Demographic Knowledge, ‘Race Suicide’ and the Making of Racial Jews in Interwar Europe

• Main Author: Sandrine Bertaux
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association pour la Recherche sur le Moyen-Orient 2013-12-01
• Series: European Journal of Turkish Studies
• Subjects: Bio-Politics; Demographic Knowledge; Population Theory; Security; Fascism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4848

This essay takes a critical stance on the category of demographic engineering. I regard demographic engineering as naturalizing the connection between population, territory and security eschewing both the modern edge of the concept of population and its power effect. My argument is that the connection between security and population that is underlying demographic engineering is not a ‘natural’ behavior of ‘populations’ but an artefact of demographic knowledge that can be traced back to interwar Europe when the population/security nexus was reformulated in the light of ‘race suicide,’ ‘depopulation’ and the making of racial Jews. Demographic engineering is a loaded category that obfuscates how demographic knowledge constitutes populations to make them available to political intervention it calls for as a necessity.