It is always refreshing to read the work of Emmanual Todd, as he is one of the few Western intellectuals to challenge beliefs which, from time to time, tend to be shared by journalists, politicians, and other members of the commentariat (and the group from which they mostly derive, namely, upper class professionals). The first time I was exposed to his ideas was in 2008, during my PhD, in a course on the subject of the rise and fall of empires, including the American one. Todd famously predicted the collapse the USSR in the early 80s, while most others at the time predicted stability, and he did this on the basis of demographic and cultural variables that were elsewhere ignored; most of his contemporaries tended to look at indices of hard power like territory, military, and economy, which, when adding the motivations of USSR’s rulers, pointed to continuity. In this example, his training in anthropology plus his analytical ability proved to be an asset, allowing him to see what most others did not.
This tendency among Western commentators, especially in Anglo countries, to mostly sing from the same tune on the subject of geopolitical questions (it sometimes seems as if they are taking their cue from the editorial positions of the Economist, of which I have been a faithful reader for almost 20 years) is observable in the conflict which has destabilized Europe, the war in Ukraine. In the book I will review in this blogpost, La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West), Todd provides an alternative perspective to the mainstream one and in so doing encourages readers to question their beliefs and even revise them.
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| An Inconoclast |
The standard view of the war in Ukraine is that it started on Feburary 24, 2022, and that one man, Vladimir Putin, is largely responsbile. His motivations, it has been stated at one time or another, range from covid-induced craziness, to the imperialist attempt to re-establish a Russian empire as the loss of the USSR was never psychologically come to terms with. Whatever the motivation, Putin and his generals are presented as acting on the basis of pure malice, ignorance, or irationality, while Ukraine and its Western backers are the voices of reason, justice, and morality. This narrative is given more layers of meaning by depicting the conflict as one between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”, which presumes that Ukraine and its Western backers are paragons of democratic rule, while Putin and his henchmen are dictators afraid that democracy in Ukraine will set an example which will lead to more demands for democracy in Russia. Questioning this framework leads to one getting labeled as a “Putin puppet” or some other designation which not so subtly implies that, in polite discourse, only one interpretation is acceptable, and that those who criticize it are either ignorant or victims of Russian propaganda.
La Défaite de l'Occident provides readers with a very different interpretation in part because Todd focuses on different variables. As in his other work, and reflective of his training and expertise, he looks at culture, religion, family structure, demographics, and sociological indicators, and how they help to explain foreign policy decisions in general and the NATO-Ukraine conflict in particular. The theoretical assumption is that the key to understanding international behaviour is to look at domestic society and politics. This is a theory of international relations which obliges us to examine a longer span of history rather than the last few years or decades. Accordingly, before examining Todd’s analysis of the war, it is essential to present his ideas on the fundamental changes in the West and especially the US, and how they relate to decisions and patterns vis-à-vis the conflict.
Rise and Decline
Todd begins with the development of modern nation-states and looks at the role of Christianity in their formation. The Protestant reformation was crucial in this regard as it led to the publication and distribution of the bible in the vernacular languages (previously it was published only in Latin, the language spoken by the elite), as believers were obliged to establish a personal relationship with God via the written word, and not, as in Catholic countries, through the inter-mediary of the church hierarchy. This led to widespread literarcy and to the standardization of distinct languages in Protestant countries, mostly in Northern Europe. A consequence was the development of a shared value system, rooted in Protestantism, between masses and elites which would form the basis of national consciousness. Thus it was religion, and not the ideals of the French revolution, which led to the political form which we call the nation-state which would eventually become the dominant political unit in the international system.
Protestantism was different from Catholicism in other respects. The latter’s concept of original sin implied that all were equal, while Protestant sects such as calvinism believed that some were favoured and selected by God (the doctrine of predestination), which introduced into Christianity ideas about divinely sanctioned natural hierarchy. In one of Emmanual Todd’s more original and controversial statements, he argues that this helps to explain the fact that some of the worst forms of racism occurred in Protestant countries. Nazism in Germany grew mostly out of the Protestant not Catholic parts of the country; the US abolished slavery relatively late and afterwards institutionalized segregation; Canada, the US, Sweden, and not Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, implemented eugenics, that abonimable state-sanctioned policy of sterilization of so-called inferiors.
Leaving aside this dark aspect in Protestant countries, across the Western world religion would eventually provide a glue which binded governors and the governed; a shared language and moral framework also established the conditions for community ties and civic associations. Democracy understood as multiparty elections and the rule of law functioned with a relatively high degree of stability and legitimacy when shared values among various social classes anchored in national conscioussness were present.
