I suppose that, certainly within the lifetimes of those living on this planet today, there has not been a period when people did not feel that modern life was precarious. Still, while modern war; viral epidemic; economic calamity; ecological catastrophe; are not novel concerns it has been rare that any of them have been felt so keenly as we feel them now, let alone feel all of them so keenly at the same time as the U.S. President himself draws comparisons between the present moment and the Cuban Missile Crisis; as we continue grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic; as decades of creditism and speculation and the disruptions of war and disease come to a head in a historic burst of price inflation; as anthropogenic global warming proceeds virtually without serious governmental efforts at curbing emissions or offsetting or mitigating their effects.
Amid all that speculating about what tomorrow might bring--to say nothing of the harder business of making forecasts--seems even chancier than before, so much so that to speculate about the littler things of life underlain by the big things--to speculate, for instance, about how nice self-driving cars might be as we dread the escalation of perhaps the most dangerous international crisis in human history--can seem pointless or trivial to the point of being an embarrassment. Still, the problems of everyday life remain with us--and will remain in the absence of the worst, as we can only hope they will.
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Friday, October 28, 2022
How Does Britain Stand as a Manufacturing Power Among the Group of Seven Advanced Industrial Nations ?
The result is that among the original G-7 Britain has slipped from the second to the sixth place in aggregate output, ahead only of Canada ($256 billion to $170 billion), which has a population not much more than half Britain's size (37 million to Britain's 67 million), while in terms of per capita output it is at number seven ($3800)--and if we were to give South Korea a seat at the table Britain would drop out of the seven and end up in eighth place, with just half the U.S. level of per capita output ($7100), and well under half the per capita output of Germany ($9600), South Korea ($9000) and Japan ($8200) in the aforementioned year.
One can easily picture China closing the gap before the end of the decade, even were its growth to continue slowing--while if one takes the common view that China's currency has been undervalued, and Britain's overvalued, it may even be the case that China has already done so.
* Paul Bairoch's figures have Britain, circa 1953, if only about three-quarters as big a producer as the Soviet Union, three times as industrialized in per capita terms--and about one-and-a-half times as industrialized as Germany.
A Choice of Conservatisms?
A decade ago considering Kevin Phillips' version of the argument that American electoral patterns follow a decades-long cycle it seemed to me that rather than an alternation between right and left what we tended to have was an alternation between different versions of the right--one more elitist, the other more populist. The 1932-1968 cycle seemed to me an exception which I attributed to the special circumstances of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, with the left a factor.
Reviewing the political history I have rethought that somewhat. Certainly there is no question that there was a shift of the center leftward during that period. Still, it seems to me a mistake to think of New Deal/Cold War liberalism as "left." Rather it was centrism--which is to say, conservatism again (in its assumptions about human beings and society, its pessimism about and hostility to radical change, etc.), but of that form of conservatism which is prepared to make compromises to preserve the deeper structure of society rather than simply dig in its heels in the face of pressures for change. It looked like the left because in American life the bar for what counts as compromise, and as leftishness, is set very low. (For all the talk of big government in the U.S. the role of government in the economy, the expansion of the welfare state, etc. never went anywhere near so far as in Europe, while even at its most radical-seeming anti-capitalism and socialism never became part of the mainstream. The 1960s, for instance, saw a "War on Poverty" without reference to capitalism or class as such, while that "War" was scarcely begun before it was stopped. Right-wingers sneered about "anti-anti-Communists" more than they did Communists, at least when not hurling the term about as a hyperbolic epithet. And so forth.)
The result is that even in that liberal heyday between the 1930s and 1960s American politics, as before and after, remained a choice of forms of conservatism, but with, reflecting the political pressures of the day and the arguable demands of modern life, the more compromising version of that conservatism embraced by the mainstream of both of the country's political parties. Thus did we end up in a situation where Richard Nixon, whom '70s-era leftists could imagine as the would-be Evil Emperor in an America going fascist, come to look too liberal to survive a Democratic Party primary a few decades on.
