SECURITY STUDIES AND EUROPEAN SOCIETY, pages: 167 - 179, 2019

Population aging. A demographic vulnerability for the societal security of the European Union

Rezumat: For centuries, important geopolitical, social-economic or scientific factors have contributed to the progress of European societies. An important effect of this progress was the improvement of the perspectives and the demographic context. The positive evolution of important demographic indicators, including population growth, urbanization, decreased mortality (including infant mortality), increased life expectancy, population mobility, etc. have contributed to Europe‟s success worldwide. Europe proved to be an important demographic source that allowed for the golden era of colonialism when the Christian-European civilization spread across the globe. However, the trends have changed in the meantime. If during the period of sharp increase in the birth rate in the years after the Second World War, the European population reached up to 22.8% of the world's population, Europe subsequently experienced a reduction down to zero of the population growth. Today, the European population represents only 9.6% of the world's population. In the current geopolitical and economic context, this tendency of population decline is an important demographic vulnerability of the European space, and particularly of the European Union. Not only the quantitative dynamics of the population is in decline. Its structure reflects more and more vulnerabilities that impose new public policies, including in the field of social protection, of social services. The increase of life expectancy in the last decades has not been corroborated with the maintenance or increase of the birth rate, so we are witnessing an increasingly visible phenomenon of population aging. These imbalances create strong pressures on the pension systems of EU member states. In this context, some states have chosen to progressively open their doors to the foreign workforce. The increasingly massive migration is a demographic phenomenon entailing several problems that require a delicate approach through the rethinking of public policies. Immigrant integration has proven to be toilsome and costly. Moreover, this increasingly raises issues related not only to societal security but also to national security. Methodologically, without analyzing the full range of demographic vulnerabilities that the European Union is facing, we intend to monitor the main demographic indicators that refer to the age group structure of the population of the 28 EU Member States. This paper aims to capture the phenomenon of population aging in Europe, with its various regional peculiarities. To carry out this analysis we propose to use the data provided by Eurostat for the last 10 years.