Toward a Post-Work World?

The idea of a "post-work" society--a society where persons generally have the option of a life not centered on work for wages as a condition of physical survival and membership in social life, and where they may actually take that option without harm to society or themselves--is by no means new, but interest in the idea has risen and declined in line with intellectual shifts, not least in the possibility of automating work tasks. About a decade ago, in the wake of the publication of the famous Frey-Osborne study (and the generally confused communication of that study's finding to the public), a surge of progress in the training of neural nets in pattern recognition, and spectacular promises about application of that progress in ways touching daily life (full self-driving by 2017!), a great many of those "experts" to whom the mainstream pays attention expressed expectations of a great wave of automation in the workplace.

Of course, the expectations proved overblown, and anyway, much else seems to have a higher place on the agenda now. Amid endless "supply chain" problems we are acutely conscious of how little automation there has actually been, and how remote progress remains in many areas. Still, the technical work proceeds--while it may be that other factors besides automation will play their part in producing a "post-work" situation.

There is, for example, the prospect of automation interacting with other technical possibilities, as with dramatic drops in the cost and material throughput of many essentials (of the kind that, for example, the RethinkX think tank argues are imminent in the areas of energy, food, transport and materials)--implying a sharp drop in the need for human labor (for instance, as we set about consuming precision fermentation-produced food, using Transportation-as-a-Serviceand living in printed houses).

Alongside the prospect of our being able to produce more with less human labor there is also the possibility that much of our "production" is simply irrational from an economic standpoint, and that it might be dispensed with by some sort of rationalization, whether emanating from the market (if technical or managerial developments made its uselessness too obvious or unaffordable, or makes it easier for business to cut it out), or from the political arena (where some now advocate a zero-growth, or "degrowth," economy, which would likely mean people working less--and such work an obvious place to make cuts, while it seems that we are looking at the emergence of a movement which is "antiwork" as such).

Moreover, were such a process to get going one could picture synergies swiftly accelerating it. (Certainly it has long seemed to me that much of our consumption is specifically required by our working lives--our academic credentialing, work clothes, transportation, day care, etc.. Stop working and one can consume that much less, which would in turn mean much less demand for many goods and thus people to produce them, etc., etc..)

Will such factors prove to be enough to make a post-work world happen any time soon? I have no idea. But I can say that where some equate the right to live with the misery of "alienated labor", and dread the prospect of "the lower orders" having the time and energy to think of anything but scraping together a living, I can very easily picture a post-work world being a far happier and saner one than the world in which we are living now.

Who is Penny Mordaunt?

Apparently few knew until recently, even in Britain. (We are told that some of those polled confused her with Adele--and that such confusion was evident even among her own constituents.)

I personally had to look her up when hearing about her being the first to declare herself in the post-Liz Truss leadership contest--maybe because I was having a "Simpson, eh?" moment, but maybe because I really had never had occasion to hear or read her name. To go by what I found there is ample reason for her obscurity--her record, at least, in spite of over twelve years in Parliament, several years in various Cabinet posts (including Secretary of State for Defence) and much else, not distinguished by significant initiatives, or significant stances, at least not in any very public way. Indeed, the little I did find on her was tabloid stuff--tabloid stuff of the sort all too often seen in the records of heads of government these days, not just in Britain but elsewhere.

Like the outgoing Prime Minister with her talk of cheese imports as a "disgrace" she seems to have made herself ridiculous with a speech about agricultural products (the transcript of which you may read at the web site of the "Mother of Parliaments" itself, this now part of official British history, as well as her principal contribution to British oratory to date).

Like a certain President of another country she is, apparently, a celebrity-obsessed, showbusiness-minded, reality TV show personality who grabbed attention at an early stage of the game by gratuitously inserting what one old dictionary I remember would call "slang term, usually vulgar" for "coitus" into a political speech (the same one about the agricultural products). Also as happened on that occasion the usage of said terms excited a great many small minds in the press, in part because it gave them a rare excuse to use such words in their copy (though, very much unlike in the other case, also because hearing Britain's "sexiest MP" speak a certain synonym for rooster probably appealed to many in . . . well, other ways).

