風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
嬰兒死亡率, 中國為4.9‰，俄羅斯 4.4‰, 美國 5.6‰
西方人說西方正在自殺
這些年，美西方所謂戰略界一些人最怕聽到“東升西降”。美國政客也是張口閉口“中國不要賭美國輸”。問題是，“東升”不是中國人吹出來的，“西降”也不是西方人怕就能躲得開的。一時強弱在於力，千秋勝負在於理。一邊是行大道、利天下，另一邊是謀霸權、薅羊毛，孰優孰劣明擺著。
▲ 世界正在見證西方“燈塔”倒塌
近期，法國知名曆史作家、人類學家托德（Emmanuel Todd）在新作《西方的失敗》中直言西方因“自殺”而非“他殺”走向衰落，在法國乃至歐洲引發熱議。西方主流媒體一邊倒地批評托德“親俄反美”“虛假宣傳”，而廣大網民卻好評如潮，認為其“打破信息繭房”“發人深省”。早在1976年，托德就曾在《最後的墜落》一書中預言蘇聯解體，並因此在西方名聲大噪。近50年過去，他的觀點能否再次應驗？不妨一觀。
▲ 《西方的失敗》，作者埃馬紐埃爾·托德（Emmanuel Todd）
? 一、西方不配代言“自由民主”
西方陣營頑固堅持主觀道德優越感，自詡“自由民主旗手”，但事實並非如此。狹義西方指“自由民主”的發源地，即英國（1688年光榮革命）、美國（1776年獨立戰爭）和法國（1789年法國大革命）。廣義西方則涵蓋率先實現經濟教育騰飛的國家，也可視作“美國權力體係”的代稱，這才是政界媒體眼中的西方。
▲ 1899年4月，美國《法官》雜誌刊登漫畫《白人的負擔》，英美兩國的擬人化形象背著其他種族跨過“迷信”“野蠻”“墮落”“無知”等等阻礙，實現“文明使命”。
產生過法西斯、納粹和軍國主義的西方並非生而“自由”，通過全球化剝削壓榨別國的西方也早就談不上“民主”。當今最時髦的曆史學主題之一就是奴隸製，歐洲人和美國人必須為自己犯下的滔天罪行贖罪。
? 二、權力“寡頭化”加劇政治僵局
高等教育資源的有限性催生了掌握更多資源的精英階層，與此同時中產階級卻在全球化進程中大幅萎縮。兩種現象相互作用，導致西方國家權力寡頭化和社會極化不斷加劇。財富加速向塔尖人群集中，占人口1%或0.1%的寡頭和占人口10%的精英形成近乎封閉的特權圈層，地位和利益不斷鞏固。
2006年，即大衰退前夕，美國的基尼係數（指判斷收入分配公平程度的指標）為0.470，超過貧富差距過大的警戒水平；大衰退十年後的2021年，美國的基尼係數達到0.494，再創曆史新高。
▲ 2022年7月，美國亞利桑那州鳳凰城，無家可歸者在道路兩邊的帳篷裏躲避高溫。
? 三、經濟虛化掏空霸權物質基礎
美國一手推動的全球化摧毀了自身的工業霸權。1945年，美國的工業產值曾占世界45%，2019年則已降至16.8%，而中國所占份額2020年升至28.7%。俄羅斯及白俄羅斯的經濟規模僅為西方的3.3%，卻能生產比西方更多的武器彈藥，充分暴露西方實力虛空。
▲ 在美國，許多過去風光無限的工業城市早已淪為“鏽帶”。
美國人口雖是俄羅斯的兩倍多，但培養的工程師卻少33%。截至2019年，美國從國外引進的科學、技術、工程和數學（STEM）人才多達250萬，占STEM人才總數的23.1%。美國GDP泡沫虛高，實體經濟貢獻度僅約20%。美國農產品出口滑坡，未來10至20年可能隨人口增長轉變為糧食進口國。
美國醫療開支雖高達GDP的18.8%，但人均壽命預期卻每況愈下，2021年降至76.3歲，比法國低6歲；嬰兒死亡率2020年達5.4/千人，高於所有其他西方國家甚至俄羅斯。嬰兒死亡率是反映一個社會深層次狀況的重要指數。當年我正是通過觀察蘇聯嬰兒死亡率的上升，以及蘇聯停止公布有關統計數據，得出了“蘇聯已經走向末路”的判斷。
▲ 2023年9月，曾成功預言2008年金融危機的美國知名經理人、金融評論員彼得·席夫警告稱，美國經濟“將麵臨悲劇性結局”。
美國還深陷“美元詛咒”，印鈔舉債“飲鴆止渴”成癮，經濟脫實向虛、寄生成性，積重難返，再工業化舉步維艱。
? 四、宗教退場導致禮崩樂壞
西方崛起很大程度得益於新教的崛起。隨著新教及其積極的倫理觀在西方社會基本退場，留下信仰虛無主義黑洞，正在造成係統性影響。
二是身份解構瓦解政治動員力。“國家信念”解體、人口結構多元化和社會原子化，導致統治階級失去統一連貫的精神內核和集體動員能力。
三是“政治正確”助長歪風橫行。跨性別意識形態等“政治正確”在西方大行其道，加劇社會反智和反真相趨勢，嚴重挫傷西方作為軍事盟友和外交夥伴的可信度。
▲ 2023年4月，一名兒童在美國印第安納州槍支展會上"試槍"。
四是精神黑洞加劇社會暴力。虛無主義助長破壞衝動，美國槍支暴力、凶殺搶劫、毒品藥品濫用等問題積重難返，歐洲社會“造反有理”、治安滑坡愈演愈烈。在國際事務中，這種虛無主義意識形態正在把美國履行承諾的原則本身變成一種過時的、消極的東西。正因如此，美國對別國的背叛成為常態。
? 五、內衰外擴透支實力信譽
? 六、西方衰落內卷內耗加劇
美國雖保留了帝國的軍事機器，但其精神內核已經隨新教退場而消亡，西方進入“後帝國時代”。美國實力、霸權下行，越來越倚重其權力基本盤，加大對盟友的壓榨和控製，2021年美國對盟友貿易逆差達到3930億美元，依賴盟友係統性“供養”格局形成。
▲ 2014年，立陶宛民眾圍觀美國液化天然氣（LNG）運輸船到港。2022年起，歐洲成為美國LNG的主要買家。
帝國之後：美國秩序的崩潰
是法國人口統計學家和社會學家伊曼紐爾·托德(Emmanuel Todd)於2001年出版的一本書。在書中，托德審視了現代美國的根本弱點，從而得出結論認為美國正在迅速失去其在經濟、軍事和意識形態方麵對世界舞台的控製。托德預測美國，作為現時全球唯一超級大國，將衰落。
1976年蘇聯解體預言
1976年，25歲的托德因預測了蘇聯的垮台引起了人們的注意，因此在20世紀70年代後期托德被廣泛稱為“反共主義者”。在《帝國之後》出版後，他也被攻擊為“反美主義者”一樣。不過托德對這些標簽嗤之以鼻，他將自己描述為曆史學家和人類學家。他指促使他寫作《帝國之後》的動機是他作為曆史學家對世界現況的關注，而不是政治狂熱。2002年，托德認為美國將重蹈1970年代對蘇聯犯下的同樣錯誤，耗費資源在侵略及軍事活動的擴張。
冷戰後的地緣政治氣候
