Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes write:

We live in a strange time marked by widespread and ongoing depopulation. The entire world is grappling with a crisis of childlessness. By 2015, the global fertility rate had dropped to half of what it was in 1965, and most people now lives in societies with fertility rates below replacement levels. Populations are shrinking across rich and poor nations, secular and religious societies, democracies and autocracies alike.

As the eminent American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt recently observed in Foreign Affairs, “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation.” The last major episode of large-scale depopulation resulted from the bubonic plague that devastated Eurasia 700 years ago. But what history clearly shows is that depopulation always has political effects. These include a potential increase in warfare—fighting motivated by the desire to compensate, directly or indirectly, for population loss.

Historians have documented the so-called “mourning wars” among Native American tribes during the 17th and 18th centuries. They would raid each other’s communities, kidnapping women and children to compensate for widespread losses of their own people to contagious diseases and warfare. Women and children were absorbed into the raiding tribe, while adult males were usually killed, because they were seen as impossible to integrate. These wars, if they were genocidal, were wars of genocidal inclusion.

Which brings us to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. How different is it from the mourning wars of the past? In many ways, it resembles an updated version of such a war, a desperate attempt to replenish a dwindling population by forcibly incorporating a neighboring people into Russia’s own.

While the invasion was undoubtedly sparked by imperialist ambitions, anti-Western resentment, and a desire for Great Power recognition, it may also have been conditioned by Russia’s rapidly shrinking, aging, and emigrating population. Russia’s 2100 population is currently projected to shrink to a median of 126 million, an astonishing drop from its current population of roughly 145 million.

Putin’s interpretation of Russia’s dismaying demographic decline through the lens of a cultural war that the West is allegedly waging against Russia, its people, and its civilization, may even have played a decisive role in his decision to launch this cruel and devastating war. [Continue reading…]