Some news links: public art, history, marriage, diaspora, assimilation

Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.

• CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
• JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
• Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
• Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
• Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
• VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family's earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)

On the Pew Forum's disproof of Eurabia

My latest post at my other group blog, History and Futility, was entitled "Why Eurabia?" Why, in the face of the abundant evidence that the prospect of a Muslim majority in any European country--indeed, of particularly large Muslim minorities anywhere--do large numbers of people (like Glenn Beck) predict an imminent caliphate in Europe?



Eurabia's fundamentally an ideology of revenge ("Ha, ha, you didn't support us, now you're going to get raped by Muslims!") as well as an ideology of envy. Muslims, imagined by Eurabianists as beings somehow completely resistant to the influences of modernization and post-modernization etc., are imagined as perfect conservatives, retaining the superfecundity of old and maintaining the traditional family. Why them? some ask. Why not us?

Eurabia's all the more ironic since many sources–the Economist, Douglas Todd’s blog The Search, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times–have reported on a recent report by the Pew Research Group observing that Muslim population growth is slowing, and certainly Muslims won’t become majority populations in any European country.

At the heart of its analysis is the ongoing effect of a “youth bulge” which peaked in 2000. In 1990 Islam’s share of the world’s youth was 20%; in 2010, 26%. In 2030 it will be 29% (of 15-to-29-year-olds). But the Muslim world is slowly heading towards paunchiness: the median age in Muslim-majority countries was 19 in 1990. It is 24 now, and will be 30 by 2030. (For French, Germans and Japanese the figure is 40 or over.) This suggests Muslim numbers will ultimately stop climbing, but later than the rest of the world population.

The authors call their calculations demographic, not political. Drawing on earlier Pew research, they say conversion is not a big factor in the global contest between Islam, Christianity and other faiths; the converts balance out. Nor do they assess piety; via the imperfect data of the United Nations, the European Union and national statistics, they aim simply to measure how many people call themselves Muslim, at least culturally, if asked.

New numbers, they say, will change the world map. As Indonesia prospers, its birth rate is falling; South Asia’s remains very high. By 2030, 80m extra mouths in Pakistan will boost its Muslim numbers to 256m, ousting Indonesia (with 239m) as the most populous Islamic land. India’s Muslim minority will be nearly as large at 236m—though growth is slowing there too. And in 2030 India’s Muslims will still constitute only a modest 15.9% of that country’s swelling total, against 14.6% now.

The report asserts no causal link between Islamic teaching and high fertility rates, although it notes that poverty and poor education are a problem in many Muslim lands. In Muslim countries such as Bangladesh and Turkey, it observes, the lay and religious authorities encourage birth control. Better medical care and lower mortality boost poor-country population numbers too.

[. . .]

The total Muslim share of Europe’s population is predicted to grow from 6% now to 8% in 2030: hardly the stuff of nightmares. But amid that are some sharp rises. The report assumes Britain has 2.9m Muslims now (far higher than the usual estimates, which suggest 2.4m at most), rising to 5.6m by 2030. As poor migrants start families in Spain and Italy, numbers there will rocket; in France and Germany, where some Muslims are middle-class, rises will be more modest—though from a higher base. Russia’s Muslims will increase to 14.4% or 18.6m, up from 11.7% now (partly because non-Muslims are declining). The report takes a cautious baseline of 2.6m American Muslims in 2010, but predicts the number will surge by 2030 to 6.2m, or 1.7% of the population—about the same size as Jews or Episcopalians. In Canada the Muslim share will surge from 2.8% to 6.6%.

The report in question--"The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030"--makes for very interesting reading. Suffice it to say that although Muslim populations are growing more quickly, it is a consequence of relatively higher fertility--declining notably, however, for the same reasons as in Iran or Turkey or Tunisia or any other country where urbanization, the liberation of women, and economic pressures has pushed fertility down--and a relatively large proportion of young people of childbearing age. In the case of Europe, the projections suggest that a tenth of the populations of France, Belgium, and Sweden will be Muslim by 2030, that the proportion in western Europe as a whole will rise from 4.5% now to 7.1%, noting additionally that right now Muslim fertility is below replacement levels in Germany, Italy, and Spain, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim populations continuing to close. Russia, notably, is and will be home to one-third of Europe's Muslims, but even there proportions won't change overmuch (~11% to ~15%). And in case you're worried about India, the projections suggest a rise in the Muslim proportion of the Indian population from 14.6% to 15.9%.