托德寫道，在美國主要對手蘇聯突然解體之後，美國成為一個絕對帝國，但這種情況不是出於戰略勝利，而是出於偶然。 隨著經濟全球化，美國沉迷於利用流入的資本進行炫耀性的奢侈消費，同時國家債務越來越多。托德認為由於過度的軍備開支、不平等和國內的不滿，美國事實上就像一個搖搖欲墜的羅馬帝國。為了防止其債權人追債，美國需要做的就是揮舞大棒。[2]托德寫道︰“真正的美國太弱了，除了可以對付軍事侏儒之外無法與任何人抗衡， 這就是為什麽美國隻對朝鮮、古巴和伊拉克等國家充滿敵意，因為這些國家隻是欠發達國家，而且早已因為數十年的經濟製裁而疲憊不堪。這種“代表很少或沒有軍事風險的衝突”允許美國軍隊在全世界的存在。此外，由於媒體的戲劇性報導，給了美國人一個基本事實完成不同的現實。[1]托德認為，美國無法直接挑戰一個軍事上更強大的國家。他寫道︰“當今世界隻有一個對全球穩定的威脅，那就是美國本身。它曾經是世界的保護者，但現在卻是掠奪者。
三個因素表明西方轉向衰落
埃馬紐埃爾·托德認為“西方已被打敗的論斷基於三個因素：首先是美國工業存在不足以及美國的經濟表現是虛假的。我在書中去除了美國國內生產總值虛高的部分，並指出了美國工業衰退的深刻原因：工程師培訓不足，以及自1965年以來教育水平的普遍下降。第二個重要因素是美國新教的消失。”
德國《世界報》網站1月21日刊登題為《“三個因素表明西方已被打敗”》的文章，作者是亞曆山大·德韋基奧。全文摘編如下：
原文提要：1976年，法國曆史學家和人類學家埃馬紐埃爾·托德預測了蘇聯的解體。現在，這位“預言家”再次展望未來世界——我們隻能希望他這次錯了。
亞曆山大·德韋基奧問：您說您的新書《西方的衰落》源於您一年前接受法國《費加羅報》的采訪，當時訪談的題目是“第三次世界大戰已經開始”。您現在確認西方失敗，但烏克蘭戰爭尚未結束。
埃馬紐埃爾·托德答：沒錯，但西方不再相信烏克蘭能取得戰爭的勝利。我開始寫這本書時，並非所有人都清楚這一點。但在夏季反攻失敗以及人們意識到美國和其他北約成員國無法向烏克蘭提供足夠的武器後，美國國防部也會同意我的觀點。我關於西方已被打敗的論斷基於三個因素：首先是美國工業存在不足以及美國的經濟表現是虛假的。我在書中去除了美國國內生產總值虛高的部分，並指出了美國工業衰退的深刻原因：工程師培訓不足，以及自1965年以來教育水平的普遍下降。第二個重要因素是美國新教的消失。我的書基本上是馬克斯·韋伯《新教倫理與資本主義精神》一書的延續。
問：它在什麽程度上是續篇？
答：韋伯在第一次世界大戰爆發前不久的1914年正確地認識到，西方的崛起主要源於新教世界在英國、美國、普魯士統一的德國和斯堪的納維亞半島的崛起。法國當時的幸運之處在於，它的地理位置與這一領先群體比鄰。新教帶來了人類曆史上前所未有的高水平教育。它還帶來了全民掃盲，因為它要求每個信徒都能自己閱讀《聖經》。此外，人們還害怕被詛咒，需要能夠感到自己是上帝的選民。這導致了一種職業道德以及強烈的個人和集體道德觀。然而從消極的角度看，它也導致了有史以來最嚴重的種族主義——在美國針對黑人，在德國針對猶太人，新教宣稱的“選民”和“棄民”與天主教的人人平等正相反。與此相應的是，新教最近的崩潰造成了知識分子的衰落、職業道德的下降和大眾的普遍貪婪。西方的崛起正在轉為衰落。
問：第三個因素是什麽？
答：世界其他地區更青睞俄羅斯。俄羅斯在世界各地都找到了謹慎的經濟盟友。當人們意識到莫斯科能夠承受經濟衝擊時，俄羅斯新的保守軟實力開始高速運轉。在世界其他地區看來，我們的文化現代性在很大程度上是瘋狂的。由於我們依靠前第三世界男女老幼的廉價勞動為生，我們的道德是不可信的。在這本書中，我希望避免我們周遭的情緒化和持續的道德評判，應該對地緣政治局勢進行冷靜的分析。
問：我們真的可以將之稱為一場世界大戰嗎？俄羅斯真的已經贏了嗎？我們目前不如說處於一種現狀……
答：美國人會嚐試達到一種能夠掩蓋自身失敗的現狀。但俄羅斯人不會允許這樣。他們不僅知道自己目前在工業和軍事上的優勢，也清楚自己未來在人口上的劣勢。普京希望在節省人力的情況下實現自己的戰爭目標。他希望將穩定俄羅斯社會所取得的成果保留下來。他不想讓俄羅斯再次軍事化，並高度重視推動俄羅斯的經濟發展。然而，普京也知道，人口低穀的幾年即將到來，幾年後部隊征兵肯定會變得更加困難。因此，俄羅斯現在就必須解決掉烏克蘭和北約，不能讓它們有喘息的機會。我們不要自欺欺人：俄羅斯人還會變本加厲。
問：您的意思是什麽？
答：西方拒絕從邏輯、動機和優劣勢等方麵真正思考俄羅斯的戰略，這導致了普遍的盲目性。從軍事角度看，對烏克蘭和西方而言最壞的情況尚未到來。俄羅斯當然希望征服烏克蘭40%的領土，並在基輔建立一個傀儡政權。如果普京宣布敖德薩為俄羅斯城市，我們的電視節目仍會聲稱前線正趨於穩定。
這位預言家學者現在預見到西方的失敗
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-decline-west.html
2024 年 3 月 9 日
克裏斯托弗·考德威爾 作者：克裏斯托弗·考德威爾
考德威爾先生是《觀點》撰稿人，也是《權利時代：六十年代以來的美國》一書的作者。
“如果這個房間裏有人認為普京會在烏克蘭停留，我向你保證，他不會，”拜登總統在周四晚的國情谘文演講中表示。 他在歡迎北約最新成員國瑞典首相烏爾夫·克裏斯特鬆時補充道，歐洲“處於危險之中”。
但拜登也表示，他仍然“決心”不需要美國士兵來保衛歐洲。 正如白宮發言人上周所說，使用地麵部隊的可能性“非常明確”。
克裏斯特森先生一定是頭暈目眩。 俄羅斯進一步入侵的前景是美國將北約拉入戰爭以及吸引瑞典等新成員國加入北約的最有力論據。 但如果這種入侵確實令人擔憂，那麽地麵部隊幾乎肯定會成為美國及其盟友的一個選擇。
正當人們期望北約參與俄羅斯-烏克蘭戰爭的理由變得更加清晰的時候，它的理由卻變得越來越模糊。
這是個問題。 歐洲人和美國人一樣，厭倦了戰爭。 他們越來越懷疑烏克蘭能否獲勝。 但也許最重要的是，他們不信任美國，美國在這場戰爭中幾乎沒有采取任何行動來消除二十年前在伊拉克戰爭期間產生的對其動機和能力的懷疑。 盡管美國人有時認為他們的兩極分化是獨一無二的，但所有西方社會都有一個版本。 在歐洲“精英”看來，北約正在打一場反擊俄羅斯入侵的戰爭。 但在“民粹主義者”看來，美國精英正在領導一場戰爭，以擊退對其自身霸權的挑戰——無論附帶損害如何。
美國的領導力正在失敗：這是一本古怪的新書的論點，自一月份以來，這本書一直穩居法國暢銷書排行榜的榜首。 它被稱為"La Défaite de l'Occident”（"西方的失敗"）。 該書的作者伊曼紐爾·托德 (Emmanuel Todd) 是一位著名的曆史學家和人類學家，他於 1976 年在一本名為《最終的墮落》的書中利用嬰兒死亡率統計數據預測蘇聯即將崩潰。
從那時起，托德先生所寫的有關時事的文章在歐洲往往被視為預言。 他的著作《帝國之後》於 2002 年出版，該書預言了“美國秩序的崩潰”，當時正值 9/11 事件後國家凝聚力達到頂峰，伊拉克戰爭崩潰之前，托德先生對這場戰爭感到強烈不滿。 反對。 作為一名英語母語者（他的博士學位來自劍橋）和親英派（至少在他職業生涯的開始階段），他對美國的幻想逐漸破滅，甚至反美。
