The defeat of the West
according to Emmanuel Todd
Emmanuel Todd is known for his controversial positions on woke ideology. According to him, it presents the signs of a decadent society that substitute its living values with social relativism. He distinguished himself in the 1970s with The Final Fall where he predicted the implosion of the USSR. In 2002 he predicted the American decline and the realignment of Europe towards Russia and China.
This book is published on the back of the Russo-Ukrainian contention. Still, its main subject Europe. Todd persists in forecasting the bankruptcy of the American hegemony. Still, he mentions the concept of “sustainable decadence” suggested by Douthat.
Main points
Russian stability: Russia is not according to him an autocracy, but an authoritarian democracy, in which the people vote for a firm leader. This need for state authority is linked to the Russian family structure where the father holds power over his sons. This is reproduced at the political level. Russia is stable because it has completed its demographic transition.
Ukrainian enigma. According to Todd, there are several Ukraines. Ukraine is mainly Russian-speaking, and Russian is the only language of high culture. Western Ukraine is a part that becomes more important as Russian speakers leave for Russia for better economic prospects. Family structures are less authoritarian, which means that Ukraine is more anarchic, and that the State was never able to check the power of oligarchs there, whereas Russian oligarchs have lost their power and are now billionaires without diplomatic immunity subject to policy control.
Eastern Europe, a postmodern Russophobia: Eastern Europe has become Russophobic due to Soviet domination, but it has as much reason historically to be wary of Germany. It is out of opportunism to obtain EU aid, economic integration with Germany and NATO's military aid that they affect such Russophobia.
What is the West? According to Rudyard Lynch, the West is a specific group to which only the Americans and the British belong (the French are catholic and non western). Steven Pinker tries to improve the image of the Enlightenment by explaining that it has its origin from Scottish and German thinkers, again, the French are ignored. John Darwin explains that the Russians in the 19th centuries were thinking themselves to be as Western as the Americans. According to Todd, US, UK and the French and Scandinavians are Western because of their nuclear family structure, while the Germans have an authoritarian family structure.
The assisted suicide of Europe: the Franco-German couple built Europe, it suicide demographically, with too low fertility, of the elites which turn to Washington. The end of Swiss banking secrecy would have greatly benefited the financial power of the United States, as they control the other tax havens. While Europe was distancing itself from the Bellicose United States during the 2nd Iraq War in 2003, it imploded as the Germans are unable to consult the French when their coalition government is so unstable that it is difficult for them to agree. A London-Warsaw-Kiev axis would therefore have replaced the Paris-Berlin axis.
Great Britain, towards the nation zero. The disintegration of religious belief has been progressive with an active stage in the victorian era followed by a zombie stage until the 1960s, where the institutions of marriage, burial are respected. New practices such as cremation rather than burial, divorce and marriage forAll are markers of the zero level of religion. The English elites considered the proles as naturally inferior than the elites, and the elites fear more the common man than foreigners. We see in particular Pakistanis and blacks obtain high-ranking positions in government, where they are over-represented.
Scandinavia: from feminism to bellicism. Norway is an enthusiastic member of NATO. Denmark helps NSA spy on European leaders. Sweden would have joined NATO out of mimetism, to keep the leading role that its larger population gives it over Denmark and Norway. Women in power would be bellicists to show that they can replace men in this area.
True nature of America: oligarchy and nihilism. The will of the people is no longer represented. America is a liberal oligarchy. Unlike the UK, America was traditionally racist and considered the whites to be equal and the Indians and the blacks as inferior. From the 1960s, this racism disappeared and the condition of white American workers deteriorated through deindustrialization. This ends up with an atomized society, with mass shootings in schools and opioid problems. The WOKE fight for the transgender goes further than the rights of homosexuals, it denies reality to spite the conservative enemy and protest its belonging to the woke in-group.
Deflating the American economy. Health represents 17% of spending in the United States while mortality is high. This corresponds to a real health expense of 40% of this amount. If we apply the same coefficient to services while primary and secondary production are assigned to a coefficient 1, the GDP would be assessed at $40,000/hab. Doctors and and lawyers are predators to the american middle-class, prescribing opioids and enabling them to sue one-another. The once proud and most productive industrial nation in the world has become a hyper-violent society. Its people have become a parasitic plebe consuming entertainment and products made in China. Even its agriculture is going towards an annual deficit.
The Washington Clique: since Obama’s time, the Blob designates foreign business staff. This neo-cons elite is small but seems ignorant, misguided and inept. Todd quotes Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Jack Sullivan as typical examples. Note that Blinken and Nuland have Jewish parents from the former USSR. Would they have chosen to punish Ukrainians?
Why the rest of the world has chosen Russia. Globalization looked like a colonization 2.0 to many. The blindness of the West when they claims to judge what is morally right is obvious since Ukraine or Gaza. The Chinese government knows that it is the next to be targeted. The sanctions against the Russian economic elites have scared the elites of other countries in the world.
Conclusions
Unlike the imposing decline of the West composed by Oswald Spengler since 1905 and published at the end of the 1ʳᵉ World War, Todd's work has the advantage of being a trove of factual data, including an insolent review of American GDP.
The book studies the societies that Todd knows best: Europe and the US, but hardly touches here on the situation in China or in the countries of the Middle East.
His 2002 book had even more complete global coverage. It predicted the Arab Spring. That previous book prediction concerning Europe did come to be as it did not realign itself to China and Russia.
