The New Biopolitics

How individual reproductive choices made around the world can destabilize the global economy and threaten our security–and what we can do about it.

Will globalization destroy itself? Every few years, another crisis suggests it might. The Internet, satellite phones, and intercontinental air travel help terrorists cross the world in an instant. The global spread of democracy shakes authoritarian governments–and opens the way for Islamists in Tehran and Cairo, a populist strongman in Venezuela, and nuke-happy nationalists in New Delhi. Open capital markets wreck the economies of Southeast Asia. Divisions between Muslim immigrants and the rest of Europe explode in French riots and Dutch assassinations.

These unhappy stories are familiar by now. An open, mobile, interconnected world creates new threats, or amplifies familiar ones, and countries throw up new borders in self-defense. The uncertainties of political and personal freedom make invented traditions seductive: pure Islamic states, India for the Hindus, premodern idylls available for free download.

But, along with electronic commerce, transnational fanaticism, and increasingly fluid borders, there is a missing piece in the current picture of globalization, one that puts the familiar paradoxes in a new light: biopolitics, the politics of human life and reproduction. Around the world, people are taking control of childbearing in new ways, which could produce serious consequences for global politics. In Europe, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, women are having too few children to sustain the current population. A shrinking workforce means too few taxpayers to support the next generation of retirees. The only obvious solution is greatly expanded immigration–which, recall, is already the source of riots, xenophobia, and deep political anxiety. All this threatens a perfect political storm of bankrupt welfare states, struggles over immigration, and crises of national identity. Meanwhile, in India, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, a very different problem is growing. Abortion of female fetuses, along with other causes, has produced a population with roughly 100 million more men than women–men who are a prime constituency of extremist political movements in that volatile part of the world.

The demographic crises of globalization express a deep, troubling question. The crises emerge from hundreds of millions of free choices that earlier generations could not make: whether and when to bear children, and which children to bear. In other words, the two demographic crises express a dramatic new form of freedom, part of the unprecedented control people have gained over their lives in the several centuries of the liberal, modern experiment. The question is whether we have gained more freedom than we can handle. Liberal modernity is all about expanding human freedom, not so much in the mystic chords of George W. Bush’s foreign-policy speeches as in the expanding realm of personal choice. Communication and mobility make traditions optional, not mandatory–by moving, or just watching and listening and mimicking, people decide who they will be as never before in history. And, as ideas and desires expand, technology increases our power to make wishes come true: hopping around the world, meeting a partner from another continent, choosing the most promising of a dozen embryos or 3,000 sperm donors. None of this has to be forced on us; people run headlong toward every one of these new choices.

Technology, with the liberal international economy that ensures its rapid spread, has made all this possible. But technology doesn’t care whether you use it for an anti-landmine campaign or to wreck world climate and vaporize a neighboring country. It is as benign or destructive as the wishes it makes true. And free choice often turns out to be more choice than people want. Modern democracy is the great marketplace of easy answers to hard questions: nationalism, fundamentalism, and any other halfway believable story about how the world makes more sense than in fact it does. Critics of freedom and democracy have always argued that people are too selfish, frightened, and confused to bring these hopeful principles to life. The last several hundred years have been a test of the question, with mixed evidence–good results from North America and the last 60 years of European history, disasters in Europe between 1914 and 1945, and Russia, alas, showing that no system, from monarchy to authoritarianism to democracy, is guaranteed to work. Globalization takes the same question to a new scale.

Do the biopolitical crises of Europe and Asia suggest that globalization makes the pessimists’ argument? Is control over reproduction more freedom than we can handle, a kind of private selfishness that undermines politics and public institutions? Maybe. The answer will depend mostly on the intelligence and boldness of the political response. A pure laissez-faire approach to biopolitical problems might well mean a broken Europe, an inflamed Asia, and a failed globalization. On the other hand, a takeover of reproductive choices by the state might mean an even worse outcome, a return to the disastrous eugenic policies of twentieth-century totalitarianism. However, a political response that enhanced rather than cut back the personal freedom that drives the new biopolitics would make globalization fairer and more humane than it is now. And innovative financial arrangements could link the biopolitical fates of regions in a new model of an international and intergenerational bargain that would pave the way toward a governable globalization for mutual benefit.

The Biopolitical Atlas Three biopolitical regions are emerging in the twenty-first century. First is an axis of inequality, including India, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of nearby East and Central Asia, which now have approximately 105 men per 100 women, with ratios among younger cohorts running as high as 118:100. Second is an axis of decline, sweeping in almost all of Europe along with Japan and South Korea, where fertility rates–the average number of children born to an adult woman–are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 required for a stable population. In a third group of countries, fertility presently hangs around the replacement rate: the United States, major Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and even giant Indonesia are all somewhere in this band.

The Missing Women and Surplus Men What do people in modernizing cultures do when they take reproduction out of the realm of luck and nature and put it under self-conscious control? In much of Asia, the answer has turned out to be that they have sons. For those conditioned by U.S. abortion politics to think of reproductive choice as always and entirely pro-woman, this is a disconcerting irony. Even more troubling is that millions of individual reproductive choices produce a massive demographic distortion–scores of millions of men with no one to court, love, or marry.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen first drew attention to what he called “missing women” in 1990. Sen estimated a worldwide deficit of 100 million women relative to the natural distribution of sexes at birth. Although later research has adjusted his estimates modestly downward, the phenomenon has only accelerated. Official Chinese statistics now put the ratio of boys to girls under age six at 119:100. In India, the sex ratio at birth now approaches 114:100.