Family structure worked in combination with culture and religion to produce a relatively stable social order in which democracy could function, but here too there were differences among Western countries. The nuclear family which reigned supreme in Protestant countries had hierarchical elements which reinforced the ideas of superiority and inferiority inherited from their religion. On the other hand, there were liberal elements in the realm of gender relations, namely, the social of status of both mother and father could be transmitted to the children; this, says Todd, helps explain why Protestant countries were also among the first to advance the feminist cause.
From my reading of La Défaite de l'Occident, to understand contemporary international relations and especially Western and non-Western relations, we need to explore how the relatively stable system mentioned above began to weaken, and especially the breakdown of shared values which binded elites and masses. One must begin by pointing out that the frailing of Western institutions, such as the nation and the state, is not the discourse of obscure Russian or Chinese propoganists. It is well outlined in the work of serious Western scholars including Colin Crouch, Christopher Lasch, Michael Lind, David Goodhart, and Christophe Guilley. This crisis has been especially evident since the 2010s, as populism grew and produced several major changes in Western history, including the Brexit referendum and the Trump phenomenon, which demonstrate that millions of citizens reject their country’s system and are willing to vote for anti-establishment parties. This is evidence of a lack of legitimacy, without which political regimes, democratic or other, cannot be stable. Political polarization is another key feature of contemporary Western democracies, whereby there has been a centrifugal proliferation of many parties with supporters who view compatriots from other parties as evil or corrupt rather than, as would be the case in an ideal civic system, as possessing different views derived from reason and potentially adjustible via civil debate and discourse. Even the US, where two major parties remain, has seen a splintering into different political families which in many ways are incompatible although they sometimes campaign under the same party banner (MAGA and mainstream Republicans are the most visible examples of this trend).
Todd’s contribution to this well-known centrifugal tendency is to connect it to the decline of religion, while introducing a distinct vocabulary to help readers grasp his reasoning. Religion went through three phases in the West and particularly Protestant countries such as the US: 1) active, 2) zombie, 3) nihilism. In the first, religion provided the shared value system mentioned above which, most importantly, bound the governed and governors and ensured a high degree of stability and legitimacy. In the zombie state, most people no longer go to mass, but they continue to engage in the religious ceremonies which mark life’s three major stages: birth, marriage, and death. Their subjective worlds are now more influenced by secular ideologies or hedonist considerations such as consumerism than by religion. In the zombie state, all religious practices and beliefs have fell by the wayside even though the legacy of religion is still visible in the names of streets, public holidays, art and architecture.
The decline of religion in the second and third phases does not lead to the secular humanist ideal of reason, rather than superstition, being the main guide to belief. Rather, new political ideologies reign supreme and provide moral frameworks, the basis of social action and determine the formation of networks and relationships among key actors. One ideology that Todd focuses on, as it is relevant to the understanding the decline (and, as per the title, the defeat) of the West is neoliberalism, which placed market relations above all other criteria in guiding political action. Privileging economic growth and free trade contributed to, among other things, the increasing financialization of the economy, whereby capital less and less was allocated to manufacturing which was central to the creation of a middle class; rather, more capital went to stocks, bonds, and especially property, all of which was made possible by easy access to credit and high levels of debt. This helped to generate inequality as some sectors, especially banking, accounting, and law, benefited far more than others.
In La Défaite de l'Occident, Todd reminds readers that, although this trend is visible across the West, it reached extreme proportions in the US because of the status of the dollar as the international reserve currency, which increases demand for US securities, lowering interest rates and allowing both the American federal government and US consumers to increase debt-based consumption. At the same time, it articifically inflates the value of the dollar and in so doing punishes US manufacturers while favouring imports. Another consequence is that fewer citizens study engineering, as it is more profitable and status enhancing to study business, finance, or law. Todd presents data which illustrates how China and Russia produce far more engineers than the US, and that this helps to explain why their production prowess in either natural resources or manufacturing compared to rivals, a fact not unrelated to the events in Ukraine (more on this below).
To these trends Todd adds the indicators of health such as obesity and chronic disease, which have reached unprecedented levels in the US, and have led to a health sector which consumes 18.8% of GDP (in 2022). The opoid epidemic is more evidence of fraying social ties, as are mass shootings and gun violence. The US is the only Western country where life expectancy has decreased, which is attributable to the higher death rates of middle-aged white men in deindustrialized cities and towns.
For Todd, it is no coincidence that these trends coincide with with the zombie and nihilist stages of religion, which led to, among other things, extreme atomisation, or the break down of community and civic ties and the rupture between masses and elites. Numerous opinion polls attest the fact that politicians and journalists are the least trusted actors, Todd reminds readers. They are percieved as selfish, dishonest, and corrupt in part because of the breakdown of social ties, the increase in inequality, the rise of social problems are the direct consequence of decisions taken by powerful people who have more in common with powerful people in other countries than they do with their lower-class compatriots.
