Europe: getting older but seemingly no wiser

Citation

Blackman, C. (2002), "Europe: getting older but seemingly no wiser", Foresight, Vol. 4 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs.2002.27304caa.001

Europe: getting older but seemingly no wiser

Europe: getting older but seemingly no wiser

The ageing problem facing the world's advanced countries has been well known for many years. According to the UN, the number of people aged over 60 will more than treble by 2050 – from 600 million to two billion. In many developed countries, particularly in Europe, forecasts indicate that 25 years from now over half the population will be over 65 years of age. The fear is that with falling birth rates there will not be enough younger people of working age to provide the tax revenues needed to support the growing health care and pensions needs of a rapidly ageing population. Nevertheless, it is bizarre that this testimony to the success of improving health care and lifestyles should be considered "a problem".

In his article in this issue of foresight, however, Frank Shaw argues that there is no demographic time bomb and rather that the obsession with a global ageing crisis is contributing to genuine dangers by distracting us from finding solutions to the big problems of poverty, social inequality and oppression. Indeed, Shaw contends that the "problem of the elderly has been promoted in order to consolidate an anti-welfarist consensus in Anglo-American societies".

The reality is that the elderly are being gradually marginalized in society. Despite talk of increasing the retirement age, older people are finding it more and more difficult to find work. In the UK, for instance, a third of men aged between 50 and 65 are jobless. This is despite the fact that average working hours remain stubbornly high.

Shaw says that contemporary society is faced with a major dilemma:

On the one hand people are living longer and longer but at the same time society is less and less certain about what role it ought to assign to the elderly. The erosion of traditional communities and of family networks further adds to the difficulty of establishing a harmonious relationship between the elderly and the rest of society. In circumstances such as this, it is understandable that the experience of ageing has become "problematized". Very real moral and socio-economic issues have converged to place the question of the elderly on the agenda. Sadly, society cannot resist the temptation of evading these issues and is drawn towards recasting them as demographic crises facing society.

Europe faces a similar dilemma over immigration. Against the background of an ageing population and fewer people of working age, in the future Europe will need more immigrants – both skilled and unskilled. But there is growing discontent among Europe's "native" population and prejudice towards people of different ethnic origins. Political conflict and economic meltdown in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East have increased the flow of both political asylum seekers and economic migrants heading for Western Europe. September 11 has only served to increase feelings of mistrust towards Muslims among white Europeans. The belief that Europe's indigenous cultures are being swamped is growing. The view is becoming more widespread in many European countries that the growing number of immigrants are largely responsible for the significant rise in criminal behaviour, both petty street crime and more serious offences, often drug-related.

In the recent past, politicians on the centre/right of the political spectrum who talked about "bogus asylum seekers" were accused by left-leaning governments of "playing the race card". But governments across Europe are now paying the price for not getting to grips with issues raised by immigration and racism as voters have embraced populist far right political parties. For instance, French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen received nearly one-quarter of the vote in the presidential election, ousting socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. And in the general election in The Netherlands in May, the far-right Lijst Pim Fortuyn party won 26 of 150 seats following Pim Fortuyn's assassination. These are not isolated events: in the past 12 months left-leaning governments have fallen in Denmark, Portugal and Italy, with support increasing for populist far-right parties. Local elections and opinion polls in the UK show a similar trend.

Needless to say, the knee-jerk reaction of governments in power will be to move to the right, tightening immigration laws and fuelling racism. There are clearly real issues to do with asylum and immigration, and many of these issues need to be tackled on a European-wide basis. But what concerns me most is that rather than tackle the question of racial prejudice head on, Europe's governments will pander to the fascists. It would seem that the past is quickly forgotten.

Colin Blackman