Emmanuel Todd's Latterday German Empire

Emmanuel Todd's specialty, as is well known, is demography, but he has at times applied his skills as demographer, and social scientist more generally, to geopolitics--sometimes with impressive results. Others, of course, had discussed the decline and fall of the Soviet Union before, in cases anticipating aspects of it, perhaps even more fundamental aspects of it, with striking accuracy. (None other than Leon Trotsky, following Stalin's triumph, envisioned the apparatchiks who made up the Soviet elite themselves dismantling Communism in preference of life as a capitalist elite instead out of pure and simple selfishness if they ever got the chance--which, in the view of many, is precisely what happened.) However, Todd's declaration in 1976's The Final Fall that the end was nigh, and that it would begin with a reform process intended to rescue the country's failing economy exposing it to centrifugal forces, after which first the Warsaw Pact satellites would tear themselves away, and then the republics of the Soviet Union itself--a process soon underway, and completed within fifteen years of the book's publication--anticipated so much that it is hard to deny significant insight. Subsequently Todd made another foray into the field with After the Empire, in which, if less obviously correct about the big picture, he nonetheless displayed significant insight (not least, into the false dawn of the New Economy and the bottoming out of the Russian collapse).

Since that time Todd has not produced any really equivalent books, his books tending to, when not turning to the deeper past (The Origin of Family Systems, Lineages of Modernity), stick closer to his demographic specialty, and to French domestic concerns (as with A Convergence of Civilizations and Who is Charlie?). Still, he seems to still be much interested in the topic, penning articles and giving interviews about it. We do not see him much in the English-speaking world's press (where foreign language skills are rare, foreign experts are given little time, and frankly Todd out of step with the neoliberal-neoconservative-identity politics ideology of the centrists who gatekeep the mainstream media, such that he now refuses to give interviews even to the media of his own country)--to the point that English-language Internet searches in my experience are much more likely to turn up Emmanuel Todd Lopez, or, if we take some pains to make clear we are not interested in emus, Emmanuel Macron (because our search engine simply ignores the "Todd"). The result, ironically, is that these days an English speaker is most likely to find Dr. Todd talking to Japanese publications putting out English-language editions, like Nikkei Asia or The Mainichi.

All the same, with a little effort one can find something of his more recent comment--with this going for the reversal of course since his 2003 book, Todd, who had been a critic of American hegemony then, becoming rather more worried by Germany's ascent, which he categorized as nothing short of imperial. Making his position clear in a round table discussion in one of his rare English-language appearances in Harper's (notably, way back in 2014), he offered a much more detailed explanation to Olivier Berruyer (again, in 2014).

Reading claims about some latterday German drive for empire I admittedly tend to be skeptical. One reason is Germany's demographic and economic limitations, not only relative to the rest of the world, but even the rest of the European Union--circa 2019, Germany having a population of 80 million inside a European bloc of 450 million, a GDP of under $4 trillion inside the EU's $16 trillion.

In answering that point Todd bases his case on Germany's being able to leverage the weight of its neighbors. Specifically, even if Germany amounts to between a fifth and a quarter of the population and output of the bloc Todd holds that the organization of the bloc extends German influence significantly. Critical to this is his claim about a vast area of effective German economic "sovereignty" broadly corresponding to the territory envisioned as a German empire in Europe by pre-World War I Pan-Germanists--Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria, plus territories inhabited by other German-speaking and Germanic populations--this includes besides Germany, Austria and several of its former imperial territories (Czechia, Slovenia, Croatia); non-EU Switzerland; the "Benelux" countries of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; and about the Baltic Sea, Sweden, Poland, and the three former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. (Todd divides these into two categories, the "German economic space" and the "Russophobic satellites," the latter category made up of the Baltic categories, but they are no less within the German economic zone than the others he identifies with the "German economic space," and classed separately because politically they show more independence, with for him the most significant such factor their attitude toward Russia.)

If one thinks of Germany's economic weight in terms of its dominance of a German economic space rather than of simply the nation-state of Germany then one has a bloc not of 80 million in population and $4 trillion in GDP, but of 200 million people and over $8 trillion in GDP (with, approaching the matter in another way, a manufacturing output in the vicinity of $1.4 trillion). Treating this large, highly developed and industrialized bloc as a single entity would make it the second largest of the advanced industrial powers by a long way, well ahead even of Japan--and starting to look like an at least potential superpower quite capable of being a significant actor on the world stage. Accounting for some half of the EU's population and wealth, it would be more consequential still because of its weight within the EU, potentially directing that body's diffuse but collectively great potential to its ends--with one reflection, and reinforcement, of that fact, the tendency of the governments of France (another 65 million people and another $3 trillion in GDP) to defer to Germany.

Of course, to say that this picture is plausible is not necessarily to say that it is accurate--and as with much else that Todd has argued over the years, even while I am not intrigued I am not necessarily convinced. But it suffices to make clear that simple measures of population and GDP may not fully capture Germany's potential as an "actor on the world stage."