These observations lead Todd to question that concept which has been central to the neoliberal era, GDP. Movements in this indicator are almost daily deployed in the media as a measure of success or failure of government policy, or to compare the performance of countries and then to distill conclusions about their relative strength or weakness. In particular, the US’s ranking on GDP, both aggregate and per capita, is often cited to illustrate its status as top dog in the system. La Défaite de l'Occident shows that when we take into account that much economic activity, such as finance, often reflects parasitic ponzi schemes, or pharmaceuticals, which is indicative of widespread chronic disease and hence weakness and decline, GDP begins to lose its force as an accurate indicator of national strength. He further shows that if we measure GDP in terms of actual material production which contributes to national strength by substracting the mentioned economic activities, US GDP per capita in 2022 drops from $76 000 to $39 520 (below we will see the importance of this when we connect it to Todd’s analysis of the war in Ukraine).
Finally, the decline of religion and its replacement with neoliberalism leads to a new clerisy with a self-ordained mission to spread liberalism around the world, through force if necessary. This pattern has occurred across the West but again, it has taken extreme proportions in the US in part because of its imperial status. During much of the 20th century, American foreign policy was led by a WASP elite imbued with Protestant values anchored in a widely shared national consciousness. According to Todd, they were more likely to understand or recongize cultural or civilizational differences which made the Western model inapt for Eastern societies, including Russia’s. It was replaced by a foreign policy elite imbued with the ideology known as neoconservatism, which is a bit of a misnomer, as it aimed to promote liberal democratic revolutions around the world utilizing various methods to enact regime change. A network of bureacrats, politicians, journalists, and academics replaced the WASP elite to make neoconservatism the dominant foreign policy paradigm, a fact recognized by the Obama administration’s designation of this network as the “blob”, which highlights how they form a kind of homogenous and invasive agent which can spread its tentacles in the aparatus of state and society.
This “blob” is at least partly responsible for the many policy fiascos which have destablished and damaged many countries, including the invasion of Iraq, the intervention in Syria, the overthrow of Ghaddafi, and, most importantly for the present work, the war in Ukraine. For the present purposes, what matters is that it is an indicator of Western and especially US decline. We can now connect the disparate but connected themes above to the main case study.
The war in Ukraine
The mainstream interpretation of the war—the one challenged by Todd—is that it was an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign democratic country by an authoritarian one which aims to re-establish a lost empire. When we take into acount the critiques above, a very different interpretation emerges. First, in a West and especially the US characterized with crises of representation, polarization, rising inequality, atomization, and the severed bond between the governors and the governed, it becomes misleading to characterize them as “democratic” in the ideal or unqualified sense. Todd goes farther and labels them as liberal oligarchies, as majority rule becomes untenable when there is a centrifugal splintering, polarization, and rupture in the ties that binded most citizens to their rulers. If the majority does not rule, decisions still have to be made, and these decisions often come from powerful minorities such as lobbies or the “blob” which have captured society’s commanding heights. Meanwhile, he doesn’t deny Russia’s authoritarian character, but reminds readers that opposition to Putin mostly comes from upper-class Russians in European and cosmopolitan cities like Moscow and St Petersburg; lower class citizens who live in rural areas or the periphery form the majority, and they continue to support Putin. From this strictly numerical perspective, it could be argued that Putin enjoys more popular support than most Western leaders, many of whom are utterly detested by the majority of their compatriots especially the lower class ones (Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron are the most flagrant examples of this trend). It follows that, rather than the conflict being one of democracy versus authoritarian, it is more accurate to frame it as Western liberal oligarchy pitted against Russia’s majoritarian/illiberal authoritarianism.
The democracy vs authoritarian interpretation simplifies and obscures in other ways. Ukraine is actually divided along ethnic lines, and Todd presents a map to highlight this. In an election on 2010, the pro-Russia candidate of Viktor Ianoukovytch received between 60% and 90% amount of votes from the Russian speaking regions in the South East. They were allowed to protect their language, but Kiev passed a law which aimed to impose Ukrainian language on these regions. This delicate ethnic balance, plus the historical importance to Russia, was one reason why strict neutrality was one of the conditions of independence and enshrined in the constitution; in 2014, this was removed and replaced with the aim of joining Western institutions including NATO. These complex ethnic, historical, and political dynamics are either ignored or minimized in most Western commentary, in part because of the democracy vs authoritarian frame leads to a binary reductionism (not coincidently, many Western commentators made the same mistake in their interpretations of ethnically diverse Iraq, Syria, and Libya).