托德是美國介入烏克蘭事務的批評者，但他的論點並不是我們現在所熟悉的持不同政見的政治學家約翰·米爾斯海默（John Mearsheimer）提出的曆史論點。 與米爾斯海默一樣，托德對比爾·克林頓和喬治·W·布什總統領導下的北約的熱心擴張、促進民主的新保守主義意識形態以及官方對俄羅斯的妖魔化提出了質疑。 但他對美國介入烏克蘭的懷疑更深了。 他認為美帝國主義不僅危害了世界其他國家，也腐蝕了美國的品格。
在過去一年的采訪中，托德表示，西方人過於關注戰爭的一個意外：烏克蘭有能力對抗俄羅斯規模大得多的軍隊。 但還有一個被低估的驚喜：俄羅斯有能力反抗美國試圖摧毀俄羅斯經濟的製裁和扣押。 即使有西歐盟友的支持，美國也缺乏讓世界上新的大型經濟參與者保持一致的影響力。 印度利用了俄羅斯能源的甩賣價格。 中國向俄羅斯提供了受製裁商品和電子元件。
然後，事實證明，美國及其歐洲盟國的製造基地不足以向烏克蘭提供穩定戰爭所需的物資（特別是火炮），更不用說贏得戰爭了。 美國不再有能力兌現其外交政策承諾。
人們等待這一刻已經有一段時間了，但並不是所有人都像托德先生那樣遠離權力走廊。 拜登在 2017 年的回憶錄中提到，巴拉克·奧巴馬總統曾警告他“不要向烏克蘭政府做出過度承諾”。 現在我們明白為什麽了。
托德先生認為，美國人不經意地投入全球經濟是一個錯誤。 其他作者可能會熟悉他的部分案例：美國生產的汽車比 20 世紀 80 年代少； 它生產的小麥較少。 但他的部分案例涉及更深層次、長期的文化史
fts 常年與繁榮聯係在一起。 我們過去稱其為頹廢。
托德先生認為，在像我們這樣先進、受過高等教育的社會中，太多人渴望從事管理事物和發號施令的工作。 他們想成為政治家、藝術家、管理者。 這並不總是需要學習智力上複雜的東西。 “從長遠來看，教育的進步帶來了教育的衰落，”他寫道，“因為它導致了那些有利於教育的價值觀的消失。”
托德先生計算出，美國培養的工程師數量比俄羅斯少，不僅是人均數量，而且是絕對數量。 它正在經曆“內部人才流失”，因為年輕人從高要求、高技能、高附加值的職業轉向法律、金融和各種僅僅在經濟中轉移價值的職業，在某些情況下甚至可能摧毀經濟 。 （例如，他要求我們考慮阿片類藥物行業的破壞。）
在托德看來，西方將其工業基地外包的決定不僅僅是糟糕的政策，而且是錯誤的。 這也是一個剝削世界其他地區的計劃的證據。 但增加利潤並不是美國在世界上所做的唯一事情——它還傳播自由主義價值觀體係，這些價值觀通常被描述為普遍人權。 作為家庭人類學專家，托德先生警告說，美國人目前傳播的許多價值觀並不像美國人想象的那麽普遍。
例如，英美家庭結構傳統上比世界上幾乎任何其他地方的家庭結構都沒有那麽重男輕女。 隨著美國的現代化，它開始擁護一種性和性別模式，這種模式與傳統文化（如印度）和更父權製的現代文化（如俄羅斯）的模式不太協調。
托德先生不是一個說教者。 但他堅持認為，傳統文化對西方的各種進步傾向有很多恐懼，並且可能會抵製在外交政策上與支持它們的人結盟。 同樣，在冷戰期間，蘇聯官方的無神論對許多本來可能傾向於共產主義的人來說是一個破壞性的因素。
托德先生確實認為我們的某些價值觀是“非常消極的”。 他提供的證據表明西方並不重視年輕人的生命。 半個世紀前，拜登領導下的美國嬰兒死亡率（5.4%）高於普京領導下的俄羅斯，比首相文雄領導下的日本高出三倍。 岸田。
雖然托德先生對性問題不做任何評判，但他對智力問題卻有評判性。 在烏克蘭戰爭的每一次轉折點上，他都無法區分事實和願望，這讓他感到震驚。 在托德先生看來，美國在戰爭初期希望中國能夠在針對俄羅斯的製裁製度中進行合作，從而幫助美國改進一種有朝一日針對中國本身的武器，這是一種“癡心妄想”。
對於研究越南戰爭的學生來說，托德先生的書中有很多內容讓人回想起曆史學家洛倫·巴裏茨 (Loren Baritz) 1985 年的經典著作《適得其反》(Backfire)，該書利用流行文化、愛國神話和管理理論來解釋是什麽導致美國在越南戰爭中誤入歧途。 越南。 巴裏茨總結道：“越南的問題出在我們身上。” 巴裏茨反思道，如果林登·約翰遜能夠將自己的意誌強加於越南人，“整個文化就會因美國人內心的善良而被徹底摧毀。”
人們經常在報紙上看到弗拉基米爾·普京對西方秩序構成威脅。 或許。 但西方秩序麵臨的更大威脅是其統治者的傲慢。
基於價值觀進行戰爭需要良好的價值觀。 它至少需要就所傳播的價值觀達成一致，而美國距離達成這樣的一致比其曆史上任何時候都更加遙遠，甚至比內戰前夕還要遙遠。 有時，似乎沒有國家原則，隻有黨派原則，雙方都堅信對方不僅試圖管理政府，而且還試圖奪取國家政權。
在出現一些新的共識之前，拜登總統歪曲了他的國家，將其描繪成足夠穩定和團結，足以承諾任何事情。 烏克蘭人正在付出高昂的代價來學習這一點。
西方的失敗？ 伊曼紐爾·托德和俄烏戰爭
https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2024/03/defeat-of-west-emmanuel-todd-and-russo.html
作者：MARC POLONSKY 文章，2024 年 3 月 26 日
現年 72 歲的伊曼紐爾·托德是少數幾個預測蘇聯解體的人之一。 在《La chute Finale: Essai sur la Deposition de la sphere soviétique》（1976）中，他分析了嬰兒死亡率、自殺率、經濟生產率和其他指標，得出的結論是，蘇聯的長期停滯很快就會崩潰。
現在，在《La Défaite de l’Occident》（Gallimard，384 頁，2024 年 1 月出版）中，托德將相同的法證數據分析應用於俄羅斯、烏克蘭和西方。 他的結論是，俄羅斯將成功實現其戰爭目標，而西方正在走向失敗——與其說是由於戰爭，不如說是由於其自身的“自我毀滅”。
在法國，托德的書受到了媒體的關注，就像名人一樣：在高雅的電視討論節目中進行長篇采訪，獲得了數十萬的瀏覽量。 盡管《世界報》將他斥為“一位閉著眼睛的先知”，“不是第一個在法國傳播克裏姆林宮宣傳的人”，但托德堅稱自己不是普京親信者。 他的分析是一位長期曆史學家的分析，他以意識形態超然的態度來考慮長期趨勢。
普京為何選擇2022年2月發起“特別軍事行動”？ 托德給出了兩個答案。 首先，俄羅斯已經做好了準備。 自 2014 年因俄羅斯吞並克裏米亞而實施製裁以來，俄羅斯一直在增強其軍事能力（包括北約無法匹敵的高超音速導彈）和麵向未來的經濟，發展“偉大的技術、經濟和社會能力”。 靈活性：需要認真對待的對手”。
