In the range of reasons explaining the changes that we have experienced, how could we not emphasize the demographic dimension? At the end of the nineteenth century, China and the British Indian Empire were, as they had always been, the world’s two most populated areas. The Indian Empire, which included as previously mentioned Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, and a few small Himalayan states, was under Great Britain’s dominion. China, which had suffered a military defeat by Japan (1895), had been humiliated for several decades by “unequal treaties” giving free access to its main ports, which were under the jurisdiction of foreign powers. Russia had expanded its borders through territorial continuity by appropriating one million square miles formerly under the Manchu Empire’s rule. Outside of the two demographic giants, one subjected to Europe and the other humiliated by unequal treaties, the demography of Asia and Africa’s countries was very low. The most populated Asian country after China and British India was Japan, with a population of forty-five million at the beginning of the twentieth century, which by beating Russia on sea and on land rose to the rank of industrial power soon-to-be colonial power.
Most populated states in 1900 except China and British India (in millions)
| Russia | 135 |
| United States | 76 |
| Germany | 64 |
| Austria – Hungary | 46 |
| Japan | 45 |
| Great Britain | 41 |
| France | 39 |
| Indonesia | 38 |
In 1900, six Western countries were among the ten most populated countries (see table). At the time, Brazil had a population of eighteen million and Nigeria seventeen million, that is, together, the population of Italy at that time. The population of the entire continent of Africa was just one hundred ten million. Latin America, seventy-five million. Asia, minus China and India, some two hundred fifty million. Europe, Russia included, and North America bordered on five hundred million. This gives a better measure of the difference between this period and the world we know now. In fact, in their crushing majority, the colonial conquests were of countries with populations of no more than three to five million, often less. The population of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan) in 1920, when it was divided between French and British Mandate less than a century ago, stood under ten million (against seventy-five million today). Just before its fall (1920), the Ottoman Empire, which included the whole of the Arab Levant and the coast of Arabia down to Yemen, ruled over twenty million subjects. Today, Turkey alone has seventy-eight million inhabitants.
Twenty most populated countries in 1950 and their numbers in 2014 (millions)
Source: 2014 Yearbook of the United Nations
| 1950 | 2014 | |
| China | 557 | 1373 |
| India | 368 | 1250 |
| Soviet Union | 180 | Russia 144 |
| United States | 152 | 323 |
| Japan | 84 | 127 |
| Indonesia | 80 | 255 |
| Brazil | 53 | 204 |
| Great Britain | 51 | 63 |
| West Germany | 50 | Germany 82 |
| Italy | 47 | 61 |
| France | 42 | 67 |
| Bangladesh | 42 | 158 |
| Pakistan | 40 | 191 |
| Spain | 28 | 46 |
| Vietnam | 28 | 94 |
| Mexico | 27 | 120 |
| Poland | 25 | 38 |
| Nigeria | 23 | 177 |
| Philippines | 21 | 101 |
| Turkey | 21 | 78 |
In 2025, or in less than ten years, the world population will have topped eight billion:
- Africa, credited in 1950 with approximately 230 million, or 9% of the world population, will border on 1.5 billion, or 18% of the world population. A very high share of the population growth will take place in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Asia will go from 1.4 billion (1950), or 55%, to 4.75 billion, or 59%.
- Latin America will go from 170 million (1950), or 7%, to 690 million, or 8%.
- The United States and Canada will go from 172 million (1950), or 7%, to 690 million, or 5%.
- Europe will go from 550 million (1950), or 22%, to 740 million, or 9%. The share of European population will collapse.
Since about fifteen years ago and for about the next fifteen years, the population share of sub-Saharan Africa has been increasing and is set to double. This demographic pressure on a labor market with no prospects is destructive. Despite some encouraging figures, a number of countries, if not the majority of them, will have neither the means, in terms of economic growth, to provide employment, nor the necessary infrastructure to school new generations. Wealth there is highly concentrated at the top, and the middle class, in the majority of these countries, is very narrow. Massive emigration will not be possible. Everything seems to indicate today that sub-Saharan Africa will be in the coming period one of the world’s areas both most unstable and most favorable to the propagation of Islamist ideology, both in West Africa and in East Africa.
Islamism, in the area where Islam was established long ago and has been instrumentalized for decades by Wahhabi preachers or the Muslim Brotherhood, will be the way out for the marginalized. Eastern Africa and the African west will be affected, and what has recently occurred in the Central African Republic (a minority Muslim government oppressing a majority of Christians, leading France to intervene militarily), is just a harbinger. Already, as a consequence of the intervention in Libya, the Sahel is being affected by this drive. This is also the case in the northern periphery of Nigeria, in particular in the Hausa region (Niger and Cameroon). In eastern Africa, Sudan, Kenya, and northern Tanzania, are candidates for increasing Islamic agitation.
As a protest ideology, Islamism has taken over from the Marxist Leninism of former times.
Although in 1900 thirty-three percent of the globe’s population lived in Europe, the United States and Canada, by 2025, at best, this will be a fourteen percent share. The persistent importance of the European-US model is due to the illusion of the United States’ “soft power” and the continued influence of its movie and television industries, and so on, but the blonde, blue-eyed Hollywood star is a rapidly disappearing species.
There is nothing ultimately surprising in the fact that public opinion in western and central Europe, and in the United States and Canada, does not want its soldiers, be they volunteers, to die or to risk dying in theaters that do not seem of vital importance and where victory is anything but certain.
In Europe, a long period of peace, safety, and relative prosperity, and the fact that the continent has essentially depended on US military protection have contributed to a sharp reduction in military budgets when others are building up their fire power, and eagerness to fight has lost its edge.1 This process, particularly in certain countries including France, has been aggravated by excessive assistance of states anxious to prolong social peace as long as possible.
As for the West in general, whatever the dynamism of the United States, it is paradoxically characterized by its recent denial of death and singular reluctance, partly due to the aging of its populations.