Reviewing the political history I have rethought that somewhat. Certainly there is no question that there was a shift of the center leftward during that period. Still, it seems to me a mistake to think of New Deal/Cold War liberalism as "left." Rather it was centrism--which is to say, conservatism again (in its assumptions about human beings and society, its pessimism about and hostility to radical change, etc.), but of that form of conservatism which is prepared to make compromises to preserve the deeper structure of society rather than simply dig in its heels in the face of pressures for change. It looked like the left because in American life the bar for what counts as compromise, and as leftishness, is set very low. (For all the talk of big government in the U.S. the role of government in the economy, the expansion of the welfare state, etc. never went anywhere near so far as in Europe, while even at its most radical-seeming anti-capitalism and socialism never became part of the mainstream. The 1960s, for instance, saw a "War on Poverty" without reference to capitalism or class as such, while that "War" was scarcely begun before it was stopped. Right-wingers sneered about "anti-anti-Communists" more than they did Communists, at least when not hurling the term about as a hyperbolic epithet. And so forth.)
What Might Education Be Like in a Post-Work World?
When we talk about a post-work society we usually have in mind the problem of adults--how they will get money to live, and what they will do with their time.
We never "think of the children."
By this I mean that we rarely give much consideration to the fact that our ideas about education are almost entirely oriented to the demands of work as we know it.
A principal reason why schools exist is to "babysit" the young so that their parents can, in a world where home and workplace were separated in a way they had not been in the pre-modern world of the peasant and artisan, go work for a paycheck.
Moreover, those schools are organized in the expectation that the students will one day go to work themselves, on very particular terms. Consider the classical image of modern education, with its bells and rows and ditto sheets and the rest. In ways even more fundamental to the curriculum than the strictly defined academics (especially beyond the rather minimal literacy and numeracy required) there is a training in deference to authority figures placed on them by a bureaucratic organization whose heads are remote; attentiveness to time generally and punctuality in reporting to work specifically; uncritical acceptance of assigned physical placement and diligent performance of assigned, repetitive, often arduous tasks with no intrinsic interest to the person performing them; the tolerance of silence and tedium and delay of the meeting of one's physical needs (eating, the use of the bathroom) to allotted times to avoid disruption to the working process; and the identification of self with "boss" and "workplace."
And students are enjoined to strain themselves to the utmost to get good grades, etc. precisely because this is supposed to be their best chance of securing a better lot in the work force later in life, determining whether or not they end up working-class laborers or middle-class professionals and managers (with, perhaps, a shot at something more).
But what about when all that stops being relevant? When the parents no longer need the kids babysat while they are at work, and an upbringing centered on training to work in a nineteenth century mill, or competing in the "Rat Race," ceases to be justifiable? It would seem logical that the way we educate the young would change with this.
Of course, so far I have talked about what we will need less of in our educations--and not what we will need more of, which is a harder thing to guess at, given the uncertainties about how such a society will be arranged. One should also acknowledge that education is an area where people tend to be extremely conservative, sticking with what they think is tried and true rather than rationally adapting education to current needs (hence, that nineteenth century mill worker-training in the twenty-first century; and one might add, the endurance of "Classical education" at the level of the ultra-privileged, long after it ceased to make any sort of practical sense), with all it implies for the likely slowness of change.
Still, it does seem easy to imagine that, especially in light of the technological changes we have already seen, and which will be much more advanced in a post-work society (otherwise we would never have achieved one), it is plausible that we will see school continue its shift from centralized physical locations, away toward remote learning at home, especially with parents more likely to be there. We may see at least a partial increase in the automation of teaching, while parents also become more involved, possibly making for much more individualized instruction.