其次，根據出生率和動員隊列，托德得出結論，普京看到了擊敗烏克蘭並擊退北約的五年機會。 到 2027 年，有資格服兵役的男性人數將會太少。 托德堅稱，俄羅斯在征服烏克蘭後入侵歐洲隻是“幻想和宣傳”的內容。"事實是，人口不斷減少、領土麵積達 1700 萬平方公裏的俄羅斯根本不想征服新領土，她最想知道的是如何繼續占領她已經擁有的領土。”
托德表示，人口因素也會影響俄羅斯的戰爭行為。 最初，俄羅斯在麵積 60 萬平方公裏的國家僅部署了 12 萬軍隊。（與蘇聯 1968 年入侵捷克斯洛伐克相比：麵積 128,000 平方公裏，軍隊 500,000 人）與許多西方評論家青睞的說法相反，俄羅斯當前的軍事戰略並不是將數百萬人投入斯大林格勒絞肉機。 這場戰爭正在緩慢而有條不紊地進行，以盡量減少損失。 托德指出了車臣軍團和瓦格納民兵在衝突早期階段發揮的重要作用，以及動員：部分、漸進、謹慎實施。“俄羅斯的首要任務不是征服盡可能多的領土，而是損失最少的人員。”
普京在國內的持續受歡迎並不令托德感到意外。 托德利用自殺率和酗酒相關死亡率，展示了普京時代的社會穩定。 一個特別重要的指標是嬰兒死亡率：2000 年為 19%，2020 年為 4.4%, 低於美國的 5.4%。對於大多數俄羅斯公民來說，生活水平從未如此高。
在托德看來，俄羅斯將被經濟戰爭擊敗的觀點是接管西方政策製定和規劃的律師和會計師散布的錯覺。 製裁有賴於全球合作。 但許多國家對俄羅斯與北約的對抗漠不關心，並對戰爭給它們帶來的代價感到不滿，不願意合作，也不願意協助向俄羅斯輸送重要設備以及從俄羅斯輸送碳氫化合物。
盡管（或由於？）製裁，俄羅斯經濟已經反彈。 以小麥產量為例：2012年為3700萬噸，2020 年為 80 萬噸。（美國的產量從 1980 年的 6500 萬噸下降到 2022 年的 47 萬噸。）如果俄羅斯和白俄羅斯的 GDP 合計占西方國家（美國、加拿大、歐盟、 英國、日本、韓國）——能夠在武器生產方麵超過西方，那麽整個GDP概念就必須重新考慮。 更嚴重的後果是，由於武器供應短缺，烏克蘭正在輸掉戰爭。
至於烏克蘭，很少有人預料到，一個飽受腐敗困擾、寡頭控製的“失敗國家”會發起這樣的鬥爭。 “沒有人能預料到的是，它會在戰爭中找到存在的理由，為自己存在的理由。” 托德呈現出一個無法挽回的分裂的烏克蘭，南部和東部地區很久以前就選擇退出烏克蘭國家計劃。 他說，2010 年的總統選舉以“簡單得幾乎令人不安”的方式展現了這種分歧。 為公關投票
俄羅斯人維克多·亞努科維奇在頓涅茨克、盧甘斯克和克裏米亞的支持率分別為90.44%、88.96%和78.24%，但在西部省份利沃夫、捷爾諾波爾和伊萬諾-弗蘭科夫斯克隻有8.60%、7.92%和7.02%。
對於托德來說，2014 年 5 月的總統選舉——導致彼得羅·波羅申科當選——是一個轉折點。 頓涅茨克的投票率僅為 15%； 盧甘斯克，25%。錨點[2]“這些選舉標誌著[俄語]地區從烏克蘭政治體係中消失的時刻。” 這是“烏克蘭民主製度的終結，事實上它從未發揮過作用”，也是“烏克蘭民族的真正誕生，通過西方極端民族主義和中央無政府軍國主義的聯盟，反對親俄派”。 國家的一部分。”
在 2022 年 2 月之前，俄羅斯向烏克蘭提出了三項要求：永久保留克裏米亞、保護頓巴斯講俄語（或者用托德的話說，俄語）人口以及保持中立。 托德堅持認為，“一個確信自己在西歐的存在和命運的烏克蘭國家會接受這些條件”； “它甚至會擺脫頓巴斯。” 回顧捷克斯洛伐克的友好解體，托德指出，這個較小的政體可以集中精力將自己建設為一個真正的烏克蘭民族國家，得到所有人的認可。
托德聲稱，烏克蘭重新征服頓巴斯並收複克裏米亞的決心是“一個自殺計劃”。 它試圖“維護對另一個國家人民的主權——一個比它強大得多的國家”。 他繼續說道：“自相矛盾的是，基輔戰略中自殺式的缺乏現實主義表明，烏克蘭對俄羅斯有一種病態的依戀：需要衝突，卻又無法與之分離。”
至於西方，托德將其描述為自戀和傲慢，與“世界其他地方”脫節。 它的“意識形態上的孤獨和對自身孤立的無知”是美國主導的全球化和侵略性外交政策二十年來的結果。 在對典型家庭結構以及文化和宗教忠誠的分析的支持下，托德對世界其他國家支持俄羅斯、蔑視美國主導的單極霸權和“自由國際秩序”並不感到驚訝。
托德表示，俄羅斯並不是主要的地緣政治問題。"對於不斷減少的人口來說，麵積太大了，她將無法控製地球，也沒有任何願望這樣做……相反，這是一場西方 — — 更具體地說是美國 — — 的危機，一場末期危機， 地球的平衡陷入危險。”
隨著馬克龍總統現在提議帶頭推動歐洲對烏克蘭的軍事支持，伊曼紐爾·托德似乎與法國當權派產生了分歧。 他的書中有很多內容挑戰了我們自己的政治和媒體中的主流敘事。
馬克·波隆斯基 (Marc Polonsky) 是一家國際律師事務所的退休合夥人。 他的執業重點是對俄羅斯碳氫化合物和基礎設施領域的投資。 所有法語譯本都是他的。
Defeat of the West? Emmanuel Todd and the Russo-Ukrainian War
https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2024/03/defeat-of-west-emmanuel-todd-and-russo.html
by MARC POLONSKY The Article, March 26, 2024
Emmanuel Todd, now 72, is one of the few who predicted the end of the Soviet Union. In La chute finale: Essai sur la decomposition de la sphere soviétique (1976)[1] he analysed infant mortality, suicide rates, economic productivity and other indicators, and concluded that the USSR’s long stagnation would soon culminate in collapse.
Now, in La Défaite de l’Occident (Gallimard, 384 pp, published in January 2024), Todd applies the same forensic data analysis to Russia, Ukraine and the West. He concludes that Russia will succeed in its war aims and that the West is heading for defeat — less due to the war than as a result of its own “self-destruction”.
