Country populations without the world wars

In pre-war rates, Australia should have hit 7.5m by about 1930 instead of the 6.5m IRL.

As a rough guesstimate of the impact of manpower losses, Australia sent 300,000 men over-seas. 60,000 died and of the rest none were discharged fit. This was 40% of the working age male population.

Lets assume in 1913, males are responsible for 80% of GDP.
  • 1913 Population = 4,820,172
  • About 2,410,086 are male
  • 750,000 working age male (based on 300k being 40%)
  • 690,000 survivors (50% with some form of disability/injury)
This suggests perhaps at least 8% less production for a generation on 1913 levels. Far more than the 1.2% of population loss suffered in the war. A 1% loss of population in war equates to a permanent loss of about 7% GDP per year for the next 30-40 years as that 1% is predominantly young males with an expected highly productive life in front of them. Perhaps by the same proportion, German losses of 2m men out of 68m Germans in 1913 would equate to a permanent loss of 13% of GDP from productive manpower.

The loss of males in war didn't impact breeding stock, females just bred with other males. The Spanish Flu did impact numbers of healthy young females - assume 4-5 million globally. The bigger impact is in women choosing to have 2, 3 or 4 children. In poor economic circumstances between the wars then this would put a crimp on the natural size of families.
 
It's good news for Canada, Australia, S Africa and NZ

According to AJP Taylor, in the four years immediately before WW1, GB lost more people by emigration than she did as war casualties in the four years of it. While the emigrants were not exclusively young men, they were mainly so, and no doubt female relatives would have followed later. So avoiding WW1 has only limited effect on Britain's own population, but much more on that of the Dominions.

What about Newfoundland? Could it remain as dominion instead firstly taken to under British control and then becoming province of Canada?
 
Europe probably gets OTL's number of immigrants due to labor needs even with higher birthrates, but due to a more nationalistic/xenophobic mentality expect them to be from latin america/china instead of the middle east or africa.
Latin America part is probably true for Spain. But most of Europe will probably get most immigration from Eastern Europe especially from the Russian Empire. Their population will be much higher and more traditional socially in Eastern Europe. Jews from the east might flood into countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Britain probably gets a lot of Eastern Europeans, Eastern European Jews, and Asians. France probably still gets a lot of Africans due to them either holding onto Africa longer or actually integrating parts of it. I could see Europeans especially the French and Italians preferring black non-Islamic Africans over Muslims since conflict between them and Muslims will be much higher due to both countries trying to settle parts of North Africa with Europeans. If Italian Libya and French Algeria get fully integrated into mainland Europe some Muslims are bond to come over to both countries naturally unless a segregation system is heavily enforced in the region. Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism will be a major issue for Italy and France at some point. Italy could get a lot of Greeks immigrants and possibly some from the Americas especially among the Italian diaspora populations. Italy will probably also get a good bit of Eastern Europeans and Jewish immigration too.
 
Latin America part is probably true for Spain. But most of Europe will probably get most immigration from Eastern Europe especially from the Russian Empire. Their population will be much higher and more traditional socially in Eastern Europe. Jews from the east might flood into countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Britain probably gets a lot of Eastern Europeans, Eastern European Jews, and Asians. France probably still gets a lot of Africans due to them either holding onto Africa longer or actually integrating parts of it. I could see Europeans especially the French and Italians preferring black non-Islamic Africans over Muslims since conflict between them and Muslims will be much higher due to both countries trying to settle parts of North Africa with Europeans. If Italian Libya and French Algeria get fully integrated into mainland Europe some Muslims are bond to come over to both countries naturally unless a segregation system is heavily enforced in the region. Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism will be a major issue for Italy and France at some point. Italy could get a lot of Greeks immigrants and possibly some from the Americas especially among the Italian diaspora populations. Italy will probably also get a good bit of Eastern Europeans and Jewish immigration too.

France - yes. France will never get a French Algeria, its too heavily populated. All French colonies have that problem, theyre all to heavily populated.