Of such are heads of government made these days--but for the time being the oddsmakers appear to favor instead the "populist" billionaire who even at a less exalted point in his life bragged on camera that he had no working class friends and got his professional start working for Goldman Sachs, in what seems equally a sign of the times.*

* Sunak's personal fortune of some £730 million is not much short of a billion--so close as to make little difference--and as of just last year (with the pound hitting $1.38) would have made him a billionaire in U.S. dollar terms. At any rate his wife and father-in-law are each both safely accounted billionaires--which is more than can be said for many of those more commonly called billionaire (as Jeffrey Epstein was once supposed to be). So I feel comfortable calling Sunak a billionaire here.

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."

Of "Ossis" and "Chavs"

Reading again about the stereotypes West and East Germans still have of each other I find myself reminded not only of racist disdain for "unsuccessful" minorities told they have only their dysfunctional "cultures" to blame for their problems, but a case where similar attitudes are shown toward people undisputably of the same ethnicity as the dominant group--the "chavs" in Britain. Where the prejudice there is obviously one of class, the "Ossi-Wessi" talk gives the impression that it is one of region. Still, poverty in Germany is by no means exclusive to the territory of the former German Democratic Republic, or people whose families lived there (15 percent of the residents of western Germany are officially classed as poor, and these by no means all arrivals from the East), and the economic nature of the issue makes class inextricable from it.

The comparison with the attitude of the more privileged groups in Britain toward the working-class people they denigrate as "chavs" has me thinking of another aspect, evident there (and elsewhere)--the tendency of upper-class persons who pride themselves on their supposed "political correctness," "wokeness," etc. to think of racism and other socially backward views as a failing of "the lower orders," who have only themselves to blame for their problems, unlike their enlightened, "college-educated" social superiors. Thus from the start has there ever been a tendency to identify racism, fascism, etc. with eastern Germany. None of this is to deny that such tendencies do appear more pronounced in eastern Germany, not least because movements like these find it easiest to gain adherents among those who feel disenfranchised, who really do appear to be more numerous in that part of the country than in others. All the same, in talking about such attitudes as if they were exclusive to them there is an undeniable element of scapegoating--as well as an evasion of the question of why so many are left so vulnerable to such appeals in the first place.

What Ever Happened to the East German Armed Forces?

In the Die Hard sequel Die Hard With a Vengeance (that was film number three) a group of demobbed East German soldiers robbed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York--only to be stopped, of course, by John McClane and company. I suspect that comparatively few outside Germany have given much thought to the old East German army since that movie came out--at least, until this year, when there were plenty of headlines about Germany resupplying Ukrainian forces (and topping off the stocks of NATO forces using similar gear that also made contributions) out of its old stockpile.

For my part, I found myself wondering what happened to the army to which that stockpile had once belonged. As it happened the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were officially reunified when the two countries were--but the situation was untenable in many ways.

One was the question of the sheer size of the resulting establishment. Together the two armed forces' (the nearly half million man West German forces, the 140,000-person East German military) came to over 600,000 personnel. Impossible to justify in the post-Cold War context (for lack of need, as well as the associated budgetary pressure and the difficulty of getting enough recruits), the figure was also far above the 500,000 person limit generally thought to have been set by the Paris Accords in the 1950s. And it was that much more above the still lower ceiling established by the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany with the Allied Big Four (the U.S., Britain, France and, of course, the Soviet Union)—which was set at 370,000 personnel in all, and 345,000 in the land and air forces, versus the 540,000 in the two countries' combined air and ground forces.

The result was that simply to keep under that limit some 240,000 personnel--with these having to include 190,000 ground and air force personnel, more than were in the entire pre-reunification GDR military establishment--had to be retired simply to meet the country's international obligations.

In considering the inevitable, deep cuts, one should remember that from a plain and simple efficiency perspective it made less sense to try operating two militaries rather than just one, or make the investments required to create a single integrated, standardized military out of the two as it was being massively cut back, than to dispense with one entirely--with, given its larger size and integration with Germany's society and government and with the NATO alliance of which reunified Germany remained a member, the Bundeswehr the natural candidate for retention.