In France Todd’s book has received the media attention befitting a celebrity: long interviews on highbrow TV discussion programmes achieving hundreds of thousands of views. Though Le Monde dismissed him as “a prophet with closed eyes” who is “not the first to spread Kremlin propaganda in France”, Todd is adamant that he is no Putinophile. His is the analysis of a longue durée historian, who considers long-term trends with ideological detachment.
Why did Vladimir Putin choose February 2022 to launch his “special military operation”? Todd gives two answers. Firstly, Russia was ready. Since the 2014 sanctions in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea, Russia had been building up its military capability (including hypersonic missiles for which Nato has no match) and future-proofing its economy, developing the capacity for “great technical, economic and social flexibility: an adversary to be taken seriously”.
Secondly, based on birth rates and mobilisation cohorts, Todd concludes that Putin saw a five-year opening in which to defeat Ukraine and push back Nato. By 2027 the cohort of men eligible for military service will be too small. Russia invading Europe after conquering Ukraine is the stuff of “fantasy and propaganda”, Todd maintains. “The truth is that Russia, with a shrinking population and a territory of 17 million square kilometers, far from wanting to conquer new territories, wonders above all how she will continue to occupy those she already possesses.”
Demographic factors also impact Russia’s conduct of the war, Todd suggests. Initially a mere 120,000 Russian troops were deployed in Ukraine, a country of 600,000 km2. (Compare this with the USSR’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia: 128,000 km2, 500,000 troops.) Contrary to the narrative favoured by many Western commentators, Russia’s current military strategy is not to hurl millions into the Stalingrad meat grinder. This war is being prosecuted slowly and methodically, to minimise losses. Todd points to the important role played in the conflict’s early stages by Chechen regiments and the Wagner militia, and to the mobilisations: partial, gradual, sparingly implemented. “Russia’s priority is not to conquer a maximum of territory but to lose a minimum of men.”
Putin’s continued popularity at home does not surprise Todd. Drawing on rates of suicide and alcohol-related deaths, Todd demonstrates the social stabilisation of the Putin era. A particularly significant indicator is infant mortality: 19 per thousand in 2000, 4.4 per thousand in 2020 – below the American rate of 5.4. And for most Russian citizens the standard of living has never been higher.