References
David Teutrie - Russie, retour de la puissance
Tatiana Kastoueva-Jean - La souveraineté nationale dans la vision russe
Mearsheimer - The great delusion
Aristote - Politique
Todd - Apres l'empire - La chute finale - la troisieme planete - ou en sont-elles? - apres la democratie - L'invention de l'Europe
Adam Ferguson - History of Civil Society
thanks to insights of Olivier Berruyer on french media and Jacques Sapir on russia's economy
James K Galbraith 0 The gift of sanctions
Shlapentokh - Freedom Repression and Private Property
Alexandre Latsa - Dissonance, journal d'un frussien
Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu - L'empire des tsars et les russes
Margaret Mead - Soviet attitude towards authority
Geoffrey Gorer John Rickman - The people of Great Russia
Dinko Tomasik - The impact of russian culture on soviet communism
Culture and World view: a method of analysis applied to rural russia
Edward Banfield - The moral basis of a backward society
Bertram Shaffner - Fatherland, a study of authoritarianism in the german family
Ruth Benedict - le chrysantheme et le sabre
"George Kennan's love of russia inspired his containment strategy"
WW Rostow - les etapes de la croissance economique
Emma Lambertin - lessons from Ukraine: shifting international surrogacy policy
Oliver Radkey - the election to the all russian constituant assembly
Anderd Aslund - Ukraine. What went wrong and how to fix it
Mark tolts - A half century of jewish emigration from the former soviet union
James Benett - The anglosphere challenge
Max Weber - la ville - ethique protestante et esprit du capitalisme
Ivan Berend - Decades of Crisis. Central and easter Europe before WWII
David Schoenbaum - la revolution brune
Paul Lendvai - l'antisemitisme sans juifs
Christopher Lasch - la revolte des elites et la trahison de la democratie
Michael lind - the next american nation - the new class war
Joel kotkin - the new class conflict
Colin Couch - post democracy
David Goodhart - les deux clans. la nouvelle fracture mondiale
David Skelton - the new snobbery
Christophe Guilly - la France peripherique
Luc Rouban - la democratie representative est-elle en crise?
Jerome Fourquet - l'archipel francais
Oliver Nachtwey - Die Abstieggeselschaft. Uber das Aufgeben in der regressiven Moderne - Germany's hidden crisis
Peter Mair - Ruling the void
Nicholas Mulder - The economic Weapon
Jacques Bainville - les consequences politiques de la paix
OCDE - Is the German middle-class crumbling?
Brzezinsky - le grand echiquier
Oliver Bulough - moneyland - butler to the world
Gabriel Zucman - la richesse cachee des nations
Glenn Greenwal - no place to hide
Linda Colley - Brittons
Kwarteng, Patel, Truss - Brittania unchained
David Edgerton - the rise and fall of the british nation
KDM Snell et Paul Ell - Rival Jerusalems, The geography of victorian religion
Hugh McLeod - Religion and the people of western Europe
Calum Brown - Death of Christian Britain
Boyd Hilton - The age of atonement
Francis Green David Kynaston - Engines of Privilege
Mike Savage - Social class in the 21st century
Kathryne Simpson - Tabloid Tales. How the british tabloid press shaped the brexit vote
Deborah Mattinson - Beyond the red wall. Why labour lost, how the conservatives won and what will happen
Owen Jones - Chavs. The demonisation of the working class
Matthew Goodwin - Vales, voice and virtue
James Flynn et Michel Shayer - Decline and Piaget. Does the rot start at the top?
Ronald Inglehart - Cultural Evolution
Ross Douthat - the decadent society
Hermann Rauschning - la revolution du nihilisme
leo strauss - nihilisme et politique
Anne Case Angus Deaton - Death of despair
Robert Putnam David Campbell - American Grace
C Wright Mills - the power elite
John Rawls - Theory of Justice
Saez Zucman - le triomphe de l'injustice
Ross Douthat - bad religion
Nicholas Lemann - the big test. the secret history of the american meritocracy
Babcock et mindy marks - the falling time cost of college
Dworack Revelle Condon - looking for flynn effects in a recent online US adult sample
Jerome Karabel - the chosen
Daniel Markowits - the meritocracy trap
Charap Priebe - avoiding a long war
michael Brenes - privatization and the hollowing out of the US defense industry
mark whetherington - american agriculture
will snell - US agriculture flirting with an annual trade deficit
Michael Sandel - the tyranny of merit
Farrar Strauss Giroux - After the ivory tower falls
Ann Pettifor - the production of money
Jacob Savage - the vanishing
Eric Kaufman - the rise and fall of anglo-america
Stephen Walt - the hell of good intentions
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt - le lobby pro-israelien et la politique etrangere americaine
Robert Kagan - Of paradise and power
Robert Kagan - The jungle grows back
Christopher Larsch - the culture of narcissism
John Hobson - Imperialism
HG Wells - the time machine
Engels - la situation de la classe ouvriere anglaise en 1844
Lenine - imperialisme, phase ultime du capitalisme
Joy Gordon - invisible war
Francis Fukuyama - la fin de l'histoire et le dernier homme
Paola Giuliano et Nathan Nunn - ancestral characteristics of modern populations
Andrei Tsygankov - the dark double
Hans Kundnani - the paradox of german power
Piere Melandri - americans first : la geopolitique de l'administration Biden