This was reinforced by the lack of incentive to retain much from the GDR armed forces. If they were by some lights the best-regarded of the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact forces, they brought no distinct capabilities such as a very well-armed West Germany lacked, and in fact were, even by non-Soviet WP standards, mostly equipped with older materiel--the Motor Rifle divisions reliant on T-55s, the air force on MiG-21s (hardly the thing to impress an army with Leopard 2s or an air force with Tornados), while the navy was even more thoroughly a coastal force than its West German counterpart. (It did not possess a single submarine--in contrast with the two dozen high-quality subs the West German navy used--while the 800-1,000 ton Butzow-class vessels that made up almost all of its "frigate" force were better describable as corvettes, and not even very modern ones at that, completely lacking missile armament.) Moreover East Germany did not bring with it much in the way of the military-industrial base for supporting those forces, relying heavily on imports to keep that war machinery going--compounding a logistical problem worrisome even before one considered just how much disarray the East European countries would be in economically in the '90s. (And of course, the low opinion Western analysts tended to have of all things Soviet at the time, compounded in early 1991 by the Gulf War, did not improve the case for holding on to the Volksarmee.)

Unsurprisingly the GDR military was in the end shut down, with the vast majority of its personnel retired (particularly the older and more senior of them) and its equipment mostly sold off--often to East European states still using the same stuff (many to this day), sometimes by other countries further off (with the Indonesian navy buying 39 East German craft in a particularly big sale, advertised as a third of the old fleet). As the resupply of Ukraine and other East European states shows not everything found other takers, even three decades on, but at least where Germany's own active-duty forces were concerned the only really significant retention would seem to have been two dozen MiG-29s, which were pretty well regarded at the time, and even if opinion toward them has soured since ("fourth generation engineering with third generation hardware" as one critic called it), still usable--and having an intrinsic interest as "aggressor aircraft," the more in as the West had so little access to examples of them at the time.

Still, logical as the Federal Republic's shutdown of the Volksarmee was from the standpoint of practical utility, there seems plenty of room for questioning the Federal Republic's handling of its human element, which calls to mind the attitude the West German government showed East Germany in the civilian sphere. Just as it let the East German economy and social services system collapse, and privatized the associated assets without regard for the attitudes of the population, the Federal Republic (in complete contempt of the idea that reunification was a matter of two Germanies being made one) classed the veterans of the Volksarmee "veterans of foreign armed forces." Thus the time they put in did not count toward their pensions, which meant practical hardship for many (especially as East German veterans had an especially tough time in the poor post-reunification economy's job market), while other aspects of that status brought numerous other irritations--as with their denial of the right to use their old rank as a professional title, in spite of the fact that, as has been pointed out, Nazi-era veterans, including SS veterans, were not subject to such treatment. There was, eventually, redress of the issue, but it was fairly late in coming--and I would imagine this worse than shabby treatment of the country's veterans was yet another contributing factor to the much-remarked ill feeling many East Germans had about their status and situation within post-reunification Germany.

Of "Ossis" and "Wessis"

I remember how in the years immediately after German reunification, even in the United States where we take so little interest in social reality inside our borders, never mind outside them, those who were at least somewhat attentive to international life still heard something of the ways in which residents of what had been "West Germany" and "East Germany" stereotyped each other, calling each other "Wessi" and "Ossi." (To cite one small example of how this kind of thing was known far beyond the world travelers and the academics the words were actually included in the glossary of terms at the end of Larry Bond's techno-thriller Cauldron, precisely because the scenes depicting the German army made some references to resentments between members of the two groups.)

I thought all this Wessi and Ossi talk was a "narcissism of small differences," and thought it would all pass soon enough--not least because East Germany's existence was so brief in historical terms (1949-1990), but also because there was a bullishness about Germany's prospects. In the early '90s after all, the reunified Germany, like Japan, was one of those countries that Americans anxious that their country was in decline thought likely to do better than they, economically and in other ways. And given the fact that the two groups were supposed to be countrymen finally living out a supposedly longed-for reunification it also seemed that there would be enough sharing out of the benefits to wipe away the stresses of reunification, encouraging the passage of such perceptions.

