Les populations des Balkans depuis 1990 : aspects géographiques de la crise

Abstract

The demographic disaster of a great part of the Balkan, announced for a long time by the drop of the fertility, and sped by the postsocialist crisis, takes on a spatial dimension : beyond the opposition between areas of immigration (Greece, Slovenia) and those of emigration, the demographic exception of ethnic Albanian countries still remains, whereas the Danubian countries are struck in the same time by the shrinking fertility, the increasing mortality and migration. Ethnocultural exception or sign of underdevelopment ? Reservoir of men, how long? The Albanian countries are in the heart of the demographic and political question.On a local level, the emigration, hard to estimate, upsets the distribution of the settlement and the activities, emptying the less enregisadvanced rural areas of the people there maintained by the communist utopias of systematic development. The growth of the main cities is taking off, fed by the money of the emigrants, whereas in the opposite the weak people curl up on their village and plot of land. However sudden are these phenomena, they do not seem to arise from accidental, but from more general causes which are working since years in advanced countries like Greece, where the deep rural areas are developing again thanks to the reversing migration.

Keywords

• Balkan
• development level
• migrations
• regional oppositions