Italy can easily get upwards of 75% Italians in Lybia.
 
France - yes. France will never get a French Algeria, its too heavily populated. All French colonies have that problem, theyre all to heavily populated.

Italy can easily get upwards of 75% Italians in Lybia.
It will still be 30ish percent French at best which is probably enough to make it part of French proper. You could add a other 10 to 15 percent of Europeans by lenient immigration laws for the area. Algeria could also be flooded by Sub Saharan Africans when it is integrated and industrialized fully
 
It's good news for Canada, Australia, S Africa and NZ

According to AJP Taylor, in the four years immediately before WW1, GB lost more people by emigration than she did as war casualties in the four years of it. While the emigrants were not exclusively young men, they were mainly so, and no doubt female relatives would have followed later. So avoiding WW1 has only limited effect on Britain's own population, but much more on that of the Dominions.
Did South Africa lose a lot of its white population during the war? Wasn’t it over 20 percent before WW1?
 
Without the World Wars Europe would have been more prosperous and have thus experienced an earlier demographic transition. Without the disproportionate war-related losses of working age male population segments there would also not have arisen the necessity to import an ethno-socially distinct workforce to the same degree as IOTL, which would not only have reduced the direct influence on the population sizes but also on the total fertility rate. Without the World Wars a lot of ethnic Germans would also have stayed in those eastern European countries their ancestors had settled in. So the total German population might reasonably remain well below 100 millions.

It takes longer for peoples attitudes to change than it does for economic growth to occur. That is the whole reason for a demographic transitions are a thing. Archaic attitudes lag behind industrial development and there is a population boom. Germany's economic growth prior to WW1 was spectacular and it would be a question of not if but when it would overtake Britain. With a population of over 100 million consumers, Germany would be the economic juggernaut of the continent, even more so than today. On the other hand Germany was also the first welfare sate and its Socialist Party was growing every election with no signs of stopping. State welfare means people don't need to have kids since the main reason people used to have kids was so the kids could grow up, work, and provide for the parents when they got old because being elderly and not having any money sucks. But if the State provides for you instead of your children, then you don't need to have kids anymore. This is Demographic transition 101 and is why I think 150 million Germans is too high (within the 1914 borders of Germany) but less then 100 million strikes me as too low. There are ways Germany could encourage people to have kids, but there is no incentive or need to do so. France does have those needs and I would expect it to implement incentives regardless of a War. In fact I expect France to lead the rest of Europe on those kinds of policies.

Now the survival of Austria-Hungary always struck me as interesting because it was on the cusp of the mass urbanization stage of a demographic transition. The cities are going to absolutely explode in population as people from the countryside move to them. Within a generation or two the Empire is going to be more more urban than rural with a majority of the population living in the cities. This creates an interesting situation and IMO it it naive to assume Austria would inevitably fall apart. You will have a dozen ethnic groups living together. What will they be doing? What language would they use to speak to each other? The "core" of the Empire would shift from the various "nations" that it was composed of and instead move to the cities and the infrastructure connecting them. This situation strikes me as being survivable enough for Austria to last to the modern day.

Russia is in dire, dire, dire, need of land reform. It can sustain a humongous population but not with the economy it had or was on track of having. I doubt Nicolas II would be able to stomach such a reform though. It would be to radical for his Tsarist mentality despite how necessary it needs to be. So despite how much farmland Russia had, IMO it was due for another revolution. There is a reason the whole time period from 1905 to 1917 is lumped together by historians. The reforms needed for the survival of the regime were too radical for it so the regime is going to get the boot. No more Absolute Monarchy of the Tsars. Even if Russia avoids the famine and revolution though it isn't roses for them anyway.

Various people on this site have said in the past that Russia was heading into a middle-income trap and I happen to agree with them. The problem with MITs is that once your stuck in one it can take decades to get unstuck. I can imagine that TTL economists would have an entire wing to studying the Russian economy and the rights and wrongs of it. Even so, a capitalist Russia would still be a tremendous improvement over the Soviet Union and would have one of the largest economies in the world, it just can't match per capita consumption of the likes of Germany, the UK, or the USA.
 
