26
October 2019
ANALYSIS
BYE-BYE, BALKANS: A REGION IN CRITICAL DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE Former communist countries in Southeast Europe face catastrophic depopulation, with far-reaching social and political consequences. TIM JUDAH | BIRN | BELGRADE, CHISINAU, CLUJ, PODGORICA, SARAJEVO, TIRANA, ZAGREB
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oung people are leaving. Fertility rates have collapsed. Societies are ageing. And though hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants have tramped through much of the region, few want to stay. Borders, ethnic spats, EU accession, NATO membership and unfinished business from the wars of the 1990s — these are the stories that fill the news from the Balkans. But serious analysis of the region’s demographic decline, depopulation and the hollowing out of the labour force is harder to find. Possibly this is because governments have neither credible answers nor the resources available to change things. If demography is destiny, the Balkan future is bleak — but it is not unique. From Greece to Poland, almost all Eastern, Central and Southeast European countries are wrestling with the same problems. On current projections, by 2050, Bulgaria will have 38.6 per cent fewer people than it did in 1990. Serbia will have 23.8 per cent fewer, Croatia 22.4 per cent and Romania 30.1 per cent. Moldova has already lost 33.9 per cent of its population. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a fertility rate of 1.26, one of the lowest in the world. Kosovo, with a median age of 29, is the youngest country in the region but does not escape demographic decline either. The figures and percentages may vary but the trends are the same almost everywhere, albeit with some countries further advanced than others. Serbia’s median age is 43, older than the EU average of 42.6. However you look at it, the demographic future of the Balkans and this half of Europe, afflicted by emigration and chronic low birth rates, is dramatic. Different from the past Historically, all countries of the region, and in fact most of Europe, had periods of intense emigration. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands went abroad from the 1960s as gastarbeiters, not necessarily meaning to stay away but many of whom did, perhaps because they had children abroad or the wars or both. Before that, Jews left — or were killed in the
Holocaust — and ethnic Germans were expelled or killed. In the generation before that, Muslims, Albanians and Turks from Bosnia and other parts of former Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans left in various waves during the 19th and 20th Centuries. People from the Dalmatian islands and parts of Montenegro went to the United States. Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria exchanged populations. But in terms of numbers, this did not matter so much when women were having five or seven children. Emigration, in peacetime at least, both eased the pressure on land and resources and populations continued to increase. That is one of the reasons why what is happening today is so different from the past. Then, Balkan countries exhibited the classic demographic and emigration characteris-
Infographic. Source:BIRN.
tics of poor countries. Today they exhibit the symptoms of both rich and poor countries simultaneously. This is unprecedented. People in the Balkans live long lives — not quite as long as in the richer countries of Eu-
BIRN infographics about depopulation hot-sports in the Eastern Europe.
rope, but much longer than in poorer countries. At the same time, just as in the richer countries, fertility rates have collapsed. But while Western countries compensate for falling birth rates and emigration with immigration, relatively few people immigrate to Balkan countries. In Central and Eastern Europe, only Poland has managed to significantly compensate large-scale emigration and low birth rates with the fortuitous immigration of more than a million Ukrainians who have, at the same time, considerably blunted what would otherwise be critical labour shortages. Governments helpless All governments are well aware of the situation but struggle to know what to do about it, or lack the means to do much. In Croatia, young couples can get government-subsidised mortgages but you have to have enough money to put down in the first place and the numbers of mortgages available and couples eligible are tiny compared with the scale of the problem. Where they can, countries give allowances to women and families with more children but there is no evidence, at least yet, that any of this can persuade them to have more children. In much wealthier Poland, which has given considerable fiscal advantages to lower income families, the money has both helped them and made them staunch supporters of the ruling Law and Justice party, but they don’t seem to be having more kids. When it comes to emigration, short of reverting to old communist-style travel restrictions, it also seems that there is little that can be done, except in targeted fields such as paying healthcare workers a lot more. Money, however, is not the only reason that people leave. In the past, those whose eyes were not focused on moving abroad migrated from vil-
