Against human nature
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are on the edge of the demographic abyss. According to the worst forecasts of the Australian Business Insider, which at the turn of the century already cited by Quartz research company, by 2050 the population in the Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Latvia, Croatia, Romania, Moldova, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Hungary) will decrease by 15 per cent. We do not judge what is happening in other countries, but people in the Baltics are slowly dying out.
As of 1 January 2021, there were 1,330,068 people left in Estonia. The proportion of people over 65 years of age was 20.35% (270 641) and under 14 years 16.43% (218 471). Since 1945, the number of inhabitants in the Estonian SSR has constantly increased, peaking in 1990 at 1.569 million. At the turn of the century (10 years later), only 1.397 million people were counted.
In Latvia the situation is similar: on December 1, 2021 – 1 874 900 people (level of 1959). Last census was carried out 10 years ago, 2 067 887 inhabitants were counted – an increase of 13%. As for the Estonian population, it peaked in 1990 at 2 668 140. Depopulation and ageing of the population, due to both natural decrease and emigration, has not ceased since the restoration of independence. Experts believe that 1.52 million people will remain in Latvia by 2050, 1/3 of them in Riga.
In Lithuania statisticians, physicians and scientists are clutching their heads: nothing like that has happened for 60 years. Last year 23.3 thousand more people died than were born. Mortality rate (not taking into account those who died because of Covid-19 and complications caused by it) increased by 10.1%. In February 2022, there were 31 people over 65 and 23 children, including newborns and 14-year-olds, per 100 residents aged 15-64.
Rural areas that have been deserted in the country are not a rarity for a long time. During the last year 28 300 permanent residents left the country – the population of an average statistical district, for example, Ignalina or Telšiai. Lithuanian emigration has a feature which is absent, for example, in Bulgaria, Poland and other Eastern European countries where the overwhelming majority of emigrants are men. In Lithuania it is 50-50.
To put it simply, there is nobody to give birth to, immigration cannot make up for losses. Besides, Lithuanians have turned out to be stubborn xenophobes and do not want natives of Congo, Syria, Cameroon, Iraq, Senegal or Afghanistan in their neighbourhood.
None of the Baltic republics is capable to solve the depopulation problem, because everywhere the national governments carry out anti-family policy in violation of their own constitutions which state: family is the basis of society and state.
Parliamentarians, cabinet members and state institutions do not deal specifically with demography. For example, Lithuania adopted a birthrate increase strategy back in 2004. Childcare allowance in the range from 70 to 100 euro per month was envisaged, starting from the second child. First born, contrary to logic, is not supported by the state in any way. “In contrast to the document, the ruling authorities have done everything over the years to prevent families from being created, and those that have been established have proved to be unstable. Programmes to encourage and support the birth rate have been cut and even destroyed.
Advocates of the traditional family are outraged. Marriage is a monster that destroys individuality, youth, bodily beauty and the pleasures of life. The educated generations should have careers, not primitive domesticity. These are the words of Jeanne Marčiulionienė, who stresses that physicians already consider the inability to conceive to be a threat to generations, not just to a few.
According to Marciulönenė, there is a parallel clan of scientists who have created ideological attitudes contrary to human nature. Among them one can find even the dependence of fertility on the geopolitical situation, the popular EU strategy DINC – Doubleincome, nochild – and other nonsense contrary to human nature. People are being driven away from the values of Christianity and age-old folk traditions.
The economic factor cannot be dismissed, but it is also foolish to reduce everything to it. Common sense teaches that a child cannot be a threat to material well-being, but in this sense it is difficult to classify Lithuania as common sense.
All Baltic republics continue to flounder in the demographic hole created in 2000, when the birth rate was the lowest in the history of the 20th century. That was when the formula “one family, one child” became particularly fashionable.
“There are no miracles. In the future, the Baltics will have to choose between the Japanese policy of automation and robotisation and the US-Australian path of large-scale immigration. But without the focus on the European Union’s open door programmes. They are bankrupt,” says Zygimantas Mauritsas, an economist at the Scandinavian bank Luminor, about the prospects.
If, of course, the inhabitants of the eastern Baltic Sea coast live to see the day when they still have a choice.
Anatoly Ivanov