The study's methodology looks fine to me: conservative, well-grounded in facts, not making the sorts of sweeping predictions of radical transformation that always merit the most stringent skepticism. Notably, projections are made only two decades into the future, roughly one generation, beyond which point much happens. Are radical changes possible? Sure. Are they likely? No. One may as well predict a huge surge in non-Muslim fertility as not, or mass Christian immigration into Muslim lands. (The latter is possible, by the way; the huge disparities in income between North Africa and the Middle East to the north, and sub-Saharan Africa to the south, could drive interesting population movements.)

Alas, this fine report won't be considered by the prophets of Eurabia. Eurabia is a fantasy, product of an ideology that imagines the punishment of errant nations by a terrifyingly perfect, inhuman conservatism. Envy and revenge fantasies can't be defeated so easily as all that. Pity, not least since these fantasies can lead to any number of horrifying outcomes.

On the dialogics of cultures and populations

Over at GNXP, Razib Khan put up a post on the historical demographics of German Jews as compared to the current demographics of American Jews that I thought might interest you.

[I]n regards to the future of the American Jewry I think the story outlined in Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 may serve as a possible vision of the future. Elon notes that almost the whole of the German Jewish elite of the late 18th and early 19th century converted to Christianity. Moses Mendelssohn’s last Jewish descendant died before the 20th century; the rest of his descendants had become Christians. Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine were not atypical. But there was a large German Jewish community in the early 20th century, though even that was being eroded by intermarriage and conversion. If Elon is correct that the bulk of the 19th century Jewry became Christian, where did the Jews of the 20th century come from? It seems that as the German Jewish burghers abandoned the Reform temples for Lutheran churches, their spots were filled by assimilating Eastern European Jews who were immigrating into Germany and taking over the institutions which the earlier community had built. They were heirs in spirit, if not blood, to Moses Mendelssohn. In other words, a large bumper crop of Orthodox youth may be the salvation for the Reform and Conservative movements. There may be no third generation Reform, but not all third generations beyond Orthodoxy remain Orthodox either.

Examples like the above constitute any number odata points against the idea of extending demographic trends naively into the distant future, expecting that cultures and populations will remain conservatively and hermetically sealed off from each other, without any blurring or fusion. That has never been the case. Different cultures always engage with each other, individuals interact with other individuals, thesis, antithesis, synthesis on a scale. Don't think dialectics: think dialogics, a far more complex set of relationships.

The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is. In this sense, Bakhtin's "dialogic" is analogous to T. S. Eliot's ideas in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where he holds that "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."

The term 'dialogic', however, does not just apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all language - indeed, all thought - appeared dialogic. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. We never, in other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world.

What holds for works of popular culture like literature holds for culture as a whole--and, for that matter, for areas of culture other than popular culture like demographic trends. Based on any number of highly individual reactions to different economic, political, and social stimuli, different societies respond to population issues in different ways, very often informed by the experiences of other countries. Québec has been influenced by the family-friendly policies of France; Estonia has largely adopted the family-friendly trends of low marriage rates and postponed fertility of neighbouring Nordic countries; countries with dynamic labour markets (like Spain and the United States until recently) are more open to immigrants than countries with relatively closed labour markets; people often move from one country to another based on cultural and historical bonds between sending and receiving countries (from Ukraine and Central Asia to Russia, say).

The same holds true for subpopulations within a given polity, with gender norms from a surrounding culture influencing the behaviour of immigrant women coming from cultures with different gender norms, and with some degree of mutual assimilation, often asymmetrical, between different populations. Argentina's culture may be heavily influenced by Italian immigrants, but ultimately the division of these Italians into different regional populations ensured that the descendants of Argentina's big waves of Italian immigrants, who likely formed a slight majority of incomers, ended up speaking Spanish. And Germany's Jewish population continued to grow, despite the assimilation of the native-born, thanks to immigration from Germany's eastern hinterlands.

Thoughts?

