Bluntly put, he wants to warn us that there are too many angry young men outside the Euro-American world today—above all, too many Muslim young men. It is well known, of course, that world data on age cohorts reveal a higher proportion of the young—a ‘youth bulge’—in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, relative to overall population, in contrast to the higher proportion of the ‘working-age’ population in East Asia and Latin America, or the ‘age bulge’ of Japan and Europe. Heinsohn’s contribution has been to interpret this as one of the principal threats to the West in the first quarter of the 21st century. As he generously acknowledges, Heinsohn picked up this notion from the us Defense Intelligence Agency. Clinton’s dia Director, Lt-Gen Patrick Hughes, had described the ‘youth-bulge phenomenon’ as a ‘global threat to us interests’ and ‘historically, a key factor in instability’ as early as 1997. But like a good Teutonic theorist, Heinsohn saw how to embellish the threadbare empiricism of American military bureaucracy with a world-historical idea: ‘Surplus young men’—the German word is überzähligen, over-numerous—‘almost always lead to expanding bloodshed, and to the creation or destruction of empires.’
(...) On what to do about the angry young men ante portas, Heinsohn is almost as discreet as his masters in Washington and Virginia. The director of genocide research is cautious not to say that killing them off may be the cheapest, most rational solution. Instead, he refers to a us strategy of ‘win–hold–win’, which may be translated into everyday language as kill (by pre-emption)–keep (other enemies down)–kill (next enemy, before he moves). Heinsohn makes clear that the ‘war on terror’ is a long-term offensive—‘our whole life’—against waves of rebellious young men in the Islamic world. The book was written in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, of which Heinsohn was an ardent supporter, and contains its share of sombre meditations on ‘genocidal dictatorships’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In recent interventions, his perspective has become more policy-oriented—perhaps due to the fact that, on the basis of Söhne und Weltmacht, he is now a frequent guest speaker at the German Ministry of the Interior, Intelligence Service (bnd) and nato. Where possible, he argues, the angry young men should be left to kill each other, as in Somalia or Darfur. If that is not working, discreet military aid to the ‘more civilized’ side is suggested, with French arms for the Algerian regime against the Islamists a prime example. But should the angry young men become threatening to Western interests, a pre-emptive military strike will be necessary. No long-term occupations or attempts at ‘state-building’ should follow, however. These are not only costly but futile, as long as the numbers of angry young men continue to grow. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been a grave error, according to Heinsohn. He is strongly opposed to any un or eu aid to Gaza, as it merely finances Palestinians’ ‘demographic armament’. Yet his maverick views can equally disconcert established opinion from the other side—calling in the Wall Street Journal for Europeans to welcome a quarter of a million young Palestinians into their midst immediately, so as to relieve the pressure in Gaza.
(...) Like all other data, demographic statistics can become ridiculous when extrapolated from their broader social-historical context. Sweden, with virtually complete population figures going back to 1750, the oldest in the world, had a ‘youth bulge’ from the 18th century, and most likely before that, until the First World War. This has so far added nothing of any significance to our understanding of Swedish history. Demography, even when deployed in a scholarly manner, is not a moral science—which explains, in part, its attractiveness for military bureaucracies. The youth-bulge argument can tell us nothing of the oppressive character of the Shah’s regime in Iran, the terror of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the horror of the us wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the insults of the Islamophobes, the hypocrisy of capitalist liberalism, or the stifling closets of patriarchy. The conservative appeal of ideas such as Heinsohn’s is their debunking quality: you think you are protesting against this or that, but in fact you are only competing blindly for status in an overcrowded youth bulge. Yet Pentagon fears of angry young men, from whom a contingent of angry young women should not be a priori excluded, cannot simply be dismissed as irrational paranoia. This rebellious youth may indeed be a harbinger of social change; but the direction of that change will be decided by political struggle.
(...) There have been some strong arguments for a positive demography of economic development: mercantilism saw population growth as an asset, not a social problem. In the 20th century, the Danish agronomist Esther Boserup proposed a sophisticated theory of the positive significance of population growth. Its lived truth for agrarian economics is exemplified most eloquently in the Netherlands: densely populated from early on and the major pioneer of land reclamation and agricultural innovation. In recent years the Harvard economist, David Bloom, has stressed the ratio of working-age to dependent—young and old—population sectors: in this model, children and the elderly are seen as a burden, while ‘prime’ adults are an asset. Bloom and his colleagues have argued that the comparative weight of the working-age population is a major component of the East Asian economic miracle. The Irish bulge of working-age youth, together with a decline of the birth rate, has also contributed significantly to its—by European standards, extraordinary—rise of per capita income over the past two decades. The Arab world and Africa, meanwhile, can look forward to splendid working-age bulges in about thirty years’ time.
(...) The paradox of demography is that, while it informs us about human life, it also facilitates an instrumental view of human beings. Historically close to state-power concerns, it is a science of peoples, as well as of populations. Practised paradigmatically, demography, and historical demography in particular, is a demanding, impressive intellectual effort. The left’s focus on political and economic division and polarization has often missed the weight of sums and their effects. At the same time, demographic arguments have since Malthus been used as a club of raw biology, with which to batter down hopes of popular rights and coexistence. Today we are witnessing the rehabilitation of a neo-social-darwinist discourse, a demonization of extra-European youth on a circuit that feeds from cia and Pentagon strategy papers to Bremen research institutes, and from there into the liberal media, nato commands and Israeli public discourse, on the eve of the Gaza attack. In Gunnar Heinsohn, his reception and his ilk, the world is experiencing a vengeful return of ideas that flourished before 1945, with the same scorn for the uncivilized, for lesser breeds, for the rights of other peoples.