Certainly by the 2020s!

However, looking back from this 32nd anniversary of German reunification--after a lapse of time almost as long as the old East Germany's existence--one seems to still encounter talk of cultural differences between the two regions, of which one can get the strangest impressions. Recently reading a Berliner Zeitung (Berlin News) interview with social scientist Thomas Kliche in which he described, as a "Westerner," going "East" and researching life there, his tone, and his interviewer's, struck me as that not of a man moving to another part of his own country just four hundred miles away from where he was born, but one going to a thoroughly exotic foreign land, or investigating some extremely marginalized minority group deeply alien to his personal experience. (Think of a senior university professor of genteel WASP background investigating the African-American inner city. In the 1950s.) The impression was reinforced by how the stereotypes evoke racist attitudes seen elsewhere, holding the disenfranchised to suffer not from society's prejudices or other inequities but (in an age in which blatant biological racism is still unacceptable) their own dysfunctional "culture," leaving them unequipped to survive and thrive in a dynamic capitalist society where everyone else does just fine, thank you, very much--as well as what lies behind sentiments. This is, of course, the familiar disdain of the privileged for those less well-off than themselves, whom they hasten to insist are the cause of all their own problems which are nothing whatsoever to do with, and no cause for impinging upon, the comfort of said privileged (in this case, stiffened by anti-Communist clichès about authoritarian mind-sets and such).

Rounding out the image of a quasi-racial divide are the stereotypes coming from the other side, which are quite in line with the resentment the disenfranchised feel for those who are in some degree "privileged," especially insofar as they stand on their privilege. (The "individualism" attributed to the Wessi would seem to not be that of the strong character who does what they think is right and is not afraid to go their way alone if that understanding of what is right requires it, but rather the type of personality quick to ask "May I speak to the manager?"--"Wessi" easily sounding like German slang for "Karen.")

Just what is in back of all this? I suppose the most important factor is the way in which reunification happened. West Germany basically annexed East Germany--which then got the hardcore neoliberal treatment as a Soviet-style economy was suddenly put inside of one of the most dynamic capitalist states on Earth without preparation, support or protection and permitted to collapse; and the West German government privatized the old East German assets, not to locals but to rich and powerful West German interests in a manner perhaps not so very different from what the rest of the old Soviet bloc saw; with the result the demise of a great many firms, and massive lay-offs, all as the West German government dismantled the old system of public services and the social safety net.

Traumatic as it was for those who did poorly out of it it would not have mattered quite so much all these decades later were it not for the fact that Germany as a whole did not do so well as many thought it would. Reflecting the generally lousy track record for the world as a whole in the neoliberal epoch Germany's performance (in spite of the bright spot of its genuine manufacturing successes) has been dismal, especially if one shifts their attention from the deflator-based growth numbers generally cited by analysts (which are quite bad enough) to numbers calculated using the Consumer Price Index instead to adjust for inflation. These show Germany's late '90s experience as essentially one of collapse with per capita GDP falling by a third and, if there was recovery afterward to near the levels of the mid-'90s peak, yet another collapse following the Great Recession from which the country never recovered--all as, of course, neoliberal reform meant that much less protection for the poor as the rich got much richer.

One reflection of this is the enduring gap in incomes between East and West, which have equalized only very slowly. Going by the data from the European Union's Eurostat agency it seems that in 2017, before the pandemic and the associated succession of other disasters, in the five states that, East Berlin apart, comprised the territory of East Germany (Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia), per capita Gross Regional Product was about one-third less than it is in the rest of the country (just 68 percent of its level), while it was more like three-fifths of what it was in the richest of the large West German states, Bavaria (62 percent of the Bavarian figure)--which, to put into terms of the American states comparable in nominal income, is to say that the former East Germany is about on a level with America's poorest state of Mississippi, the West on average about that of Pennsylvania, and Bavaria, Texas.

