However, Todd has also proven fairly wide off the mark on a number of important occasions, not least in his analysis of the "fall" of the American Empire. In that book he claimed that an ever more deindustrialized and debt- and bubble-reliant U.S. economy would all soon be revealed as an Enron-like house of cards, and lead to a downgrading of America's GNP by observers to compare with the downgrading of the Soviet GNP at the time of that country's collapse. Moreover, he predicted that the "American fall" he described--a matter of the country's means not only being recognized as smaller than advertised but America's having to "live within" those smaller means (no longer able to run its colossal trade deficits seemingly consequence-free)--was to be brought much nearer than would otherwise be the case not by American action, but by Europe's coming into its own. Todd specifically projected Europe coming to include Britain as a full-fledged member of the European project, and embracing Russia as well--the former bringing to the assembly its position as a global financial center, the latter its vast population, natural resources and military assets--with the result the end of European reliance on and subordination to the United States, and the end of the special privileges of "the dollar." Capping this off was Todd's prediction that the end of American predominance would mean the end of neoliberalism, with the world returning to a Keynesian economics that would facilitate growth and development around the world, while Europe's charting a course apart from American neoconservatism would conduce to stability and progress at home and abroad.
Of course, absolutely none of that happened. No such downgrading of the U.S. economy's weight ever occurred. Meanwhile, far from Britain and Russia entering the fold to make Europe the world's indisputable greatest power Britain exited the European Union entirely (with a closer relationship with the U.S. much on the minds of the advocates of that course) while, in sharp contrast with Todd's expectation, Europe and Russia grew apart rather than closer. And for what it is worth, European elites, whose connections with the U.S. were if anything affirmed by the 2007-2008 economic crisis (as Adam Tooze notes, it was a trans-Atlantic banking crisis, rather than an American banking crisis, and only the U.S. had the sheer scale to deliver the bailout), while European elites proved themselves second to none in their attraction to neoliberalism (even if their publics made the implementation of the program slower than they would have liked), and themselves fairly inclined to neoconservatism (displaying the same kind of interventionism from Mali to Syria and beyond)--and all that to such a degree that the English-language press stopped sneering and started praising the continent's governments.
All the same, even when wrong Todd made a sufficiently interesting case to leave us something to think about, rather more so than innumerable Public Intellectuals with infinitely higher profiles. And indeed, as someone who had at least occasionally got a good deal deal of mainstream notice I wondered why we did not hear of him more consistently. I initially supposed that this was a matter of Anglophone insularity, but it seemed he was not terribly present in the French press either--and was surprised to find an interview with him in Japan's Mainichi Shimbun in which he informed them that
he does not respond to interviews in France, where the media does not permit levelheaded debate. But because Japan is a safety zone for him, he continues, he does interviews for the Japanese media.I can't say that I'm terribly surprised by his assessment of the French media. However, I suspect that Japan's being a "safety zone" for him is more a function of the "hot buttons" he addresses at home having rather less emotive effect there, while a homegrown counterpart to Todd would probably find his country's media as inhospitable as Todd does France's.
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