Suchergebnisse

AbstractWe use monthly birth data collected by the Human Fertility Database to analyze the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on birth trends until September 2022 in 38 higher‐income countries. We also present estimates of the monthly total fertility rate adjusted for seasonality. Our analysis reveals that the pandemic led to distinct swings in births and fertility rates. The initial pandemic shock was associated with a fall in births in most countries, with the sharpest drop in January 2021. Next, birth rates showed a short‐term recovery in March 2021, following the conceptions after the end of the first wave of the pandemic. Most countries reported a stable or slightly increasing number of births in the subsequent months, especially in autumn 2021. Yet another, quite unexpected, downturn in births started in January 2022, linked with the conceptions in spring 2021 when the pandemic measures were mostly eased out and vaccination was gaining momentum. Taken together and contrary to some initial expectations, the coronavirus pandemic did not bring a lasting "baby bust" in most of the analyzed countries. Especially the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States experienced an improvement in their birth dynamics in 2021 compared with the prepandemic period.

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of "antimodernism". In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authors also formulated alternative visions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies that focused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism—in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in an antimodernist key