors families in which women don’t work by heavily taxing second incomes. Few deductions are allowed for child care, but the government pays women who take care of their own small children several hundred euros a month, what the German Association of Working Mothers calls a “stay-at-home subsidy.” Outside child care is also hard to find. There is very little public day care for preschoolers in Germany, and where it does exist it is provided for only a few hours in the morning. Most elementary schools follow the same pattern, dismissing children before lunch.
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Exacerbating the problem, the country has retained a deep cultural suspicion of mothers who work. “Few developed countries are more resistant to the idea of working mothers, and the hostility can be summed up in one word:
Rabenmutter,
” reported Mark Landler in the
International Herald Tribune
. “It means raven mother, and refers to women who leave their children in an empty nest while they fly away to pursue a career. The phrase, which sounds like something out of the Brothers Grimm, has been used by Germans for centuries as a synonym for bad parent.” Even today, wrote Landler, “women who work while rearing children meet disapproval from colleagues and bosses. Rather than vault the hurdles and shoulder the guilt, many German women skip having children. In 2005, 42 percent of those with academic careers were childless. That is double the percentage in France, which has one of Europe’s highest birth rates.”
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D
eveloped countries with relatively high birthrates have a range of family policies, but they are distinguished by systems that allow, and in fact encourage, women to combine families and careers. This is easiest to see in Sweden and France, countries with a rich array of public policies to assist parents. French mothers receive nearly four months of paid maternity leave at around 84 percent of their former salaries. Those with one child can take an additional six months off at a flat rate of five hundred euros a month, while those with two or more can collect the same benefit until their children turn three. Perhaps more significant, France has the best public day care in the world. All three-year-olds in France are guaranteed a place in all-day preschool, and an increasing number of two-and-a-half-year-olds are in these programs as well. Fourteen percent of children are in government-provided after-school programs.
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Even more than France, Swedish social policy, engineered to address a shortage of workers, is designed to keep mothers in the labor force. “Swedish policy makers effectively legislated the demise of the male-breadwinner family in the late 1960s and early 1970s, making it financially onerous for one parent to be home full-time,” wrote political scientist Kimberly Morgan. “Of particular importance was a tax reform that essentially eliminated the full-time homemaker from Swedish society.” Swedes are taxed individually; men can’t claim their wives as dependents. Social attitudes have tracked these changes. The number of Swedes who believe mothers of small children should stay home full time is much smaller than in other countries: 29.5 percent in one 1994 survey, compared to 54.7 percent in the United States and 68.5 percent in West Germany.
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Society is structured to help parents balance work and home. There is widespread access to public child care and after-school programs. Paid parental leave has expanded continuously, from six months in 1974 to sixteen months today. At least two months must be taken by fathers or they are forfeited. Because payments are based on previous wages, women have an incentive to build up their careers before having children. Once they return to work, parents are entitled to 120 paid days off a year to care for a sick child, and those with kids younger than eight have a right to work a six-hour day.
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