As mentioned, Todd observes that Western states and especially the Anglo-Protestant ones have entered into the nihilist phase, and one characteristic of nihilism is to deny objective reality. To illustrate this gap with reality, he cites many of the utterly failed predictions and claims made about the war. Examples include Bruno Le Maire saying that Western sanctions would make the Russian economy collapse, or Macron’s well-intensioned but naïve statement that the West should avoid “humiliating” Russia (Russia could, if it wanted, with its hypersonic missiles, destroy France instantly). In the summer of 2023, moreover, Western citizens were led to believe that Ukraine’s counteroffensive would turn the tide, in part because the country was amply supplied by Western technology, money, and arms. One reason for this mismatch between interpretation and reality, we learn from La Défaite de l'Occident, is that Western leaders believed that since together they had the highest GDPs, they were more powerful. North American and European GDP combined is more than 20 times greater than Russia’s; this is similar to comparing the GDP say, of Germany and tiny Malta. And yet Russia is prevailing on the battlefield. Why? In part because a portion of Western GDP is fictional and not related to material production, especially the essential hardware during times of war: artillery, rockets, missiles, transport vehicles, equipment. Russia also possesess the natural resources, such as agricultural products, minerals, and oil, which it turns out have added value during times of conflict; food inflation skyrocketed in Western countries, during 2023, in part because their markets were now closed to essential primary goods produced by Russia. Countries which continued normal trade with Russia, such as India or China, enjoyed stable prices. It is this which helps to explain why, in the past two years, Russia’s economic growth has exceeded Germany’s, France’s, and Italy’s, according the IMF. It also highlights how highly financialized economies may produce many rich people but they do not necessarily add to national strength which is tested during times of war.
Perhaps the most revealing denial of reality comes to the surface when we examine that the European and North American interpretation of the war is not shared by the rest of the world and especially the global South. China, India, and most of Asia, as well as Africa and South America, interpret Western leaders similar to how many ordinary and lower class Westerners do: as selfish, corrupt, and dishonest. They therefore are highly cynical about the moralizing of Western elites, especially when many of these same elites are responsible for the destabilizing and destructive interventions in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Moreover, they reject the social model propounded by the West of hyper-individualism, hedonism, and materialism, which, they conclude, leads to the breakdown of society. Rather, they want the good parts of modernity like technological development and economic growth while preserving their society’s cosmology (or metaphysical/spiritual values) and traditions which bind citizens of different social classes in general and masses and elites in particular. Given this interpretation of the West, the world outside Europe and North America (that is the vast majority of the planet) is more likely to interpet the conflict as being the result of Western arrogance which provoked Russia. And as many of them have been victims of Western arrogance, either in the form of colonialism or more recent interventions, they are cheering for Russia even though in public they speak with pious platitudes about the need for peace and diplomacy.
The tendency to deny reality leads to other observable patterns, such as Western leaders telling their citizens that the objective of support for Ukraine, including potentially sending troops, is “Ukraine’s victory” or Russia’s “strategic defeat”. Apart from the impossibility of defining these goals, it obscures the real stakes and relative positions of the beliigerents and, in so doing, is not helpful for ending the war. We know from various sources, including the letter Putin sent to Washington before the invasion, plus the negotiations which occurred two months after, that Moscow’s main demands are the preservation of Crimea to protect its naval base in Sevastepol and access to the black sea; the protection and autonomy of Russian minorities in the South East; and the permenant status of neutrality of Ukraine. Negotiations in Turkey in 2023 also highlighed that Russia would accept Ukraine joining the EU, but not NATO, as it is a military organization. If Western leaders genuinely believe that none of these demands are acceptable, and that only complete withdrawal from Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, while allowing Ukraine to join NATO, can end the war, they should be explicit about the price they are willing to pay for this. Judging by their actions, they are unwilling to sacrifice their own citizens’ lives, nor are they willing to risk nuclear war. If this is the case, then those objectives are unachievable and only a negotiated compromise can end the conflict.
Such a compromise, along the lines under negotiation in 2023, is the most likely outcome. The tragedy is that it could have been achieved earlier, before hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure destroyed. The West’s and especially the US’s inability to see its own weaknesses, its tendency to simplify or to deny reality, the rise of inequality and the rupture of masses and elites which has effectively replaced majority rule with powerful minorities like neoconservatives, all contributed to this state of affairs, and all can be traced to the zombie and nihilistic phases of Western culture. This is the most important lesson of La Défaite de l'Occident.
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