In Todd’s view the notion that Russia will be defeated by economic war is a delusion spread by the lawyers and accountants who have taken over Western policy-making and planning. Sanctions rely on global cooperation. But many countries, indifferent to this Russia-NATO confrontation and resenting the war’s costs imposed on them, do not want to play along, and assist in flows of essential equipment to Russia and hydrocarbons from it.
And the Russian economy has rebounded, despite (or because of?) the sanctions. Take wheat production: 37 million tonnes in 2012, 80 in 2020. (America’s fell from 65 million tonnes in 1980 to 47 in 2022.) If Russia and Belarus — whose combined GDP is 3.3% of the West’s (US, Canada, EU, UK, Japan, Korea) — can out-produce the West in arms production, then the whole notion of GDP must be up for reconsideration. The more significant consequence is that Ukraine is losing the war, due to shortages in weapons supply.
As for Ukraine, few anticipated that a “failed state” beset by corruption and in the grip of oligarchs would put up such a fight. “What nobody could have predicted is that it would find in the war a reason for existing, a justification for its own existence.” Todd presents a Ukraine irretrievably divided, with the Southern and Eastern regions having opted out of the Ukrainian national project long ago. The 2010 Presidential elections, he says, show this division with an “almost disconcerting simplicity”. Votes for the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych were 90.44%, 88.96% and 78.24% in Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea, but only 8.60%, 7.92% and 7.02% in the Western provinces of Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk.
For Todd the May 2014 Presidential elections — resulting in Petro Poroshenko’s election — were a turning point. In Donetsk turnout was a mere 15%; in Lugansk, 25%.[2] “These elections mark the moment when the [Russophone] regions disappeared from the Ukrainian political system.” This was “the end of a Ukrainian democracy, which in fact had never functioned” and “the true birth of the Ukrainian nation, through the alliance of the ultra-nationalism of the West and the anarcho-militarism of the Centre, against the Russophile part of the country.”
In the lead-up to February 2022, Russia made three demands on Ukraine: permanent retention of Crimea, protection for the Russian-speaking (or, as Todd puts it, Russian) populations of the Donbas, and neutrality. “A Ukrainian nation sure of its existence and of its destiny in Western Europe would have accepted these conditions”, Todd maintains; “it would even have got rid of the Donbas.” Recalling the amicable break-up of Czechoslovakia, Todd notes that this smaller polity could then have focussed on building itself as a truly Ukrainian nation-state, recognised by all.
Ukraine’s determination to reconquer the Donbas and reclaim Crimea is “a suicidal project”, Todd claims. It is trying “to maintain its sovereignty over the populations of another nation – a nation far more powerful than it is”. He continues: “The suicidal lack of realism in Kiev’s strategy suggests – paradoxically – a pathological Ukrainian attachment to Russia: a need for conflict which reveals an inability to separate from it.”
As for the West, Todd presents it as narcissistic and hubristically out of touch with the “Rest of the World”. Its “ideological solitude and ignorance of its own isolation” are the result of two decades of American-led globalisation and aggressive foreign policy. Backed up by an analysis of typical family structures and cultural and religious allegiances, Todd is not surprised that much of the Rest of the World is rooting for Russia, in its defiance of unipolar America-dominated hegemony and the “liberal international order”.
Russia is not the principal geopolitical problem, Todd suggests. “Too vast for a shrinking population, she would be incapable of taking control of the planet and has no desire whatsoever to do so […] Rather, it is a Western – and more specifically American – crisis, a terminal crisis, which is putting the planet’s equilibrium into peril.”
With President Macron now proposing to take the lead on European military support for Ukraine, Emmanuel Todd seems at odds with the French establishment. And there is much in his book to challenge the dominant narratives in our own politics and media.
Marc Polonsky is a retired partner of an international law firm. His practice focussed on investment in the Russian hydrocarbons and infrastructure sectors. All translations from the French are his.
This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West's Defeat
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-decline-west.html
Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
“If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” President Biden said during his State of the Union address on Thursday night. Europe is “at risk,” he added, as he welcomed Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, the newest member of NATO.
But Mr. Biden also said he remains “determined” that American soldiers will not be necessary to defend Europe. As a White House spokesman put it last week, it is “crystal clear” that the use of ground troops is off the table.
Mr. Kristersson’s head must have been spinning. The prospect of further Russian incursions was the strongest argument that the United States relied on to draw NATO into the war, and to draw new members, like Sweden, into NATO. But if such incursions were a genuine concern, then ground troops would be an option for the United States and its allies almost by definition.
The rationale for NATO participation in the Russo-Ukrainian war is getting fuzzier at the very moment when one would expect it to be getting clearer.
This is a problem. Europeans, like Americans, are tiring of the war. They are increasingly skeptical that Ukraine can win it. But perhaps most important, they distrust the United States, which has done little in this war to dispel skepticism about its motives and its competence that arose during the Iraq war two decades ago. Unique though Americans sometimes believe their polarization to be, all Western societies have a version of it. As Europe’s “elites” see it, NATO is fighting a war to beat back a Russian invasion. But as “populists” see it, American elites are leading a war to beat back a challenge to their own hegemony — no matter what the collateral damage.
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
Mr. Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine, but his argument is not the now-familiar historical one made by the dissident political scientist John Mearsheimer. Like Mr. Mearsheimer, Mr. Todd questions the zealous expansion of NATO under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the neoconservative ideology of democracy promotion and the official demonization of Russia. But his skepticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine goes deeper. He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.
In interviews over the past year, Mr. Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.
And then the manufacturing base of the United States and its European allies proved inadequate to supply Ukraine with the matériel (particularly artillery) needed to stabilize, let alone win, the war. The United States no longer has the means to deliver on its foreign-policy promises.
People have been awaiting this moment for quite some time, not all of them as far from the corridors of power as Mr. Todd. Mr. Biden mentioned in his 2017 memoir that President Barack Obama used to warn him about “overpromising to the Ukrainian government.” Now we see why.
Mr. Todd contends that Americans’ heedless plunge into the global economy was a mistake. Parts of his case will be familiar from other authors: The United States produces fewer cars than it did in the 1980s; it produces less wheat. But parts of his case involve deeper, long-term cultural shifts perennially associated with prosperity. We used to call them decadence.
In an advanced, highly educated society like ours, Mr. Todd argues, too many people aspire to the work of running things and bossing people around. They want to be politicians, artists, managers. This doesn’t always require learning intellectually complex stuff. “In the long run, educational progress has brought educational decline,” he writes, “because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”
Mr. Todd calculates that the United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to law, finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it. (He asks us to consider the ravages of the opioid industry, for instance.)
As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.