Observers have offered a number of competing explanations for Asia’s sex ratios, including poor official record-keeping (suggesting the numbers may be a mirage) and the biological tendency of both improved maternal nutrition and hepatitis B infection to increase the share of male fetuses surviving to term. None is nearly adequate to explain Asia’s dramatic numbers, however (in particular, the reported share of males has increased even as public statistics have improved and hepatitis B prevalence has fallen). And, in any case, although reliable figures are hard to come by, no one seriously disputes that sex-selective abortion and a bias toward sons in feeding and medical care contribute a great deal to Asia’s sex ratios. Increases in the share of young men in the population have come with diffusion of inexpensive techniques for prenatal sex-identification. While aborting fetuses based on sex has been illegal in India since 1994, enforcement relies mainly on voluntary reporting by prenatal clinics and is all but meaningless. The first criminal sentence handed out under the act was in March 2006, and there are presently 37 criminal actions in process in a country of more than one billion people. Indian ads for prenatal sex-determination (which are technically illegal under the same law) trumpet how much less the procedure costs than a daughter’s dowry–a clear reference to the motive of ensuring that a family has sons. A study in one hospital in India’s Punjab state found in the 1980s and 1990s that almost 14 percent of mothers of sons admitted having sexed their fetuses — with reticence that may suggest underreporting. The comparable figure for mothers of girls was 2 percent. Presumably, the rest of the female fetuses were aborted.

The preference for sons in Asia has several interwoven sources. One is the cultural esteem given boys, men, and the parents of boys in societies where women’s positions remain pervasively inferior. Another is economic: parents rely heavily on their children for retirement, and men’s lifetime earnings remain much higher than those of women. China’s one-child policy, which is strictly enforced in cities and often caps rural families at two children, intensifies both motives by raising the stakes of each birth. A daughter under those circumstances is not merely the first child, but the child.

Besides overwhelming sexual inequality, there is another problem with missing women: surplus men. For every absent 10 million women, there are 10 million men who will never marry and consequently will miss the main pathway to adult social integration. Unmarried men tend to unemployment, violent crime, and drug and alcohol abuse, and toward subcultures built around these. If they avoid these problems, they often swell the ranks of the army–a potential source of instability in politically volatile societies. Most significantly, single young men are the prime recruitment targets of extremist political movements, from Hindu nationalists to Islamist cells. Those movements give the shiftless something to do and, often, material support to do it. They give displaced and disrespected men recognition and status. Their ideologies, built around clashes of good and evil with their own cadres in the vanguard, insert an element of heroism into disappointing lives. Marches, riots, and even terrorism offer violent adventure to restless spirits. When a general in the military of the Palestinian Authority sketched the social profile of a suicide bomber for terrorism expert Jessica Stern, he described a surplus man: “He can’t find a job. He has no options and there is no social safety net to help him. … He has no girlfriend or fiancée … he has no money to go to the disco and pick up girls (even if that were acceptable). … Marriage is not an option–it’s expensive and he can’t even take care of his own family.”

The next few decades look to be particularly sensitive ones for the politics of the countries with the largest numbers of surplus men. Pakistan’s fragile authoritarian regime may or may not keep at bay Islamist forces that can expect to find their hardest men among the surplus males. While India’s nationalists have a mainstream face that substantially kept control during the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s recent time in power, they also encompass large paramilitaries and thug bands that have led genocidal riots against Muslims. Even in government, the BJP has sometimes pressed an illiberal and aggressive form of nationalism, hostile to Muslims at home and obsessed with standing up to Muslim Pakistan. Fast-growing and restive China is a political black box at present. No outside observer knows how the country’s political establishment will fare with its ideological cocktail of nationalism, residual socialist rhetoric–and that essential fortification, economic growth. An economic crash, an open clash among a political elite that has been remarkable for its unified public face, or a confrontation with Taiwan could inspire political appeal to popular nationalist sentiment: then the “bare branches,” as China calls its surplus males, could become a critical constituency.

Falling Fertility in the North What do people in developed countries do when they take conscious control of reproduction? In Europe and much of North Asia, they stop reproducing. Or, more exactly, they have so few children that the population, after centuries of fairly rapid expansion, stabilizes and begins to shrink. Italy’s fertility rate now stands at 1.28 children per woman, Germany’s at 1.32, and Japan’s at 1.33. Italy is typical of the Mediterranean countries–Spain comes in a bit lower at 1.27–while Germany’s neighbor Poland manages only 1.26. France and the Nordic countries are much more fertile, but still range between 1.64 (Sweden) and 1.87 (France).

Welfare states that depend on growing, or at least constant, populations are suddenly in serious jeopardy as relatively small numbers of current workers struggle to support their parents’ larger (and now longer-living) cohort in its retirement. This, too, is unsettling to people who learned to think about reproductive politics in the United States, where we tend to regard childbearing decisions as a matter of personal morality. When millions of individual choices produce demographic shifts with major consequences for public institutions, the personal becomes political in a way that the feminists who coined that slogan would hardly have imagined.

And this political crisis does begin with the personal. Europe’s declining fertility rates express changing priorities and ideas about the good life. Fertility has fallen as Europeans have put more emphasis on personal growth, the exploration of identity deep into adulthood, and nontraditional intimate relationships; fewer have chosen the traditional course of early marriage followed by childbearing. The wave of falling fertility has moved south in the last five decades, accompanying growing adherence to the “post-traditional” values that emphasize rich personal experience over customary roles and responsibilities. Even within countries, fertility is higher among traditionalists, lower among post-traditionalists. Reports from Japan suggest that an intense consumer culture and a cult of childhood have played a similar role there.

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