Europe’s Demographic Challenges as Determinants of Security

Abstract

The aim of this article is to assess the scale and nature of contemporary demographic trends that determine the security of Europe and identify the main threats to the continent’s military and non-military security resulting from them. This article constitutes an attempt to face a problem whose essence is associated with a key question: how are contemporary demographic trends in Europe shaping up, and on what security levels can we expect their implications? Population processes, which are the cumulative effects of the demographic phenomena that occurred in the near and distant past, run over the long term and are characterised by a low coefficient of uncertainty. Analyses of the UN and Eurostat demographic data show that Europe has seen an intensification and accumulation of negative demographic trends over recent decades. Demographic regression, as experienced by the Old Continent, is a multidimensional phenomenon which has numerous security implications and poses a threat to Europe’s socio-economic development.