Moreover, even this likely understates the severity of the situation because, in complete contradiction of the stereotypes about passive, immobile Ossis unwilling to move for the sake of taking a better job, the reality is that East Germans have consistently done just that from the start--so much so that the east is "depopulating" (and in the process, likely raising the income average as so many of the unemployed, etc. simply relocate). There is, too, the question of the gap between the less and more affluent inside East Germany itself, which may mean still bigger differences in the typical experience of Easterners and Westerners (especially when one recalls that those "left behind" are disproportionately persons less able to take care of themselves, like the elderly, as seen when one looks at the age gap between Germany's regions).

The result of this blend of economic instability, stagnation and widening inequality is that in Germany, as in so many other places, people simply never got over the 1990s--the era's experiences and influences of that era, its expectations and its betrayals lingering on three decades after.

The Politics of Keir Starmer--and What Might Happen if a General Election Was Indeed Called Now

With the resignation of Liz Truss there is talk of call of a general election.

My thought is that it is mostly talk since the governing party has ample opportunity to avoid one for more than two years in anything like the present situation, and, given public feeling toward it (bluntly put, extreme disgust with the recent turmoil evident at the top of the Conservative Party), expected to make the most of that opportunity.

Still, the possibility would seem to have increased the interest in the politics of opposition leader Keir Starmer (who has, of course, called for such an election).

Last year I published a working paper analyzing Keir Starmer's political rhetoric as a way of considering that matter, focusing on his February 2020 leadership contest pledges and his "New Chapter for Britain" speech one year later. My conclusion in it was that Starmer's contest pledges could safely be considered a solidly social democratic platform--while his speech one year later showed him, to put it mildly, less than stalwart in that stance. Before the year was out he declared himself ready to break those pledges for the sake of "electability" and then this year formally abandoned them altogether, while, in case there was any doubt left that he was in fact a centrist neoliberal New Labour Blairite pretending not to be one (because 2022 is a long way from 1997), he confirmed it amply at just about every opportunity since, down to his keynote speech at the party conference in Liverpool last month (my reading of which you can find here).

The result is that if there were an election in the very near term we would see a neoliberal-pretending-to-not-be-a-neoliberal New Labour-led party running against a Conservative Party whose fundamental neoliberalism endures in spite of its misunderstood populist poses--with, in centrist eyes, the Blairite looking like possibly the more competent custodian of a neoliberal economic regime (the more easily as the bar is set so low these days for competence in this as in any other sphere of political life). Popular feeling and elite support alike would likely converge in the return of Labour to government, with said Labour government fulfilling those expectations of a more competent neoliberal regime squarely prioritizing the needs of investors over those of working people (smaller budget deficits paid for by service cuts, etc.), and being applauded it for it by those centrists who so adore phrases like "adults in the room," as the voters who had actually expected "change" grumble about having been "fooled again.

How does that saying go again? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . ."

Another Day, Another Prime Ministerial Resignation: Liz Truss Resigns

As I write these words Elizabeth Truss is announcing her resignation from the Prime Ministership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the shortest tenure of anyone in that job in the history of that office.

I don't think anyone's shocked by the fact of the event given the fiscal-monetary train wreck of her government's budget.

But the point is that what we vaguely knew was coming has happened, which makes it not unfair to step back a moment from the multitude of little factoids, baseless speculations and trivial comments with which the media is constantly overwhelming everyone to try and relate this to the larger picture.

As things stand Ms. Truss is the country's fourth Prime Minister in the twelve-and-a-half years since the Conservatives ended New Labour's single patch in office since 1979 --while in the latter part of that period the occupant of 10 Downing Street will have changed three times (with Theresa May replaced by Boris Johnson replaced by Truss replaced by . . . Johnson again after departing the job a mere six weeks ago, if he has his way).

Personally when I bother discussing such matters my inclination is to focus on policy, not politics, with this certainly my emphasis when writing about the records of Thatcher and Blair. But of course one can go only so far in separating the two--not least because turmoil in politics tends to indicate a ship of state adrift on the high seas. Exemplary of the fact is that this turnover at 10 Downing Street has been nothing like since at least Suez crisis-era Britain (with Eden giving way to Macmillan--in this case, over and over and over again), with the same, we have been told, going for the fortunes of sterling.

