The War of Numbers

Testing Todd's demographic defense hypothesis

When the first census was taken in 1870, the population of Kosovo was 60 percent Muslim and 40 percent Serb Orthodox. By 1999, Serbs were only 10 percent and Albanians 90 percent of the population. ‘These fertility differentials changed the relative sizes of the various populations,’ Todd notes, ‘a phenomenon that, as in Lebanon, played a role in the ou…