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Abstract
The article elaborates the concept of demographization in light of the current revival of population-oriented agendas and demography as an important field of policy consultancy with special emphasis on Germany. It does so by referring to the Foucauldian concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, but also by exploring the limits of these concepts and by integrating them into an intersectional approach, emphasizing racist and classist selectivities and the genealogy of a Malthusian matrix. Moreover, the analysis elaborates a specific approach to reproductive relations as a biopolitical ‘hinge’. The article begins by exposing two empirical phases of demographization in Germany and then introduces the concept of demographization, distinguishing between different levels of critical analysis. Further on, a specific combination of purely quantitative and qualitative/selective rationales is presented as a Malthusian matrix and as central to understanding the processes of demographization. The following section addresses reproductive relations by combining the analysis of an individualizing governmentality of the reproductive self with the analysis of strategies of national-racist and classist exclusions at the biopolitical pole of population. Finally, the author explores how to apply the concept of demographization to transnational programmes of ‘population dynamics’ and anti-natalist policies in the Global South, and introduces further questions for theory development.
Notes on contributor
Susanne Schultz is a political scientist and researcher at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt/M., currenty working on a DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) project about the demographization of the political within family and migration policies in Germany. She did her PhD on a state theoretical approach to international population policies, women's health NGOs and processes of medicalization. She is active in feminist, internationalist and antiracist movements and at the Gene-ethics Network in Berlin. Her research interest are biopolitics, state theory, feminism, intersectionality, social movements in Latin America.
Notes
1 These and all other quotations from German in the text have been translated by the author.
2 See publications by the research network ‘Population Europe’ (www.population-europe.eu) and the population statistics of Eurostat.
3 See also other similar national examples, such as demographic catastrophism in Italian politics (Krause Citation2006). However, there are also examples in Europe which problematize a too-high population growth – for example the debate on ‘mass immigration’ and ‘overpopulation’ as an issue for two referenda in Switzerland, or David Cameron's concern about too-high population growth linked to immigration in the UK (Furedi Citation2007; http://www.express.co.uk, 26 November 2014).
4 There was certainly a continuity of a generation of population scientists, race anthropologists, statisticians, and economists who, after 1945, continued to conduct research into the German ‘national body’ and its enhancement in post-fascist Germany. However, they did not succeed in introducing explicit demographic aims into government programmes (Heim and Schaz Citation1996).
5 These arguments often referred to a United Nations Population Division paper which had calculated, on the basis of speculative long-term population projections, very high immigration rates if the age composition of the population were to remain stable (UN Citation2000).
6 The full title of the ministry is: Ministry for Family, Elderly, Women, and Youth.
7 See http://www.spdfraktion.de/sites/default/files/positionspapier_zur_einwanderung.pdf and http://www.cdu2017.de/einwanderung-zehn-thesen-zur-aktuellen-debatte/ (19 May 2015).
8 We find similar approaches in the international debate, even though the term itself is not used: e.g. Halfon Citation1997; Greenhalgh Citation2012.
9 Examples also include indicators and data on ‘foreigners’ or ‘people with a migration background’. These indicators are highly dependent on (always limited) policies of registration and on citizenship, migration, and asylum laws, and need to be adjusted whenever law reforms, border control procedures, and surveillance regimes change (Hummel Citation2000; Supik Citation2014).
10 The categorizing and reality-constituting effects of population statistics have been elaborated in science and technology studies (e.g. Hacking Citation1999; Holmberg, Bischof, and Bauer Citation2013). Without having the space here to develop the argument, this analysis unfolds its critical power towards power–knowledge relations when confronting dynamic social relations with the fixed categories of people in the sense of Karl Marx's concept of reification in Capital III.
11 Karl Brenke already questioned in 2010 important data underlying these arguments propagated by institutes and associations of the German industry and employers (Brenke Citation2010; see also Bingler and Bosbach Citation2014).
12 Another quite different biopolitical hinge is the government of individual migrants’ bodies and behaviours in order to regulate the national population as a whole. I cannot elaborate on this dimension here, but want to emphasize that governmentality has to be analysed quite differently in this case, based only secondarily on the liberal decision-making of individuals (this is certainly an issue when attracting highly skilled labour), but mainly on restrictive border regimes and migration policies directed to the pole of population. Moreover, the nation form permanently reproduces the status of migration as only an additional, secondary (although in Germany, recently highlighted) instrument of demographic policies.
13 The decisive and hierarchical difference between the privacy of the citizen as bourgeois and the privacy of the family often remains opaque in governmentality studies, but is important in order to integrate relations of reproduction as central for the genealogy of modern power relations (Pühl and Schultz Citation2001).
14 Very few politicians have explicitly addressed the correspondent conclusion that children from the less qualified and poorer groups of the population are not desired (e.g. quotes of Daniel Bahr and Renate Schmidt documented here: andreaskemper.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/klassismus-von-deutschen-politikern/). What has certainly been developing in the last decade has been a strong disciplinary discourse, ascribing an incapacity in terms of education, nutrition, or care to poorer families; however, this discourse has not, up until now, been explicitly linked to fertility and the demographic agenda within hegemonic government rationales.
15 Ulrich Bröckling (2005) introduces the term ‘vanishing point for lines of forces’ in order to avoid a hierarchical programmatic understanding of governmentality in the sense of government programmes.