One of the most characteristic aspects of Syria on which most commentators both in the western and in the Arab world have wanted to indulge themselves since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War (sometimes with absolutely grotesque implications) was its demography, with particular emphasis on communitarian and sectarian aspects. Typically, most political commentators and commentators pseudo-analysts has approached the Syrian demographic problems with a considerable approximation, if not with a real dose of sadism, generally using the percentiles relating to the various communities that have always coexisted (and sometimes collide) in that country as improper tools in support of the "political necessity" that the fate of the country is marked by a division along ethno-religious-community lines of fracture, a process that should thus create numerous little stars. This approximate theory does not stand up to an in-depth look at the demographic history of Syria once correctly interpreted in a transition perspective. Before doing this though, you need to introduce a more general discussion to understand the importance of the demographic tool and the caution you need to use it.
For many, demography is little more than a colorless parade of numbers necessary from a statistical point of view but unable to interpret the complexity of society and, due to the slowness with which demographic phenomena evolve, not even too relevant for political or economic purposes , not to say election. For others, demographic events indicate the path that humanity is taking, symptoms of unsustainable growth or inexorable decline. Both constitute hasty visions that capture only the superficial aspects of demographic phenomena, isolated from their context. The demographic trend must in fact be interpreted on three different but connected floors.
- The first and most obvious is that "Macro". The set of individuals influences production and consumption, the allocation of resources, the relationship with the territory and the environmental impact.
- The second floor is that "Micro": demographic phenomena (births, deaths, marriages, divorces, migrations, etc.) are also the result of individual choices and behaviors, and as such they are a symptom of propensities, choices and life situations that have long-term consequences .
- The third floor, concerns the "quality" population: demographic phenomena are in fact fundamental components of what is called "human capital" in economics. For example: low mortality is synonymous with better health, while the ability to unite and reproduce, to aggregate and move, are consequences of both conditioning and free individual choices.
On closer inspection, the importance of demography in the economic field was effectively described by the English economist John Maynard Keynes in a 1937 speech to the Eugenics Society: “A growing population has an important influence on the demand for capital. Not only does the demand for capital increase, net of technical progress and improved living conditions, in rough proportion to the population. But as entrepreneurs' expectations are based more on the current situation than on the future, an era of growing population tends to promote optimism, given that demand will tend to exceed expectations, rather than disappoint them. But in an era of declining populations, the opposite occurs. Demand tends to disappoint expectations and an oversupply situation is difficult to correct, so an atmosphere of pessimism can be determined. The first effect of changing from a growing population to a declining one can be disastrous ". Reading these notes you understand how the decline of the population would have an effect comparable to that of deflation: a postponement of purchases by consumers, a consequent decline in investments by businesses, a subsidence of demand, arrest or reversal of the sign of growth.
For our purposes, however, we must add an additional element that, starting from demography, leads us to partially cross over into anthropology. As Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who lived in the fourth century BC, rightly noted, human beings are social animals and tend to translate the practices and values borrowed at the lowest level of the hierarchical scale of the organized community: the family at a political-state level. This point is of fundamental importance because it allows us to touch the fundamental pillar of our theory of comparative geopolitical analysis: the impact that family systems have on the organization and the 360 degree development of political entities both in a historical perspective and in today's and future development. Although this hypothesis of analysis may at first sight present an excessive degree of complexity, in-depth studies carried out in the French context have shown that, with the necessary approximation of the case, the organization at the micro level of human societies can be traced back to 8 family types :
-the community family exogames: the most widespread globally, present in China, northern India, Russia and in the territories of the ex-Soviet empire, in various areas of Europe, especially Eastern Europe and Cuba;
-the endogamous community family: widespread throughout the Middle Eastern and North African Islamic world;
-the asymmetric community family: typical of central and southern India;
-the authoritarian family: characteristic of Japan, the Korean peninsula and European countries with Germanic culture, but not only;
-the egalitarian nuclear family: prevalent in the Greek and Latin countries both on the European and American continents as well as in the area of the Ethiopian acrocoro;
-the absolute nuclear family: prevalent in Denmark, the Netherlands and all Anglo-Saxon white culture countries;
-lto anomina family: present in the Himalayan area, in Sri Lanka, in all the territories of Southeast Asia up to New Guinea and, in a residual form, among the indigenous peoples of Latin America, in particular in the Andean area;
-African systems: characteristic of the African continent below the Sahara with the notable exception of Ethiopia and the white population of South Africa.
The presence of different family systems greatly conditions both peoples and countries and contributes to shaping civilizations as well as political, philosophical, economic and social systems. It is no coincidence that the European continent (and in particular France and Italy), which is home to peoples characterized by as many as 4 of the aforementioned family types (exogamous community family, authoritarian family, egalitarian nuclear family and absolute nuclear family ) was the one who, in the last 2000 years of history, experienced the most intense liveliness from the point of view of human development in all fields. At the conclusion of this broad theoretical excursus, we will now proceed to test our analysis tool on Syria to understand what role demography played in the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War and how it ultimately conditioned its outcomes.
(teacher)
Photo: Giorgio Bianchi
