In considering Emmanuel Todd I have mainly been attentive to his more geopolitically-oriented work--books like The Final Fall and After the Empire. However, from the standpoint of his form of cultural analysis (which sets great store by family structures and the societal values implicit in them, by fluctuations in figures on birth and mortality below the threshold of what usually commands the attention of the geopolitically-minded, etc.), there were significant connections between domestic and foreign political behavior. This certainly extended toward the matter of inclusion and exclusion, with Todd seeing a U.S. becoming less universalist and more exclusionary abroad (in its foreign policy approach in the late '90s and early '00s) taking the same course domestically, its "Othering" of foreign countries, cultures, immigrants, etc. matched by its doing the same at home with its minorities. Moreover, Todd argued that this differentialism was not separate from a broader movement toward inequality, socioeconomic as well as ethnic; that the "diversity"-singing identity politics was part of the same line of development, rather than a means of addressing it, in its stress on difference over similarity; and that widening inequality generally was endangering American democracy. (Indeed, just as Todd had noted an uptick in infant mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1970s as indicative of increased stress, he remarked a similar uptick among African-Americans in the late '90s as, while not proof of some American collapse in the Soviet manner, at least suggestive of the collapse of certain hopes of society's moving beyond its old racial divisions.)
Todd's analysis of America's domestic life, of course, has been just as unwelcome as his views on the country's foreign affairs. Indeed, one can point to single remarks of Todd's about feminism that would singlehandedly suffice to get him barred from the mainstream of the American media (as when he wrote of America as "pays des femmes castratrices"--translated in the English-language edition as "country of castrating women")--while I suspect that his latest (Ou en Sont-Elles?, specifically addressing the matter of gender) will not help his case with the American media. But all the same, given the ever greater difficulty of ignoring the divisions in the country I suspect that at least a few are giving Todd's reading of America's domestic life a second look.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Sunday, October 30, 2022
The Prospect of German and Japanese Rearmament
However, it does seem to me there are two possible objections to all that, namely:
1. Calculations of GDP at market exchange rates between dollars and their currencies understate their economic weight because their currencies are undervalued; and
2. In Germany's case one may not just be talking about a change of course on the part of Germany the nation-state, but a bigger shift on the part of a larger German-led bloc.
In answer to the first objection there is the limited extent to which any undervaluation of their currencies makes a difference. Consider, for instance, the claim made a few years ago that the euro has been undervalued by as much as 20 percent in Germany's case. The result would be that the country's $3.8 trillion economy should be thought, perhaps, a $4.5 trillion economy--and that 2 percent of that difference going to defense would be an extra $15 billion a year. This would not be nothing--but it would not affect things very much at the level of the regional and global balance of power.
Of course, Japan's economy is larger, and so is the degree by which some (by no means the most extreme of the "Japan is doing far better than it lets on" crowd) hold the yen to be overvalued--a $5 trillion economy with a currency recently claimed to have been undervalued by as much as 40 percent. The implication is that one could think of it as really a $7 trillion+ economy--a difference that would be more consequential (with 2 percent of the difference coming to $40 billion+, far more than Japan is expected to spend on defense this coming year, and 2 percent of the total a hefty $140 billion+). Still, it would mean only so much in the increasingly high-cost international security arena of the "Indo-Pacific," especially given Japan's insular position and demographic limits (with the oldest population in the world outside Monaco, almost 1 in 3 of its people a senior citizen these days)--while this is, again, a goal toward which the government would like to work over the next five years rather than a settled matter.
In answer to the second objection it seems worth acknowledging the arguments some have made in regard to Germany's weight extending well beyond its borders. Not long ago Emmanuel Todd offered a picture of a "German economic space" over which Germany is essentially dominant in Central Europe (Austria, the Benelux countries, Czechia, even Switzerland and ex-Yugoslav Slovenia and Croatia) and, to a lesser extent, the Baltic region (Poland, Sweden, the ex-Soviet Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia)--making the $4 trillion economy more like the economy of an $8 trillion bloc, which with the help of a deferential France was a basis for levering the $16 trillion bloc that is Europe in its desired direction (as the continent's "taskmaster" pursuing a "project . . . of power" in which it "enslave[s] the debt-ridden countries of the South . . . put[s] to work the Eastern Europeans," etc.). Even if one accepts the claim at face value, however, it is far from clear that Germany's economic influence over that larger space can be translated into military power to any meaningful (never mind comparable) degree--even the German-dominated "core" of this space, never mind the larger Union, which remains less than the sum of its considerable parts from the vantage point of military power.
The result is that in the end, important as the shift may be in symbolic terms--and unhappy as it is for what it says about the hopes of movement toward a less war-like world to which those countries' original post-war constitutions spoke, in however imperfect a manner--the judgment about the limits of the development seem to me to still stand.
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Making Predictions in Precarious Times
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.
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.
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.
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