Vojvodina's ethnic homogenization as a 21st century paradigm

Over at Balkan Insight, Tim Judah's article "Vojvodina’s Ageing Minorities Stare Extinction in The Face" provided an interesting examination about how the fourth stage of the demographic transition is leading to the disappearance of some relatively well-established ethnolinguistic minorities.

Puffing, panting and yelping in Romanian, six men are expertly dancing around three ping-pong tables. Watching intently are several more men, most of them greying and balding. There is not a woman is in sight. Perhaps they are preparing the feast to follow at which large quantities of alcohol are to be consumed. It has been a happy day for the Romanian community in Serbia, one of Vojvodina’s rapidly dying ethnic minorities.

Vojvodina is Serbia’s northern province. “Until now, we were proud to say that we had 28 nationalities here,” says Branislav Djurdjev, a demographer at Novi Sad university, “but demographic developments will destroy that.”

In the grand sweep of history Vojvodina is no stranger to population shifts. But today, as the Balkan wars of the 1990s fade into memory, few realise the dramatic nature of the demographic changes that have taken place in Vojvodina in the last two decades – and which are continuing.

Nicu Ciobanu, director of Libertatea, Serbia’s Romanian language newspaper, is proud that this is the 52nd annual ping-pong contest that his paper is sponsoring. But how many more will the newspaper be able to stage in years to come? This year’s contest is being held in the gym of the school in the village of Alibunar. Between the two world wars, about 75 per cent of the some 3,500 people who lived in Alibunar were ethnic Romanians. Now, of a population of around 3,400, only 28 per cent are Romanians. The rest are mostly Serbs.

A few steps from the school stand two white churches. Unusually for the Balkans, or indeed anywhere else, they stand side by side and are built in the same classic Vojvodina style. One is the Serbian Orthodox church while the other belongs to the Romanian Orthodox. Inside the Romanian church, chandeliers have been lowered and plastic sheeting placed over precious objects, while the church is alive to the sound of “pftt, pftt” as elderly ladies spray cleaning fluid on everything that needs polishing. The church is being prepared for an important saint’s day.

Overseeing the work is the priest, Fr Ionel Malaimare. Over the road, in the little community hall, tables have been laid for the meal that will follow the saint’s day service. On the walls are pictures dating back decades, recording generations of Romanian choirs of Alibunar. According to the census of 2002, there were 30,419 Romanians in Vojvodina, but back in 1910 there were 75,233. Numbers have been falling ever since. Ominously, for the first time, there is not a single child this year in the first year Romanian-language class in Alibunar’s school.

The most important thing to keep in mind in regards to the self-governing Serbian province of Vojvodina, located in the north of Serbia and bordering on Croatia, Hungary, and Romania, is tgat it has become increasingly Serb by population. Wikipedia's summary of the demographic history of Vojvodina is as accurate as anybody's. Over the period from 1880 to 2002, the region's population grew from 1.1 million to a bit over two million, but the region's Serb population has grown from four hundred thousand (35.5%) to 1.3 million (65%).

How did this shift happen? Ethnic cleansing certainly helped, but so did economics.

Before the Second World War, [. . .] only half of Vrsac’s population was Serbian while the rest were mainly Germans and Hungarians. Today barely 100 Germans remain. The 1931 census recorded 343,000 Germans in Vojvodina. After the end of the Second World War and the Communist takeover, they were driven out, fled, or died in camps. The new authorities colonised the province with almost a quarter-of-a-million Serbs, mainly from Bosnia, and others from other parts of Yugoslavia. In this way they greatly increased the proportion of Serbs in Vojvodina whilst also creating new minority communities, such as Macedonians and Montenegrins.

These Macedonian and Montenegrin immigrants, it's worth noting, are ethnically similar to the Serbs.

Additionally, while the initial resettlement of formerly German lands in Vojvodina may have been planned colonization, the province was also prosperous enough to attract economic migrants. Throughout the Communist era, Vojvodina's GDP per capita was not much lower than Croatia's and perhaps a fifth higher than that of Serbia proper, placing the province clearly in the rich "north" of the country. GDP per capita crashed over the 1990s, relative to Vojvodina's non-warring neighbours and absolutely thanks to sanctions and economic collapse, relative to Slovenia, never mind absolute GDP per capita, crashed over the 1990s, but Vojvodina still retained its income advantage over the rest of Serbia. This, along with Vojvodina's proximity to Croatia and Bosnia, encouraged the influx of ethnically Serb refugees that help boost Serb numbers even as non-Serb numbers fell.

