Heinsohn's Theory: Countries with Young Populations Are More Violent

Brian Durrant - Tue 15 May, 2007

According to Heinsohn, when 15 to 29 year olds make up more than 30% of the population, violence tends to happen. The causes in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such youth bulges now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Last week a judge jailed five “cruel and ruthless”
Britons for life for plotting al-Qaeda inspired bomb attacks, targeting nightclubs, trains and shopping centres. Why do some people in our country want to blow up their fellow citizens - none of whom has ever done them any harm? In the search for an answer, one word is particularly popular, not least with the chattering
classes: alienation. It’s a blanket term. You can add practically anything you like to alienation - youth, race, poor schooling, poverty, unemployment, dislike of materialism, rejection of sexual mores - yet it still fails absolutely to explain why these people think it right to blow up other people.

What such individuals tend to have in common is a lack of real sympathy and an overriding sense of self pity. They have a constant feeling of envy, a sense of lost entitlement, without any recognition of their own responsibility for their predicament. Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, fits these criteria. He described his desire to blow up a plane purely in political terms, specifically “the foreign policy of the US which had resulted in the murder of thousands of Muslims”. Reid, a former mugger, was not born as a Muslim, and his parents weren’t Muslims, nor did he come from a Muslim community.
In prison, he converted to the most extreme form of Islam he could find. Reid in other words was violence in search of a cause not the other way round.

This analysis leads us to some depressing conclusions. If Israel decided overnight to withdraw from the “occupied territories”, it is doubtful that peace and harmony would break out. We had a taste of what would be more likely to happen last December. Gangland slayings in Gaza pitted the Islamist gunman of Hamas against the secular forces of Fatah. In one instance the three young sons of Fatah’s Chief Intelligence Officer were brutally murdered. The boys were travelling to their school in Gaza when gunmen riddled their car with more than 70 bullets. Similarly it more likely that once US and British troops withdraw from Iraq, there will be a bloodbath with Sunnis pitted against Shia. Israel “occupation” of Palestinian lands and the American invasion of Iraq may be grievances in the minds of terrorists, but underneath it’s violence in search of a grievance.

Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist from the University of Bremen, hammers home this point. In 2003 he published Sohne und Weltmacht (Sons and World Power- it’s not available in English), which has become something of a cult book. According to Heinsohn, when 15 to 29 year olds make up more than 30% of the population, violence tends to happen. The “causes” in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such “youth bulges” now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born in the developing world. A careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to the Taleban takeover in 1993, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14 million to 22 million. Iraq had
5 million people in 1950, but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter of a century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 0.45m to 3.3m, 47% of which are under 15.

If Gunnar Heinsohn is right, the Palestinian violence of recent years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, has lasted 30 years) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the
poorest) or humiliation. It’s just violence.

In youth bulge societies there are not enough positions to provide these young men with prestige and standing.
Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from non-youth bulge societies such as Western Europe, where the prospect of sending your own precious sons to war, is to many (including Tony Blair) unthinkable. Heinsohn’s theory accounts for the way that “idealistic” wars of liberation can shift imperceptibly into “pointless” civil wars as in Africa after decolonisation.

In the broader historical perspective, it helps explain how six fast-growing European nations gradually seized control of a large part of the known world after 1485 and why the fast-growing North American colonies revolted in the 1770’s using taxation as pretext.

This demographic perspective on world affairs can provide an insight in how the west should respond to challenges presented to it. Should the west just stand back for this wave of youth bulge violence to burn itself out? Is it better for the west to keep its nose out of other people’s business? Or should it try to steer the developing world through its demographic imbalance as humanely as possible? Whatever the answers, demographics give as a guide to trouble spots in the future.

There are 23 nations with populations over 20 million, where 30% are under 15 years of age. Of these, 12 are predominantly Muslim and in two additional instances, Sudan and Malaysia, the Muslim population is approximately half.
Based on Heinsohn’s theory, the powder keg that is the Muslim world is self evident.

However, there are also concerns about the demographics of the two most populous countries in the world, China and India. In the middle of the 19th Century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai was a no-go area for the Imperial armies. The area was controlled by Nian rebels, a 50,000 strong network of bandit groups, who lived by rape and pillage. The Nian bandits were men without women.

Today in both China and India there is a massive imbalance between the numbers of men and women. Peasant societies economically and culturally value boys. Wives go to live with men in their villages; it will be your son’s family that looks after you in your old age. In rural China there is no pension system for 800 million people, terror of old age with no carer or pension is rampant, accentuated by the one-child system. If your child is a girl, she will marry out and you face an old age in neglect. The incentive to abort or kill a baby girl and try for a boy is immense. According to a study at Brigham Young University there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men by 2020.

Given this acute woman shortage lower-class women are tending to marry further up the social scale. In India dowries are rising as the average income of marrying couples increases. Consequently an ever-growing pool of men is left behind. These young men are both poor and without the prospect of finding a wife. Not surprisingly crime and violence is on the increase.

In both China and India, there is a close correlation between the growth of violent crime and those cities and provinces where the sex ratio is most unbalanced. Uttar Pradesh and parts of the Punjab have the highest ratio of men to women and the highest levels of recorded crime.
Meanwhile in Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhao report that 90% of crime is committed by unmarried men.

At the moment these two countries are enjoying stellar economic growth but we know that societies with surpluses of young men are ripe for rebellion and internal strife.
Current rates of economic progress cannot be taken for granted. 

Regards
Brian Durrant
Editor, The Fleet Street Letter 
for The Daily Reckoning

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