What Has Emmanuel Todd Been Up to Lately?

It has been some time since Emmanuel Todd's media presence has been this strong. The demographer, anthropologist and historian who produced The Final Fall and After the Empire, if not getting so much attention for his recent book on the war in Ukraine as one would expect from the reception to his past books (World War Three Has Already Begun was actually published in Japan, not France), and at least in the English-speaking world not getting more than that for Où en Sont-Elles?: Une Esquisse de l'Histoire des Femmes (recently published in English translation in Britain as Lineages of the Feminine, but apparently pretty much ignored by reviewers in the Anglosphere), is getting more notice for his latest--La Défaite de l'Occident (translatable as The Defeat of the West). Indeed, in his native France he has been making the rounds of the press, giving interviews to the newspapers Le Figaro, Le Point and Le Journal de Dimanche, the news magazine Marianne, and French radio (RMC) and television (TV5), with the contents of these interviews appearing in whole or in part translated into media outlets not only across the European continent (I have seen pieces from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Hungary, Greece), but beyond, from Azerbaijan to Vietnam (if, again, attracting very little notice in the English-speaking world thus far).

Todd has, in his discussions with his various interlocutors (and presumably in his book), continued to apply many of his established methods to recent events, and in the process extended old arguments. As was the case in After the Empire two decades ago, he argues for a United States whose power is overstated, as a result of a long (post-1965) decline in which deindustrialization under neoliberal policies has factored significantly, and the decay of its "soft" power with other countries amid changes in its values--with this given point by the country's involvement in conflicts abroad that bespeak both its policy elite's irrationality and its weakening practical military capacity; the rebound of a Russia supposedly on the verge of collapse, demographically and in other ways; and the prospect of Russia reaching an accommodation with Europe that, having suffered for following the U.S. in its path (in its own deindustrialization, for example), may assert itself newly as the United States weakens. In the course of making this argument Todd's remarks also seem consistent with his past work in premises, methodology and even his smaller conclusions, from his high stress on demographic data as an indicator of important social shifts, to the divergence between the U.S. and other countries in attitudes toward gender, to the decay of democracy in its old North Atlantic heartland as the U.S., Britain and France become more unequal and oligarchical. Indeed, this book much more recalls the Todd of twenty years ago than it does the Todd of ten years ago, when anxious about an increasingly powerful and dictatorial Germany's role in Europe he was prone to stress the community of values and interests between France and the Anglo-Saxon powers (the more in as it is specifically by way of such a Russo-German accommodation that there would be a Russo-European accommodation).

However, if much is familiar here (so much that some may be tempted to think Todd has simply refurbished old arguments), there is much that is different, and important. Todd, as one may have observed in his prior writing, has inclined to a view of modernity as being in crisis amid a collapse of fertility rates to below (often far below) replacement levels. (Indeed, it is with discussion of this crisis that he opens his prior Lineages of the Feminine.) And while he has been attentive to material factors here (in particular, criticizing neoliberalism as making it less and less possible for people with middle-class values and expectations to consider themselves in a position to properly bring up children), he also seems to think that there is as yet no solution precisely, and to have not just placed a greater stress than in his more geopolitically-oriented prior writing on gender, but a heavier one on religion (or at least, the traditional religious faith of the Western countries) than in the past. Indeed, Todd, for whom a major theme here is the state of Protestantism in those Western countries where it has long been the predominant religion (the U.S., Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries), has gone so far as to characterize his book as a "sequel" to Max Weber's classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism--dealing with the consequences of the "death" of Protestantism as Weber did with those of its rise. Where in Todd's view in these countries Protestantism had for decades been only a "zombie religion" (in which belief in the religion's theology passes but respect for its moral guidance and values endures) he sees it as having since gone over to the "zero" state in their societies (where respect for the morals and values also goes, the religion gone from undead to dead), and correlating this with their attitudes toward gender (specifically the acceptance of "same-sex marriage," and acceptance of transgenderism). While Todd is not nostalgic for a more religious past, and pointedly acknowledges what he sees as the less happy side of this religious inheritance whose passing may be viewed as positive (as with an inegalitarian outlook that contributed to extreme forms of bigotry), he also sees Protestantism's passing as having played its part in American/Western economic decline, specifically through American/Western esteem for education, work and community integration passing along with it. Todd also sees the shift of Protestantism from the zombie to the zero state as more broadly contributing to a "nihilistic" cultural stance he sees as evident in U.S. cultural attitudes and foreign policy (narcissistic, destructive). In Todd's analysis all these merge in the combination of military conflict with "culture war," in which Russia has translated its conservative position into considerable soft power, alongside its recovering material strength, which he regards as being bolstered by a wartime import-substitution program making it a more, not less, dynamic modernizer and technological power, testimony to which is Russia's appearing more successful than the West in keeping its side supplied with ammunition. (In explaining this Todd stresses Russia's relatively very high output of trained engineers, reflective of a Communist stress on education, and especially education of this kind, whose benefits Russia continues to reap as the U.S. no longer does the benefits of its own, past, ethic, in this area.)