The wars of the 1990s further accentuated the Serbian presence in Vojvodina. According to Tomislav Zigmanov, director of the Vojvodina Croatian Cultural Institute who lives in Subotica, 35,000 to 40,000 ethnic Croats left or were driven out of Vojvodina in the 1990s. The exact number is hard to pin down because some Vojvodina Croats have in the past declared themselves as Yugoslavs in censuses or as Bunjevci, another minority, close to the Croats.

The 2002 census recorded only 56,546 Croats in Vojvodina, well down on the figure a decade earlier, and that number will certainly be less in the next census in 2011. These people “feel abandoned”, says Zigmanov. Too small and cowed to exert any political influence in Serbia, he says they are looked at askance in Croatia. “It feels like we are punished for living in Serbia,” he says.

Geocurrents noted in a January 2010 blog post that ethnic Serbs now form a solid majority over most of the province, the only real exception apart from some scattered rural enclaves being a pocket of Hugnarians in the north-central region, next to Vojvodina. I suspect that rural enclaves populated by ethnic minorities integrated into a majority-dominated society won't resist assimilation for very long, not that emigration from a region that's now one of the poorest in th Balkans mightn't be attractive for ethnic minorities with options elsewhere.

Like the young people from the other minorities who gravitate towards their “motherland”, young Croats in Vojvodina are also leaving for Croatia. Zigmanov cites several telling statistics. According to a recent poll, he says, 70 per cent of students at Belgrade University said they would not want a Croat as a roommate. It is hardly surprising, then, that an equal percentage of Croatian students from Vojvodina prefer to go to university in Croatia and don’t come back.

Until the end of the First World War, Vojvodina was part of the Kingdom of Hungary and Hungarians are still the province’s largest minority. But their numbers are falling fast also. In 1948 there were 428,932 Hungarians in Vojvodina.

In 1991 that number was down to 340,946 and by 2002 there were only 290,207. In Backa Topola, a depressed northern town with a majority Hungarian population, “anyone who has enough brains runs away”, says Janos Hadzsy, a local journalist. Amongst that number are his own two children who have gone to Hungary.

Fears by Serbian nationalists that Vojvodina will secede are certainly false, if not ridiculous. Vojvodina has never been more Serb by population than it is now, and there's every reason to think that it won't become increasingly Serb. Croats also speak Serbo-Croatian; Romanians, Macedonians, and Montenegrins are also Orthodox Christians; Slovaks and Ruthese are Slavs; Hungarians (and others) don't have to move very far if they want to live in substantially stabler and more prosperous countries. Couple the relative ease of assimilation and dsiproportionately heavy emigration among minorities with fertility rates substantially below replacement levels--Roma constitute the only significant exception, but they're a small minority as yet and marginal besides--and despite Vojvodina's political autonomy the province is going to be increasingly ethnically homogeneous.

I mention the example of Vojvodina partly because it's interesting in its own right--the homogenization of the Yugoslav republics and provinces that began in the post-war era and accelerated during the ethnic cleansings of the 1990s is still ongoing--and partly because it's an example that will become increasingly relevant in other areas in other countries advanced in the demographic transition with their own multicultural traditions. In the Volga-Urals region of Russia, for instance, where any number of Finnic and Turkic minorities co-exist alongside ethnic Russians, living alongside their co-citizens, most often speaking Russian in public life and migrating from their rural heartlands and intermarrying, will many of these ethnic minorities persist? In the main extra-European countries of mass immigration--in places like Argentina and Canada and Australia--will intermarriage and assimilation and migration continue to wear away ethnic diversity on the ground, other groups meeting the fates of the Welsh of Patagonia and the Ukrainians of Saskatchewan and the Germans of South Australia, perhaps more urban groups of newer vintage? Et cetera. There will certainly be new waves of immigrants to all these regions, but with the sorts of factors that operate in Vojvodina, could the fate of the new immigrant-borne cultures possibly be any different?