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Europe probably gets OTL's number of immigrants due to labor needs even with higher birthrates, but due to a more nationalistic/xenophobic mentality expect them to be from latin america/china instead of the middle east or africa.
Why would Europeans prefer Chinese migrants to Arabs or Africans? There was lots of Yellow Peril anti-asian racism in the decades before WW1, Kaiser Wilhelm II described Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 as a "threat to the white race" and repeatedly called for European powers to partition and colonize China.

Most emigration is driven by imperial relationships due to a common language reducing labor market barriers. France was obsessed with spreading the French language around its colonies and the idea of making all its subjects believe in liberté, égalité, and fraternité, so nowadays it's easier for a young man from Mali or Senegal to head to France looking for a work than for someone from a similar age and walk of life from Ghana or Nigeria.

Japan has opened up its immigration laws recently, but the isolated nature of its language compared to French or English raises the costs of migrating to Japan.
 
Germany's immigration laws and migration history would look quite different from OTL. Without the iron curtain there would probably be more gastarbeiters from Poland and Ukraine than from Turkey, Italy, Tunisia, and Iberia.

A German government that needs to appease pan-Germanists and volkisch elements may decide to offer preferential treatment for German speakers from Transylvania, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States, and Volga Germans in Russia. The Bohemian lands were relatively developed so I doubt many Sudeten Germans would want to emigrate. It's also possible that Germany could institute an Israeli-style right of return law that offers citizenship to anyone who can offer proof of ethnic German industry.

If Germany still includes the territories it lost in WW1 I'd expect lots of colonization and Germanization schemes to continue for areas like the Polish Corridor, Alsace-Lorraine, and Schleswig. The Wilhelmine government's heavy handed policies alienated its Polish subjects for absolutely no reason, it would make things easier for Berlin to give Posen a devolved parliament or autonomous status like a Polish-speaking Quebec. Poles had a lot of leeway in governing Habsburg Galicia, and they were more loyal to Vienna than south slavs and Magyars.
 
Now the survival of Austria-Hungary always struck me as interesting because it was on the cusp of the mass urbanization stage of a demographic transition. The cities are going to absolutely explode in population as people from the countryside move to them. Within a generation or two the Empire is going to be more more urban than rural with a majority of the population living in the cities. This creates an interesting situation and IMO it it naive to assume Austria would inevitably fall apart. You will have a dozen ethnic groups living together. What will they be doing? What language would they use to speak to each other? The "core" of the Empire would shift from the various "nations" that it was composed of and instead move to the cities and the infrastructure connecting them. This situation strikes me as being survivable enough for Austria to last to the modern day.
The linguistic situation in the Habsburg lands would probably bifurcate between local languages for rural areas, and each nationality's provincial capital (assuming Magyar dominance ends and there is a Danubian federation of sorts), and a German speaking elite in cities like Vienna, Prague, Pressburg/Bratislava, Lemberg and Budapest. Two versions of German would develop in the same way that there is a native English dialect in parts of the EU like the UK and Ireland, but there is also an EU English spoken by L2 or L3 speakers in Brussels as a language of union-wide business and politics.

Jewish languages would vary widely across the Empire. In Austria and Bohemia most Jews lived in urban areas and became assimilated German-speakers, and there was a sizable migration of Ostjuden from Galicia and Bukovina that may have eventually assimilated to German as well. In 1908, the first international conference on Yiddish was held in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Yiddish was likely to become the major language of Jews in Galicia and Bukovina, and Yiddish could gain a new lease on life if there are also Bundist institutions to support it throughout Eastern Europe.

Pressburg/Bratislava seems like a good compromise location for a national institution's headquarters, its centrally located but not associated with one language like Vienna or Budapest. Austria-Hungary could end up distributing its branches of government among multiple capitals like South Africa, and complement a Viennese lower house of parliament with a a central Bank and/or judiciary in Pressburg and an upper house of provinces in Budapest.

