Europe’s fertility decline is associated with a lack of stability which was provided by the very gradual evolution of economies in the West and the Communist societies’ lack of social aspiration and low inflation in the East. The East European birth rate is set for sharp decline during the 2020s, because this decade corresponds to the fertility window of the small number of people born during the 40-50% fertility slump of the post communist 1990s. In other words, only a doubling in fertility rates among the generation born in the 1990s could avoid a slump now. However, this does not necessarily represent the social collapse that is sometimes suggested. 

As Pope Francis exhorts Europeans to start breeding again, Youtuber KaiserBauch takes a long view of Europe’s demographic collapse and draws some accelerationist conclusions. In 2021, the Czech Republic had a total fertility rate of 1.83 children per woman; the highest in Europe that year – though still below replacement level. However the decline of East Europe’s population appears more stark because, unlike the West, these societies are not currently being replenished by immigration. 

The total fertility rate is usually a measure of all the women in a society aged 15-49, rather than the number of births per thousand people. The latter measurement gives a picture which is skewed by the age structure of the population. For example Brazil, Iran and Turkey had lower fertility rates than the Czech Republic in 2021, but a higher birth rate, because a greater number of their citizens fell into the fertile age bracket. 

But the populations of European countries has been much lower in previous centuries and, with Germany currently hosting the highest number of refugees on Earth and almost half of children in that country under the age of five being from a “migration background,” the continuity which is needed to encourage families is lacking – even in the migrant population.

Efforts of lawmakers to reverse the problem with family incentives aren’t proving particularly effective in Hungary (Viktor Orbán’s  expensive subsidies have seen fertility rate jump by about 25 per cent, but not as far as replacement level), nor in Poland (where fertility has fallen from 1.35 in 2017 to 1.1 in 2023 This despite the abortion ban). But the evidence that wealth and prosperity don’t correspond to population growth was already available from Japan and Dubai (whose citizens – among the wealthiest in the world – are also face a cratering brith rate).

KaiserBauch’s analysis is that Eastern Europe will ultimately be saved by the same phenomenon which is causing Israel to buck the trend: a high birth rate among Haredi Jews as well as an above-average rate among the country’s large Arab minority points to the factor which Israel shares in common with East European culture: a strong sense of national cohesion and purpose. 

While a society with a population replacement rate of 1.3 will collapse to a third of is size after a century, East Europe’s high rates of emigration and low rates of immigration don’t threaten the core demographic of rural and religious conservatives whose offspring will represent a greater and greater proportion of the East European population.

The Visegrad nations, though less populous, will remain essentially true to their national character through failure to retain those in pursuit of global wealth and the necessity of generating their own skilled workers for want of enthusiastic recruits from abroad.