Unsustainable Societies: The Failure of Familialism in East Asia's Compressed Modernity

Abstract

Gesellschaften ohne Nachhaltigkeit: Das Versagen des Familialis- mus in der komprimierten Moderne Ostasiens«. Fertility in some East Asian societies has declined to a new global low level, which can be called ultra-low fertility. The first question of this article is whether East Asia is going through a second demographic transition just like Europe. The second question is whether individualism is the cause of the change. The answer to the first ques- tion is both yes and no, because the demographic changes currently underway in East Asia have similarities to those in Europe and North America, but there are considerable differences in essence. Unlike Europe, where cohabitation is replacing marriage, marriage as an institution of duty and responsibility rather than intimacy is still intact in East Asia. Because of that, risk-aversive indi- vidualization occurred to avoid the burden of a family. It is not individualism but that is causing the current demographic and family changes in East Asia. Different degrees of compression of modernity created the varieties of familialism: familialist reform in Japan and liberal familialism in other societies. We may conclude that both types of have failed in con- structing a sustainable social system. In today's world, East Asia is the region most associated with very low fertil- ity. The latest total rates (TFR) for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singa- pore and Japan are 1.03 (2009), 1.06 (2008), 1.19 (2008), 1.28 (2008), 1.37 (2008) respectively. In the 1990s, Southern and German-speaking European countries recorded levels below 1.3, which was described as the low- est-low fertility (Kohler et al. 2002), but contemporary Asia has broken through that level. In the second demographic transition theory, lowered fertil- ity is hypothesized as being caused by individualism (Lesthaeghe 1991; van de Kaa 1987). The first question of this article is whether we can consider that East Asia is going through a second demographic transition, just like Europe. The second question is whether individualism is also the cause for the low in East Asia. In order to answer these questions, this paper uses two strategies. The first is to embed in the wider social context. By focusing on changes in mar-