The world of the fourth demographic transition is likely to be a rather more ethnically and linguistically homogeneous one, methinks.

Demography and culture: French Canada's fall and Québec's isolation

Over the past few months, Statistics Canada has been releasing data sets and analysis from the 2006 Census. Statistics Canada released information on language use, immigration and citizenship, and inter-provincial migration. The textual analyses at Statistics Canada's website are good, but the interactive map created by the Canadian Press and hosted at CBC.ca is wonderful. Of note is the continuing fall in Francophone numbers and proportions outside of Québec and New Brunswick.

What happened? It's important to note that the belief in a French Canadian revanche des berceaux, of a nationalism-driven birth rate under British occupation that saw every family produce large numbers of children, is a legend. The disparity between Ontarian and Québec (and fertility fertility rates emerged after 1870, when Ontario moved in the direction of a demographic regime characterized by sharply falling death and infant mortality rates in tandem with falling birth rates, while Québec--more conservative, more rural--lagged behind. For a long while, this was enough to keep the Francophone proportion of Canada's population stable at roughly 30%. But then the 1960s hit.

Between 1850 and 1950, owing to a high fertility rate among French Canadian women, the proportion of Francophones in the Canadian population held at 30%. The fertility of the Francophones then dropped below the Canadian average toward the mid-1960s, contributing to a decrease in the proportion of the total Canadian population speaking French as a mother tongue -- from 29% in 1951 to 25% in 1986. Between 1926 and 1960, the fertility rate of women in Quebec moved closer to that of other Canadian women. In effect, the ratio of the fertility rate of Quebec women to other Canadian women dropped from 1.45 in 1926 to 1.30 around 1940 and 1.15 around 1950. Between 1960 and 1970, fertility declined very rapidly. The total fertility rate of women in Quebec dropped from 3.9 to 2.1; the fertility of other Canadian women declined but not so markedly, from 4.0 to 2.5. By 1974, fertility in Quebec had declined to 1.8 children/woman, and by 1986 the fertility rate had fallen still further to 1.4, while that of other Canadian women held at between 1.7 and 1.8. The fertility rate was 20% lower in Quebec in 1986 than in the other provinces. These differences in fertility between Québec and the rest of Canada have significantly affected the demographic situation. Census data have shown that the completed fertility of Francophones was 80% higher than that of Anglophones for women born at the turn of the century, but this gap narrowed rapidly over the years and disappeared for women born between 1931-36.

These differences also affected Francophone populations outside of Québec, as the same source notes, with Francophone TFRs outside of Québec falling not only below the levels of non-Francophone TFRs ("[i]n Ontario [in 1986], the total fertility rate for Francophones was 1.54, compared to 1.61 for Anglophones and 1.75 for the other groups"). The fertility of Québec--perhaps a reasonably good proxy for Francophone Canada as a whole--is not the lowest-low fertility of Italy, and it might well have only anticipated trends in English Canada. Even so, the province of Québec is going to have to deal with relatively low if not negative population growth and relatively rapid aging, further complicated by issues with immigration, as evidenced by the loud debate on the topic of how best to integrate immigrants. (The old endogamy of the pre-1960s period is most certainly gone, even if the problem of dealing with Others remains, as with other peoples and cultures.)

