Abstract
The global society consists of more than seven billion of us humans. Human beings come in all shapes, sizes and colors. They are born individually and they die individually—with few exceptions such as multiple births and collective deaths. But any moment between birth and death is as diverse as life can be. Mostly life is lived in community with others—close and distant. But life is also lived vertically that is across generational stages defined by age, context and aspiration. Life is a matter of cycles and yet again each of them is different from any of us as individuals. When seen in the abstract, human life becomes demography. Demography is about the number of people in a given place, the age pyramid and the effects of age cohorts on the socio-economic development of a society. Demography generates interdependencies among societies and demographic trends are affected by actions or non-actions elsewhere. Demographic trends are highly political. Often, demographic analyses are linked to trends, assumptions of alleged path dependencies and the potential effects of demographic features on societies. But first and foremost, demography is not about projections and phantasies. Demography is about the foundation of the global society.
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- 1.
Rilke (2015) (original German 1923).
- 2.
United Nations Development Programme (2015).
- 3.
United Nations Population Fund (2015).
- 4.
OECD (2015).
- 5.
United Nations Population Fund (2015).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
United Nations Population Fund (2015, p. 17).
- 9.
See Jeong (2016).
- 10.
See Hasselbach (2016).
- 11.
See Richter (2016).
- 12.
World Food Program (2014).
- 13.
See Robles (2016).
- 14.
United Nations Population Fund, Migration, online at: http://www.unfpa.org/migration. Accessed January 31, 2017.
- 15.
See Scheen (2015).
- 16.
Flahaux and de Haas (2014).
- 17.
Minter (2011).
- 18.
Maiyegun (2014).
- 19.
Cameron (2011).
- 20.
Lopatka (2015).
- 21.
European Commission/Migration and Home Affairs, Visa policy, online at: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/borders-and-visas/visa-policy/index_en.htm. Accessed January 31, 2017.
- 22.
Marsilius of Padua (2005) (first edition 1324).
- 23.
See Gleason (1995).
- 24.
MacPherson (1962).
- 25.
- 26.
See the regular monitoring of the work of the EU institutions by Brammer et al. (eds.), Future of Europe Observer, online at: www.zei.de. Accessed January 31, 2017.
- 27.
See Desai (2009).
- 28.
- 29.
Huntington (1997) (first edition 1996).
- 30.
Ibid., p. 321.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 212.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 258.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 200.
- 34.
See Pew Research Center (2011).
- 35.
Hackett (2015).
- 36.
Huntington (1997, p. 265).
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Kermani (2015).
- 39.
El-Tayeb visited the German parliament in March 2016. The Egyptian-born political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad wrote an open letter to El-Tayeb, demanding answers for questions such as: Why he himself had received a death threat from a Professor of Al-Azhar 3 years ago without protest of the Grand Mufti? Why apostasy-fatwas from Al-Azhar led to the killing of critical Sudanese intellectuals in 1985 and a critical Egyptian intellectual in 1992? Why the Grand Mufti established two commissions in 2015, one to fight atheism in Egypt and the other to improve the image of Islam abroad instead of purifying Al-Azhar textbooks from demagoguery and hatred against Christians and Jews? See Abdel-Samad (2016). For the broader context see Ali (2015).
- 40.
Huntington (1997, p. 264).
- 41.
Kermani (2015).
- 42.
- 43.
Harris (2015).
- 44.
Financial Times (2015).
- 45.
Deutsche Welle (2015).
- 46.
Rudolph (2016).
- 47.
See Kühnhardt (1987).
- 48.
- 49.
- 50.
Pope Benedict XVI (2006).
- 51.
BBC (2015).
- 52.
- 53.
- 54.
- 55.
African Union, Constitutive Act, July 11, 2000, cited in: Kühnhardt (2010, p. 247).
- 56.
- 57.
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Kühnhardt, L. (2017). People and Peoples. In: The Global Society and Its Enemies. Global Power Shift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55904-9_5
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