The Habsburg lands could also end up with a version of the West Lothian question where autonomous status is gradually granted to each non-German speaking group, but the German-speakers of Austria and the Sudetenland lack a distinctive province or parliamentary representation of their own aside from the Imperial Parliament in Vienna.
Russia is in dire, dire, dire, need of land reform. It can sustain a humongous population but not with the economy it had or was on track of having. I doubt Nicolas II would be able to stomach such a reform though. It would be to radical for his Tsarist mentality despite how necessary it needs to be. So despite how much farmland Russia had, IMO it was due for another revolution. There is a reason the whole time period from 1905 to 1917 is lumped together by historians. The reforms needed for the survival of the regime were too radical for it so the regime is going to get the boot. No more Absolute Monarchy of the Tsars. Even if Russia avoids the famine and revolution though it isn't roses for them anyway.

Various people on this site have said in the past that Russia was heading into a middle-income trap and I happen to agree with them. The problem with MITs is that once your stuck in one it can take decades to get unstuck. I can imagine that TTL economists would have an entire wing to studying the Russian economy and the rights and wrongs of it. Even so, a capitalist Russia would still be a tremendous improvement over the Soviet Union and would have one of the largest economies in the world, it just can't match per capita consumption of the likes of Germany, the UK, or the USA.
All the industrial gains of the OTL USSR and more could have been accomplished without the steep human costs of Stalinism. A moderate (compared to the Bolsheviks) SR government that enacts land reform, a parliament with actual power, legal equality for Jews, and some kind of autonomy for nationalities is the most likely result of a revolution against the Czar.

Russia wouldn't necessarily end up in a middle income trap. Even if the SRs are committed to democracy, there's a chance they could hamper industrialization the way the Congress Party-ruled India stagnated under the License Raj. Russia could end up going through a long period of failed socialist development, followed by free market reforms between the '60s and '80s, or a move towards a more dirigiste system like Japan's MITI or post-WW2 France with state support for "national champions", export subsidies, joint venture requirements for foreign investors, and some tariffs or import quotas.
 
Without the two World Wars to cause massive anti-German sentiment in the States, large swathes of the American Midwest might remain visibly German, especially in terms of language. I can see that potentially leading to an increase of the region's ability to attract more German immigrants.
 
Without the two World Wars to cause massive anti-German sentiment in the States, large swathes of the American Midwest might remain visibly German, especially in terms of language. I can see that potentially leading to an increase of the region's ability to attract more German immigrants.
The same would be true in Australia, especially South Australia which had developed its own dialect around the Barossa Valley.
Gaelic may be stronger in Canada, as well, as it was suppressed during the second world war due to a perception that it was seditious.

I would very much expect Australia's population to be higher generally, but not as multicultural. It'd probably take longer for the White Australia policy to be eased enough to admit Southern and Eastern Europeans, and even longer for it to be abolished entirely without the horror of the Holocaust. There would also probably be a lot more white Australians in New Guinea, as most of the white population fled the Japanese in WWII and never returned. If there was a concerted enough effort to settle white people up there by Canberra, New Guinea might eventually be annexed either as a territory or a state. Papua, of course, would remain German.
A great deal depends on how decolonisation works out. Are we dealing with a bunch of Vietnam/Algeria quagmires? Largely peaceful but still kinda racist and refugee producing situations like in East Africa? Integration into the metropole like French Guiana? Weird ad-hoc arrangements like Gibralter or Bermuda? Failing apartheid states like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe?
The messier decolonisation is, the more young men die in wars, and the more refugees end up in the metropoles and settler colonies.
 
Problem is that the baby boom likely won't happen in any of the countries it affected without the world wars. It was mostly a phenomenom in those countriesinvolved in the war caused by a combination of adult post-trauma which usually causes family size increases and sharp economic growth again caused by the rebuilding after the war.
 
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