Battle of the (youth) bulge.

• Author: Howe, Neil
• Position: New World Order - Demographic change implications - Viewpoint essay

OVER THE next few decades, the developed countries will age and weaken. Meanwhile, dramatic demographic trends in developing nations--from resurgent youth booms in the Muslim world to premature aging in China and population implosion in Russia--will give rise to dangerous new security threats. Some argue that global demographic trends are progressively pushing the world toward greater peace and prosperity. They are wrong. The risks of both chaotic state collapse and neoauthoritarian reaction are rising.

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Everyone knows that the developed world is aging rapidly. Graying workforces will become less flexible, less mobile and less innovative; rates of savings and investment will decline; current-account balances will turn negative and foreign indebtedness will grow. Rising pension and health-care costs will place intense pressure on government budgets, crowding out spending on defense and international affairs; militaries will face growing manpower shortages.

Although it is less widely appreciated, the developing world is also aging. Like the developed world before it, the developing world is now in the midst of what demographers call the "demographic transition"--the shift from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility that all societies undergo in the course of development. Since 1970, the average fertility rate in the developing world has fallen from 5.1 to 2.9. Meanwhile, the median age of the developing world has risen from 20 in 1970 to 26 in 2005. It is projected to keep rising to 31 in 2030 and 35 in 2050--at which point the typical developing country will be about as old as the United States is today.

While most experts conclude that the geopolitical implications of aging in the developed world will be negative, a growing school of thought says that the same trend in the developing world will be positive--so positive, in fact, that it will make up for the developed world's growing weakness. It won't matter if the developed countries can't fight a war, because demographic trends will render the rest of the world increasingly pacific.

This argument is based on the well-established relationship between youthful age structures and violent conflict. Throughout history, people have observed that young men are responsible for most of the world's mayhem. Since the mid-1990s, a large body of research has confirmed the close statistical correlation between the likelihood of conflict, especially civil strife, and the size of a society's "youth bulge," which is typically defined as the ratio of youth aged 15 to 24 to the entire adult population aged 15 and over. In the early post-cold-war years, this research triggered alarm among Pentagon planners about how sizable youth bulges in much of the developing world posed significant threats to U.S. interests. But more recently, experts have begun pointing to the projected decline in youth bulges as a cause for optimism. With each passing decade, they say, the propensity of the typical developing country to engage in violence can be expected to decline.

We have dubbed this argument the "demographic peace" thesis. In its most-basic form, it holds that the demographic transition, by bringing about an older age structure, will, wherever and whenever it occurs, also bring social and political stability--and ultimately democracy--in its wake; today's security threats, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation, are just one last speed bump on the road to a more-peaceful future.

Although the demographic-peace thesis may seem plausible, we believe that it is deeply flawed. The demographic-peace thesis fails to take into account the huge variation in the timing and pace of the demographic transition, which is leaving some of the developing world's poorest and least-stable countries with large and lingering youth bulges, even as it threatens to subject some of the most-successful countries to the stresses of premature aging. It tends to focus exclusively on the threat of state failure, as in the Somalia model, while ignoring the threat of neoauthoritarian-state success, seen in the China or Russia model, which is more likely to occur in societies where the transition is already well under way.

More fundamentally, the demographic-peace thesis lacks any realistic sense of historical process. Rapid demographic change, when coupled with rapid development, can itself become a highly destabilizing force. As the developing world's demographic transition unfolds, it is de-racinating traditional communities, overturning established economic and social relationships and cultural norms, and fueling a rising tide of ethnic strife and religious extremism. This hardly portends a new era of international peace. It is possible (though by no means assured) that the global security environment that emerges after the demographic transition has run its course will be safer than today's. It is very unlikely, however, that the transition will make the security environment progressively safer along the way.

LET'S BEGIN with the transition's very uneven progress. Averages can be misleading. Although it is true that the developing world as a whole is gradually aging, some of the poorest and least-stable nations are not aging at all. In sub-Saharan Africa, burdened by the world's highest fertility rates and ravaged by AIDS (which decimates the ranks of older adults), the average youth bulge is now 36 percent, more than twice the developed-world average. That share will remain practically unchanged over the next twenty-five years. The transition has also failed to gain traction in parts of the...