Altogether Todd gives us a lot to consider here, more than I think I can respond to all of as yet. Still, I admit that I have always found "hard," material, explanations far more satisfying than "soft" ideal or cultural ones for phenomena such as economic rise and decline. The result is that while it certainly seems to me fair to speak of deindustrialization; and even date the beginnings of U.S. decline here to about 1965 as he does; it also seems to me that this has had less to do with the decline of values, or educational failures emanating from any source (the cry that the country's problems are due to a shortage of STEM skills is an old racket too often treated uncritically), and much more to do with the exhaustion of the potentials of the post-World War II arrangements for sustaining a growing world economy, after which economic performance became more troubled and the arrangements unraveled (as seen with the beginning of the end of American manufacturing's long expansion and of the gold standard), with, to little surprise given the state of politics in the U.S. (the predominance of a conservative center ever more prepared to move right than left, the virtual non-existence of a left in an American discourse alongside the existence of a very powerful, reactionary, right, etc.), the country shifting rightwards, and in the process producing the neoliberal model as we know it. And if there have been changes in values, or at least behavior, the direction of change ran the opposite way, with the economic model the cause rather than the byproduct, as the proponents of a shift in model that had no popular base legitimized and encouraged adaptation to that model’s terms--the rise of neoliberalism, rather than the decline of Protestantism, much more easily connected with the narcissism, etc. that Todd describes.

Moreover, one should remember that the cultural changes that Todd treats as representative of the West have actually been highly divisive and controversial within the West, and not least the U.S.. If one can attend to, for example, the widening acceptance of gay marriage, one can also consider how in the culture war-torn U.S. the formidable religious right achieved the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, and has an unprecedented champion in the current Speaker of the House, two facts which quite suffice to make it appear that reports of the death of Protestantism have been "greatly exaggerated." So does it also seem to go in the economic sphere, where "economic Calvinism" also appears alive and well--not least in the endurance of the pieties about education (all too evident in the student debt load weighing upon the country's young and not so young), and the socioeconomic aspirationalism to which it bespeaks with all its associated values, including a tolerance for extreme difference of outcome (and perhaps also admiration for wealth as testimony to virtue) greatly exceeding anything to be seen anywhere else in the developed world.

Meanwhile if Todd is quite right that Russia's government has endeavored to accelerate the country's industrialization (or re-industrialization) I have yet to see much evidence for success in this area thus far. Certainly Russia has been very successful in sustaining and elevating its ammunition production. But what about, for instance, the production of the trucks needed to carry the ammunition to the guns? More broadly, what about output in areas like the machine tools needed for the industrial work? What I have been able to find does not support the claims for much progress here to date. Meanwhile, I am far from persuaded that deindustrialization suffices to explain the shortcomings in Western material support for the Ukrainian government relative to Russia's ability to back its own effort. (Todd emphasizes the problem of comparing the West and Russia on the basis of Gross Domestic Product--but when I undertook an in-depth comparison going beyond GDP to manufacturing value added and its medium and high-tech content; the physical output of key goods in steel, vehicles and microchips; and the production, consumption, import and export of machine tools; I found that NATO, and in certain areas even just the U.S. or even Germany by itself, possesses an enormous advantage, often by orders of magnitude.) Todd is quite right that, certainly to go by the contents of Vladimir Putin's speeches, the Russian government has brought the gender politics Todd discusses into its presentation of the war in Ukraine as a campaign against Western hegemony, but one may doubt the extent to which this is actually translating to meaningful advantage for Russia internationally. (This may be all the more the case in that, as Todd himself notes, Russia itself falls short of offering a full "counter-model" to what critics of this kind may see as the lacks of Western modernity, not least in the recovery of fertility rates in Russia still leaving it below replacement level.)

Finally I find myself more dubious than in a long time about Todd's reading regarding a Europe possibly going its own way. Where circa 2003 some (naively) imagined Europe being willing and able to follow a different path from a neoliberal- neoconservative U.S., European elites have proven thoroughly neoliberal and neoconservative themselves--all as the European project seems to have lost all popular enthusiasm (as Todd himself has remarked), arguably because of that neoliberal-neoconservative course (and, if one heeds Todd's argument, the deeper cultural changes that also make for an affinity between European and American elites). Along with how integrated their material interests were and remain (as in what Adam Tooze identifies as a trans-Atlantic banking system, in which U.S. bailout was indispensable to Europe's weathering the crisis of 2007-, or Germany's burgeoning trade with the U.S. and the surpluses it produces for that country, which in the past decade overtook Japan's), it is hard to see what motive Europe has to go its own way--all while, as Todd himself argued, Germany's weight is inseparable from its connection with those countries he called its "Russophobic satellites" in the Baltic region, another barrier to such accommodation. The result is that, if Todd has once again offered bold claims supported by some interesting arguments (based on a good many hard facts many prefer to skip over, like Western deindustrialization, Russian military-industrial successes, etc.), I am skeptical that his fundamental scenario--of a world scene transformed by a declining U.S. as Europe links hands with a resurgent Russia--will be borne out by the events of today any more than they were by the events of the early twenty-first century.