Anglo-American family structures, for example, have traditionally been less patriarchal than those almost anyplace else in the world. As it has modernized, the United States has come to espouse a model of sex and gender that conjugates poorly with those of traditional cultures (such as India’s) and more patriarchal modern ones (such as Russia’s).
Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.
Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
For students of the Vietnam War, there is much in Mr. Todd’s book that recalls the historian Loren Baritz’s classic 1985 book, “Backfire,” which drew on popular culture, patriotic mythology and management theory to explain what had led the United States astray in Vietnam. Mr. Baritz concluded, “We are what went wrong in Vietnam.” Had Lyndon Johnson managed to impose his will on the Vietnamese, Mr. Baritz reflected, “an entire culture would have been utterly destroyed out of the goodness of the American heart.”
One is constantly reading in the papers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Western order. Maybe. But the larger threat to the Western order is the hubris of those who run it.
Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
Until some new consensus emerges, President Biden is misrepresenting his country in presenting it as stable and unified enough to commit to anything. Ukrainians are learning this at a steep cost.
Emmanuel Todd: death of Protestantism explains Western decline
https://unherd.com/newsroom/emmanuel-todd-vaporisation-of-protestantism-is-bringing-down-the-west/?
BY ROB LOWNIE JANUARY 10, 2024 - 1:00PM
Western decline can be attributed to the “vaporisation” of Protestantism, according to the leading French historian and public intellectual Emmanuel Todd. Speaking to French centre-right magazine Le Point last week, Todd highlighted the “values of work and social discipline” inherent to the Christian branch, which he appraised as central to the rise of the “Anglo-American world”.
Todd, whose 1976 book The Final Fall predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and who last year notably claimed that a third world war has already begun, was promoting his new book, titled La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), which is published in France today. He told Le Point that “the vaporisation of Protestantism in the United States, in England and throughout the Protestant world has caused the disappearance of what constituted the strength and specificity of the West.”
The historian added that we have passed the “active stage” and the “zombie stage”, and are now approaching “stage zero”, whereby religious belief loses all influence within the Western world. He cited the passage of laws relating to same-sex marriage as the “ultimate indicator” of the transition from the “zombie” to “zero” stage.
Within this theory, the “zombie stage” incorporates much of the US rise to prominence during the first half of the 20th century — what Todd calls “Great America, from [Theodore] Roosevelt to Eisenhower”. This was “an America that retained all the positive values ??of Protestantism, its educational effectiveness, its relationship to work, its capacity for integrating the individual into the community”. Ultimately, the historian suggested, “the Protestant matrix has disappeared at the height of American power”, not least because of the Catholic faith of incumbent President Joe Biden.
In Todd’s view, this religious and cultural decline is paired with Anglo-American economic defeat. “Globalisation has made not the West in general but specifically the United States unable to produce the weapons necessary for Ukraine,” he told the magazine. “The Americans sent the Ukrainians into disaster during the summer offensive with insufficient equipment.”
Todd has previously been described as an “anti-American” thinker, particularly following the publication of his 2001 book After the Empire, which focused on the United States’ waning status as a global superpower. When challenged on this by Le Point, he argued that America “is falling into nihilism and the deification of nothing”. He defined this nihilism as “the desire for destruction, but also of the negation of reality. There are no longer any traces of religion, but the human being is still there.” This mindset has been the catalyst, in Todd’s opinion, for American escalation of foreign wars, with the Gaza conflict being the most recent example.
Criticised in the Le Point interview for an alleged sympathy towards Moscow’s present leadership, including referring to Russia’s “authoritarian democracy”, Todd reiterated that he does not think that Putin has won total victory in Ukraine, but found parallels between the country’s cultural history and Western Protestantism. “What is common to Protestantism and Communism is the obsession with education,” he said. “Communism established in Eastern Europe developed new middle classes. And it was these middle classes who then decreed that they were liberal democracy in action and that the Russians were monsters.”
Todd sees another declining world power as a precursor to America’s fall. “England is even less powerful than France. The English don’t really have nuclear weapons. They are not even capable of making themselves hated in Africa, like us,” he told the magazine. “The English ruling classes were a model for the American ruling classes. The current warmongering madness of the English has certainly had a very bad influence on the Americans.”
Emmanuel Todd Prophesies the Defeat of the West
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine
French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.
French anthropologist, historian, and demographer Emmanuel Todd in 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Western admirers of Vladimir Putin’s Russia are a strangely assorted bunch, with each finding quite different things to like about it. Tucker Carlson raves about the living standards. He returned from a recent journey to Moscow enthusing over the spotless Metro system and the cheap supermarkets. The Putin-understanders of the German far right see in him a fellow champion of ethnonationalism. The French demographer, sociologist, and all-around provocateur Emmanuel Todd is cooler and higher minded in his praise: he is drawn to Putin’s mastery of geopolitics.
Todd’s latest book argues that Western powers are locked in a doomed effort to prop up Ukraine in its war with Russia. While it has sold well in France, it has also earned some scornful reviews. Le Monde dismissed him as a false prophet and a copyist of “the Kremlin’s propaganda.” La Défaite de L’Occident (The Defeat of the West) is undoubtedly soft on Putin. Yet it abounds in imaginative and occasionally shrewd explanations for the fears and jealousies which rack Western states. Its appearance is an opportunity to take the measure of a thinker at once systematic and mercurial, a cynic but also a moralist whose one consistent aversion is to self-satisfaction.
Family Fortunes
Todd’s dual identity as a demographer and firebrand is unusual. In a brilliant recent study, the historian Jacob Collins makes sense of it by placing him in what he calls an “anthropological turn” in French intellectual life, which began in the 1970s. The events of 1968 had shaken a narrow and repressive establishment but had not brought about a socialist nirvana. The Communist Party’s vote in national and presidential elections slumped and union membership tailed off. The oil shock of 1973 dampened economic growth and cast doubt on the Left’s assumption that the aim of politics was to share out an expanding affluence. These reverses encouraged some youngish intellectuals — who were not themselves anthropologists but read a lot of their work — to reground their understanding of politics and citizenship in the systematic study of human nature. Although Todd is the grandson of Paul Nizan, a celebrated Communist writer, and a youthful member of the French Communist Party, he soon shed a Marxist understanding of politics as the epiphenomena of class struggle and sought alternative models in the anthropological study of history. Perhaps it helped that he is also related to Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Todd ended up at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Peter Laslett supervised his doctoral study of peasant communities in preindustrial Europe. This was an important detour. Todd might seem in manner to be the model of a Left Bank intellectual who is viscerally opposed to “les Anglo-Saxons.” David Frum, the Bush staffer turned hack, once devoted a think tank blog post to sneering at Todd’s exquisite hair and reflexive skepticism about American power. Yet his thinking owed much more to Laslett’s wistful empiricism than to the antifoundational French Thought which once alarmed North American conservatives.
