Looking Back at Emmanuel Todd's Record of Prediction

Recently Pepe Escobar, alert to Emmanuel Todd's difficulties finding publishers and media opportunities in his native France, wrote of Todd's publication of his latest book there as a "small miracle." Perhaps this is an overstatement on Mr. Escobar's part, but it is definitely the case that the intellectual climate in that country is none too friendly to Todd these days, with the reviews of La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) beginning to appear looking all too predictably brutal. Exemplary is the piece by Florent Georgesco in Le Monde, who from his title forward appeals to cheap and stupid "What the hell do you know?"-type epistemological nihilism by mocking Emmanuel Todd as having since 1976 "exerce le métier de prophète" (exercised the profession of prophet") so that he can beat up on him by way of beating up on the pretensions of prophets generally (rather than judging Todd as a social scientist who, like any other social scientist, after studying the past and present, draws conclusions about what will happen on the basis of logical cause-and-effect reasoning from the facts).

Considering this rather shabby piece of "reviewing" I found myself looking back at the two books that, as Mssr. Georgesco acknowledges in the most sneering tones, made Todd's reputation, starting with The Final Fall. In that book Todd was not the first to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Todd did register that it was slipping into a phase of economic stagnation (evident in demographic data testifying to ultimately short-lived but nevertheless notable stresses) under an elite that had long ceased to truly take the official ideology seriously, leaving them a pack of self-seekers at the head of a troubled system; and that the increasing pressure for reform would compel liberalization that would open a space for centrifugal forces that would first tear away the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact satellites (a rich "periphery" to its poor "core," with all the untenability of the situation that implied), and then the non-Russian republics.

All of this actually did happen in this way in the years that followed, with the process running its course within fifteen years of the publication by Todd of his book. Because Todd did not simply say "The Soviet Union will be gone in fifteen years" but explained how and why this would happen in terms sufficiently precise that one can check them against the facts of the historical record--statistically evidentiated stagnation leading to a high-risk reform process leading to break-up in the sequence he stated (satellites first, non-Russian republics second)--it seems fair to, even if Todd did not cover every part of the story (one should not overlook the extent to which the Soviet Union's dissolution was a result of that self-seeking elite deciding that being capitalist oligarchs was better than being apparatchiks in a degenerated worker's state, and he did not deal with this here), credit Todd with having had a good deal of insight into the reality rather than merely "getting lucky" because events happened to broadly correspond to some vague claim on his part.

Todd's other principal work of "prophecy" is After the Empire--the success of which I think is rather more debatable. As I noted his vision of a U.S. "living beyond its means" losing its hegemonic position as a result of being forced to accommodate itself to its more limited power base after the dollar loses its privileged place in the international monetary order due to the rise of Europe (in which Britain's signing on with the European project and Europe reaching an accommodation with Russia would play their part) simply did not come to pass even two decades on (or, arguably, even begun to happen in an unambiguous way, such as may have been claimed for his Soviet prediction years before the Soviet bloc's collapse). Still, if events have not validated Todd's thesis, one can still say that at a time in which not only Americans but other Frenchmen spoke of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," question the dynamism and substance of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s,;and if the U.S. economy was not revealed as a collection of Enrons the way he thought possible, the tech boom proved blip rather than new normal, the growth of the U.S. slower and its economy increasingly open to charges of hollowness as deindustrialization and its ill effects became an increasing factor in the U.S.' domestic and international situation. And just as Todd was right about that, he was (even as many persons getting much more respect in the Western press continued to predict Russian collapse) right about Russia's decline having bottomed out about the turn of the century, with its military capacities again becoming a factor in international life. It seems fair, too, to acknowledge that Todd was right about the U.S. becoming less universalist and more differentialist in its domestic life as in its attitude toward the rest of the world--all as the country had ceased to meaningfully debate its problems many years earlier (Todd correctly identifying 1995 as that turning point, and rather properly calling out Paul Krugman as a "fake nonconformist").

All of this is far from nothing--and if it did not translate to the kind of dramatic, qualitative shift in the U.S. positon that Todd predicted, it did at least correspond to the U.S. facing a different (from a power standpoint, much less favorable) situation than the one fancied by theoreticians of a "unipolar moment" who had been far more fashionable at that time (even as one who disagrees with much that Todd has said over the years, and not least the arguments he makes in his latest), and like Todd's analysis it bespoke a fairly solid grasp on many important realities, rather more solid than that of many of his contemporaries--such that for all the book's limitations, After the Empire remains worth reading now, in a way that few books on international relations from 2002 about the international scene still are a near-quarter of a century after their first publication.