Survival will be an unsurmountable challenge for most Francophone minorities outside of Québec. In most of the rest of Canada, Francophones form significant minorities (and, occasionally, majorities) only in the "bilingual belt" stretching more-or-less along the Québec border. Can this be changed? It's questionable. Francophones outside of Québec once exhibited higher TFRs than Francophones inside Québec, but this situation has reversed itself. In the 1996-2001 period, there was a significant amount of Francophone out-migration to Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta, suggesting a certain potential for the revitalization of those communities, but again Francophones in Ontario and Alberta form only a small portion of the population, while the stable Francophone community of New Brunswick has often been a net exporter of population to Québec. Without any remarkable demographic event--a Francophone baby boom,. mass immigrations from Francophone Europe and Africa, et cetera--non-Francophones won't have any particular reason to view French as particularly relevant to their lives. Journalist Chantal Hébert was right to point out in a December 2007 article for The Toronto Star that "French still an abstraction in much of Canada": "[O]utside Quebec, Francophones make up only 4 per cent of the population. With French an abstraction in so many parts of Canada, the motivation to learn it as a second language is decreasing. Because most Anglophones learn French at school, the peak bilingualism rate for Anglophones outside Quebec occurs in the 15 to 19 age range. Over the past decade, it has slipped from 16.3 per cent to 13 per cent. The census also shows the retention rate of Anglophones who have learned the language is slipping." Even in 2001, Statistics Canada discovered that overall, "43.4% of Francophones reported that they were bilingual, compared with 9.0% of Anglophones." For those Francophones living outside of Québec, living in an overwhelmingly non-Francophone society with few if any barriers to intermarriage, these pressures create a perfect environment for language shift. It's not surprising that there was an overall decline in the numbers of Francophones outside of Québec. As Gilles Grenier put it in his paper "Linguistic and Economic Characteristics of Francophone Minorities in Canada: A Comparison of Ontario and New Brunswick" (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (18.8): 1997), in mixed environments

A lot still needs to be learned about what exactly determines assimilation, but it is clear that the fact that Anglophones and Francophones are more mixed together than they used to, mainly because the Canadian society has become more urbanised and communication systems more developed, leads to a more widespread use of the common majority language. If Francophones in Quebec and in New Brunswick have been able to maintain their language, it is because there is a geographical separation between them and the other communities. This does not mean that those Francophones do not use English for some of their economic activities, but at least French is still the dominant language in their own communities. One major reason of the assimilation in Ontario is that there are less and less towns and villages where the majority of the population is French.(299).

This last sentence is critical, since mass language shift from French to English is not unique in the history of North American Francophones. Starting in the late 19th century, relative economic underdevelopment propelled a tremendous migration of Francophones out from their traditional settlement areas along the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to adjacent parts of the continent. Large and thriving communities of Franco-Americans (concentrated in New England, particularly in that region's industrial cities) and Franco-Ontarians (concentrated in northern and eastern areas adjacent to Québec) formed at this time, encouraging some to believe in the idea of a greater Québec encompassing those communities. That vision failed, as the Franco-American community was whittled away through immigration restrictions and acculturation to the Anglophone culture surrounding them. Franco-Ontarians, who with few exceptions like in Anglophone-majority communities relatively isolated from Québec, may be about to follow. And no, the Francophones who are tourists in Maine or long-term residents in Florida don't make up the same sorts of communities. What the long-term effects of a Québec isolated in its language from most of the rest of Canada and attached to a wider Francophone world and (through a traditional Ameriphilia) to the United States will be on a Canada faced with its own regional challenges, I leave to my readers to speculate.

Why is all this particularly relevant to readers of Demography Matters? Shifting population balances are central to our work here. The shrinkage of working-age populations as aging proceeds is something that we've looked at, just as we have taken a look at the effects of emigration on the long-term futures of different countries, just as we have taken a look at unbalanced sex ratios. The transformation of populations via cultural or linguistic shifts is just as surely an issue of note. How's Catalan faring in the Generalitat and the Balearics and Valencia, in the context of Spain's recent immigration boom, and if badly, could this lead to anti-immigration sentiment or legislation? Is the proportion of first-language Russophones in Latvia shrinking significantly, and if so could this lead to a cautious liberalization of immigration legislation? Will Russia try to make good on its promises to the Russophones of the former Soviet Union? Just what is going on with Spanish in the United States and what does this suggest about Hispanics? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Demography matters, and so do the underlying cultural issues that not only help define demographics but influence the ways in which we think of those shifts. In Canada, English Canadians and French Canadians have dealt with each other substantially in relation to their demographics ("Are the French having too many children?" "Are the English trying to overwhelm us with immigrants?"), managing to stifle until relatively recently serious discussion about what's actually going on. If you think that this was about Eurabia, well, yes, it is in part about that, but it is more importantly about the need to come up with examples from the past and the present of underdiscussed and often misdiscussed issues sine, after all, Demography Matters.

What happened to Flemish France, what's going on with the Tibetans, and what's happening to the ethnic Poles in the former Soviet Union? Come back here to find out.