Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung

Europäische Union / Europäische Integration

Demografischer Wandel und Machtverteilung in Europa. Entstehen durch die Bevölkerungsentwicklung in der Europäischen Union neue politische Konfliktlinien?

Ursula Münch / Harald Wilkoszewski

S. 533-551

Demographic change will drive politics in Europe for the next decades. After a long period of ignoring this fact, policy-makers now begin to realize the impact of changing population structures, consequently requesting more and more scientific information on these trends. Many of these studies pay a lot of attention to the policy-level, as low fertility and increasing longevity entail substantive demands on the design of future public policy in almost all European countries. While the focus of interest has been on the consequences of population aging in the fields of health, migration, and social security, remarkably little attention has been paid to the politics-level: However, demographic change makes European countries not only age but also does affect their population sizes; the majority of the European populations will shrink to a greater (e.g. Italy, Spain) or lesser extent (e.g. Germany). On the other hand, some countries will in fact grow in population size (e.g. France). The question is, whether these changes in population sizes are going to affect the institutional arrangements concerning the balance of power in the European Union (EU). In this paper, we first look investigate the influence of future demographic trends on the power structure within the Council of Ministers. We particularly focus on the issue of whether traditional cleavages between European countries such as bigger vs. smaller ones or Northern vs. Southern will be overlaid by new conflict lines and coalitions. For the historic analysis concerning the importance of demographic trends for the power structure we use a qualitative approach, i.e. basically text analysis of relevant official documents and related literature. For the demographic prognosis we use data from the UN 2002 Revision, which we slightly modify to obtain yearly population counts. Our findings show that due to the introduction of a demographic factor in the voting procedures of the Council of Ministers, changes in population size will directly affect the European power structure, and this not only concerning the relative power of single countries; demographic change will also have an impact on different country coalitions: for example, as almost all populations of the new EU member states will experience a population decline in the decades to come, their power as a possible coalition will shrink accordingly. Furthermore, an eventual EU accession of Turkey with its large and growing population would change the picture even more distinctly, leaving e.g. the net-receiver countries with a consistent blocking minority.

Zitiervorschlag für diesen Artikel:
Münch, Ursula/Wilkoszewski, Harald 2006: Demografischer Wandel und Machtverteilung in Europa. Entstehen durch die Bevölkerungsentwicklung in der Europäischen Union neue politische Konfliktlinien?, in: Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung (Hrsg.): Jahrbuch des Föderalismus 2006. Föderalismus, Subsidiarität und Regionen in Europa, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, S. 533-551.