One result is that we could see students acquiring knowledge and skills much more quickly. We might see this as enabling them to learn more--or be content with having simply imparted a "required" amount of academic training in less time, with pushing the learning effort beyond the point of diminishing returns having, again, lost its justification. Indeed, it is plausible that rather than everyone having to grind in the same way as hard as they can for as long as they can (longer, in fact, as they burn themselves out) as in today's often mindless scramble after "success" we might see educational choices become more personalized, fitted to the potentials--and limitations--of the individual, and in the process not only produce a freer, healthier, happier generation, but one that might even be better-educated at the irreducible skill level for all the reasons discussed here, not least that they would have experienced education as something other than the grueling, discouraging thing that is the experience of so many today.
We never "think of the children."
By this I mean that we rarely give much consideration to the fact that our ideas about education are almost entirely oriented to the demands of work as we know it.
A principal reason why schools exist is to "babysit" the young so that their parents can, in a world where home and workplace were separated in a way they had not been in the pre-modern world of the peasant and artisan, go work for a paycheck.
Moreover, those schools are organized in the expectation that the students will one day go to work themselves, on very particular terms. Consider the classical image of modern education, with its bells and rows and ditto sheets and the rest. In ways even more fundamental to the curriculum than the strictly defined academics (especially beyond the rather minimal literacy and numeracy required) there is a training in deference to authority figures placed on them by a bureaucratic organization whose heads are remote; attentiveness to time generally and punctuality in reporting to work specifically; uncritical acceptance of assigned physical placement and diligent performance of assigned, repetitive, often arduous tasks with no intrinsic interest to the person performing them; the tolerance of silence and tedium and delay of the meeting of one's physical needs (eating, the use of the bathroom) to allotted times to avoid disruption to the working process; and the identification of self with "boss" and "workplace."
And students are enjoined to strain themselves to the utmost to get good grades, etc. precisely because this is supposed to be their best chance of securing a better lot in the work force later in life, determining whether or not they end up working-class laborers or middle-class professionals and managers (with, perhaps, a shot at something more).
But what about when all that stops being relevant? When the parents no longer need the kids babysat while they are at work, and an upbringing centered on training to work in a nineteenth century mill, or competing in the "Rat Race," ceases to be justifiable? It would seem logical that the way we educate the young would change with this.
Of course, so far I have talked about what we will need less of in our educations--and not what we will need more of, which is a harder thing to guess at, given the uncertainties about how such a society will be arranged. One should also acknowledge that education is an area where people tend to be extremely conservative, sticking with what they think is tried and true rather than rationally adapting education to current needs (hence, that nineteenth century mill worker-training in the twenty-first century; and one might add, the endurance of "Classical education" at the level of the ultra-privileged, long after it ceased to make any sort of practical sense), with all it implies for the likely slowness of change.
Still, it does seem easy to imagine that, especially in light of the technological changes we have already seen, and which will be much more advanced in a post-work society (otherwise we would never have achieved one), it is plausible that we will see school continue its shift from centralized physical locations, away toward remote learning at home, especially with parents more likely to be there. We may see at least a partial increase in the automation of teaching, while parents also become more involved, possibly making for much more individualized instruction.
One result is that we could see students acquiring knowledge and skills much more quickly. We might see this as enabling them to learn more--or be content with having simply imparted a "required" amount of academic training in less time, with pushing the learning effort beyond the point of diminishing returns having, again, lost its justification. Indeed, it is plausible that rather than everyone having to grind in the same way as hard as they can for as long as they can (longer, in fact, as they burn themselves out) as in today's often mindless scramble after "success" we might see educational choices become more personalized, fitted to the potentials--and limitations--of the individual, and in the process not only produce a freer, healthier, happier generation, but one that might even be better-educated at the irreducible skill level for all the reasons discussed here, not least that they would have experienced education as something other than the grueling, discouraging thing that is the experience of so many today.
Thursday, October 27, 2022
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.
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.
Monday, October 24, 2022
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.
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."
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."
Sunday, October 23, 2022
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Of "Ossis" and "Wessis"
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.
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