Still, if Britain's drift captures the headlines today I can't think of a single major country that is not in pretty much the same sad state as internationally the quality of governance races to the bottom. Truly, looking at the "world leaders" of today it seems to me that had Mike Judd's Idiocracy contained an international summit scene the vast majority, at least, would not have been out of place in the scene--all as the mainstream media in every country, whose talking heads these days routinely make a Ron Burgundy look like a man of profundity and gravitas, go on playing their parts as courtiers to those holders of high office they treat like latterday Sun Kings. (Indeed, the word courtier seems the more appropriate given how suspect having so many changes of head of government without a general election can seem to anyone with the slightest regard for pretenses of democracy . . .)

All of these things are infinitely more worthy of being called "disgraces" than a country which happens to neighbor some of the most renowned cheese-making countries on Earth importing and consuming their fine products.

Revisiting Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire

Not long ago I wrote of the "unipolar moment" of the late '90s and a particular vision many geopolitical thinkers in the U.S. had during it of a New Economy America enjoying a quasi-permanent tech boom and in the process bounding above and beyond the rest of the world (ever more "the Michael Jordan of the world system," as Thomas Friedman had it). By contrast Russia and China, Europe and Japan, would wither into irrelevance, the former staying poor and maybe collapsing outright, the latter stagnant at best within the shackles of their outdated, insufficiently dynamic economic models. The result would be that the unipolar moment would be much, much more than a moment. (Indeed, George and Meredith Friedman in The Future of War spun visions of the American Century, rather than drawing to a close, opening out into an "American epoch.")

At the height of this euphoria Emmanuel Todd anticipated a very different outcome, perhaps not addressing every detail (not least in emphasizing the western end of Eurasia at the expense of the eastern), but still dealing with the fundamentals of the picture. In his book After the Empire he contended that far from continuing to race forward America's dynamism would actually prove to be an illusion; that far from Russia's decline proceeding all the way to the point of collapse the country's decline was bottoming out; and that the U.S. would find the EU very much a relevant actor, one that would not necessarily remain deferential.

On every one of these points Todd was correct, and the fact seems to me to testify to the essential robustness of his analysis--which on the whole was more impressive than that of the theorists of permanent unipolarity. Still, there were ways in which he overstated things that proved important. He did not merely anticipate that the New Economy hype would fall apart, but went so far as to, on the basis of scandals like Enron and Arthur Anderson, suggest that the U.S. economy was riddled with accounting fraud of the type in which they had been implicated--to the point of making "American GNP . . . resemble that of the former Soviet Union when it comes to treating the numbers," the exposure of which would lead to a major write-down of America's economic weight.

Of course, that never happened.

Todd's errors also extended to events in Europe. Certainly from the vantage point of 2022 he would seem to have been overoptimistic about Russian democratization (even if probably not to the extent of this by itself modifying his vision). And more significantly he was overoptimistic about the European Union, which he pictured drawing together with Russia (and perhaps Britain too) to create a super-powered European bloc whose mere existence would put an end to what he saw as a deindustrializing U.S. living beyond its means (largely, via the readiness of the rest of the world to let it run massive and growing trade deficits), and compel "imperial" retrenchment on the part of the United States (with, again, all this helped by the extent to which American weakness was telling).

Why did Todd get these parts of his scenario wrong? Looking back I think it worthwhile to remember that no one thought the U.S. could go on running the trade deficits it has for decades with so little apparent consequence to the acceptability of its currency, or its economic weight in the world--and that this has much to do with how thoroughly unprecedented the "creditism" of the twenty-first century has been, and its keeping a troubled economy superficially afloat through speculative fever and the sustenance of "zombie firms." (Indeed, Todd was far from being the only one picturing a big write-down of the U.S. economy--Eamonn Fingleton predicting exactly that before the end of the century in Blindsight, a book that had on its back cover the endorsement of none other than then-U.S. President Bill Clinton himself--before he started talking about putting Social Security tax revenue into the stock market.)

I think it worth remembering, too, the horrified response to those accounting scandals of the tech bubble era, which was so severe that a right-wing Republican administration passed Sarbanes-Oxley and appointed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman who actually took the job seriously. That mood did not last, of course--as demonstrated by Mr. Donaldson's short time as SEC chair, and his replacement by the far more accommodating Harvey Pitt--and I get the impression that mainstream (read: neoliberalism-cheerleading) opinion has since striven mightily to forget it ever happened. But it did exist at the time in which Todd was writing, amid which his prediction, if pessimistic, would not have seemed so implausible as it does now.

I cannot speak so well to his prediction about Russia--but again, it was not too important to Todd's vision, with Russia's human and natural resources, and military capacities, giving it sufficient value as a partner that its failings from a democratic or civil liberties perspective could be overlooked. More significant is his optimism about the European Union at the time, which I think reflected the moment in which he was writing yet again. Todd, whom it seems to me can be thought of as at least left-leaning in the classical sense (not the same as left, and certainly no Marxist, just left-leaning), like many others of similar inclination entertained certain hopes about the European Union as an at least somewhat progressive alternative to the neoliberal/neoconservative/identity politics-obsessed U.S.--more capable of long term-thinking and pragmatic compromise in the social and international spheres, "greener," less militaristic, etc.. Indeed, I remember Jeremy Rifkin then writing of "the European Dream" as against "the American Dream," and which Todd would seem to have shared.

Since that time all of this has been dashed--by the EU's brutal handling of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, Italy and elsewhere, by the institution's increasing militarism as it prosecuted wars in Libya, Mali and elsewhere--with Todd since characterizing the once "wonderful project" and "beautiful dream" of "many free, democratic, liberal, equal nations getting over the past and building a general European democracy," turned into "a monstrous hierarchy," with Germany reducing the EU to a "power zone"--a new German Empire. Indeed, he has since tended to wax emphatic about France's having more in common culturally with the English-speaking nations than its continental neighbor, and become a proponent of outright Euroskepticism. Asked if he expected Britain(whose joining the EU in After the Empire, by bringing its financial importance to the bloc, was the likely decisive last act in the story of American hegemony) was going to leave the EU he replied "Of course!"--and added in the same breath that "I, a . . . Frenchman, confronted with the disappearance of my nation’s autonomy, if I have to make a choice between German hegemony and American hegemony, I'll choose American hegemony without hesitating."

It is a stark turnaround from his earlier position indeed, underlining just how dead the "European Dream" now lies.

The Continued Remilitarization of Germany and Japan

In 2022 we have seen major announcements of vast increases in spending on defense by Germany and Japan. By and large the response from other advanced industrial countries, where the sorts of commentators who dominate the mainstream have for many years been calling for such a development, has been enthusiastic, even celebratory.

Considering the implications of all this recently I found myself thinking of how different the situation was three decades ago, when such developments were seen more anxiously--with German reunification panicking Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand to the point of secretly turning to Mikhail Gorbachev with pleas for him to stop the event, or provide them with reassurance against German power; and the way that Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara prompted alarm with his grandiose declarations in The Japan That Can Say No; and going even further than Ishihara, George Friedman and Meredith LeBard warned darkly of "the coming war with Japan," and freer still to indulge their speculations, writers in the then-popular military techno-thriller genre routinely envisioned scenarios in which the U.S. had to fight a remilitarized and aggressive Germany or Japan, as in works like Tom Clancy's 1994 bestseller Debt of Honor. (The second highest-selling U.S. novel of its year according to the Publisher's Weekly list, it depicted at great length and in great detail the kind of war that Friedman and LeBard discussed in only general fashion.)

Of course, the world has changed greatly since that time, and the more benign view of the development reflects that. Most obviously the Second World War has become a far more remote thing in many an imagination--and so have even the newer fears of the '90s, namely that the end of the Cold War would see the U.S.-led alliance and trading order give way to cutthroat neomercantilist competition. There is, too, the fact that fear of Russia and China overshadows any fear observers in the U.S. have of Germany or Japan. This would seem in part a matter of Russian recovery and China's rise, but one should also not forget the fact that Germany and Japan, in relative terms, are much less formidable than they appeared to be back in the '90s, enough so that in the circumstances they are expected to be not just partners, but fairly junior partners, in the balance of power, and that much less potentially threatening were the amity among them to give way to something else.