In his celebrated book, The World We Have Lost (1964), Laslett had argued that the key to past societies was less their economies than their distinctive family structures. Contrary to what Marxists claimed, it was not capitalism that had ripped apart the fabric of English life by subordinating it to market forces. In this telling, preindustrial England was already capitalist — what mattered was that its unit of production was the household of a nuclear family and its servants. Before the coming of factories, there were no faceless masses, few lonely people, and no social classes to speak of. Labor was intimate, rather than alienated, which did not make it any less exacting than modern work, merely different in kind. England’s patriarchal politics had followed its family structure: they reserved power to the tiny proportion of gentlemen whose horizons stretched beyond the villages in which they lived.
Laslett’s thesis reinforced Todd’s sympathy with the nineteenth-century French sociologists who had already found in the family a means of explaining the comparative political stability and economic vitality of European societies. In a series of voluminously documented books, Todd went on to chart elaborate homologies between political ideologies and family structures across not just Europe but the world. The republican triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity oscillated according to the relationships between fathers, sons, and siblings. Freedom flourished in societies such as England and the United States where most families were nuclear: children escaped from the authority of their parents and formed households of their own. Germany or Japan, where children had lived under the thumb of their parents in “stem families,” tended towards authoritarianism. The French Revolution had drawn its egalitarian inspiration from the Paris region, where families had divided up inheritances between siblings. Communitarian ideologies did best in societies such as Russia, where families had lived in large agricultural communes.
The Discrete Charms of Demography
France’s national institute for demographic study, which soon hired Todd to undertake such work, was a globally minded but thoroughly centrist body. When its founder Alfred Sauvy coined the term “the Third World,” he evoked the insurgent “Third Estate” whose demands had triggered the French Revolution. Yet the point of studying developing countries was to identify structures which could assist their integration into the global market. The institute also sought to benefit the domestic economy by determining the rate at which economic migrants should be admitted to France.
Todd recognized that his charts and maps could become a platform for prophetic interventions in public life. He made his name even before his arrival at the institute with his 1976 book, La Chute Finale (The Final Fall). This work marshaled stray but alarming indications of the Soviet world’s demographic problems — such as rising infant mortality and falling fertility, despite an absence of economic growth — to predict its collapse. Profile writers to this day mention it as an example of his prescience, even though the trends he identified no longer seem grave or permanent enough to explain the meltdown of the Eastern bloc.
After his lucky essay in Sovietology, Todd became better known as an analyst of France, who celebrated what he saw as the Hexagon’s uniquely complex weave of family systems and thus of ideologies. He regarded such diversity as positive, not least because it would militate against a nativist rejection of the North African economic migrants whose presence in France became a much-discussed phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s. Yet by the time he published Après la Démocratie (After Democracy) in 2008, he was fretting about social divides which threatened the coherence of the republic and the viability of its democracy. One of these was education. Todd had always regarded the spread of universal literacy as an engine of democratization and a potent solvent of prejudices and inequalities, especially between the sexes. But he came to lament the later twentieth-century expansion of higher education, which in France and other Western countries was introducing a rift between the 40 percent or so of citizens who had benefited from it and all the rest. Globalization exacerbated this divide, because people with higher education sided with the wealthy elite in the misguided hope of sharing in its gains.
Religion, however, was the prime agent of division. In 2015, Todd’s interest in it generated his most incendiary intervention in debates about France’s democracy. After terrorists in Paris killed the staff of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine and four Jewish shoppers and staff in the Hyper Cacher supermarket, mass marches took place throughout France. These proclaimed the unity and secularity of the republic and the right to freedom of speech — up to and including the blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad published by Charlie Hebdo. Several months later, Todd caused great offense by publishing Qui est Charlie? (Who is Charlie?), which interpreted the marches as the symptom of a “religious crisis.” He argued that they were dominated by the professional classes, by regions peripheral to the egalitarian core of France where more authoritarian family structures lingered, and — crucially — by former Catholics.
“Zombie Catholics”
Todd’s earlier work had always stressed the importance of religious divisions but put them second to his cartographies of the family. He viewed family structures as foundational to all ideologies, including religion. He noted that regions with authoritarian and inegalitarian family structures were under the sway of the Virgin Mary, whereas the Parisian region had long ago cast off the Church in favor of Marianne, the incarnation of republican liberty and reason. However, religious practice had collapsed since the 1960s, even in traditionally faithful regions. How then could Catholicism be a factor in the Charlie marches?
Todd’s answer was that even people who had abandoned their faith might still perpetuate its reactionary attitudes. Arguing that a religion can shape minds in its absence may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Charlie marchers skewed old and had been thoroughly socialized in the faith they abandoned. Todd called them “zombie Catholics.” His weakness for a zinging phrase makes them sound ghastlier than he perhaps intended, because he actually regarded the residual commitment of Catholic regions to social solidarity as an advantage in the age of neoliberal competition. The overrepresentation of the zombies in the Charlie marches exposed their hollowness: they were more concerned with maintaining France’s distribution of social power than with defending universal rights and freedoms.
If Catholicism’s implosion left the “zombies” relatively unscathed, French secularists did not fare anywhere near as well. Todd — an atheist himself — once believed that the French had coped with the death of God rather well. Life no longer had any meaning, but it carried on decently and comfortably enough. Yet it had now become clear to him that the “flying buttresses” of the Catholic Church had propped up atheism all along by giving it something to oppose.
Secularization bereaved well-educated and well-off secularists. Missing the thrill of metaphysical combat, they cast around for a new enemy to unite them. They found it in Islam — the religion of a marginalized minority in France, but one they now professed to see as a threat to Western civilization. Although the French critics of Charlie were right to allege that many of the correlations it drew between the marches and the past geography of religious allegiance and family structure were sloppy and lacking in causal power, its warnings about the rise and social anchorage of “Islamophobia” stand vindicated today — and not merely for France. In countries such as Britain, the conviction that Islam and Muslims pose a threat to Western societies differs from crasser forms of xenophobia in being a pathology of anxious elites, one spouted by newspaper columnists as often as it shouted by street brawlers.
Who’s Afraid of Russia?
“Russophobia” performs the same function in The Defeat of the West as “Islamophobia” did in Charlie. When this book gets translated into English, it will startle many readers with its fond portrait of Russia as the very model of a sovereign nation state. Casting an eye over its vital signs, Todd argues that the country compares favorably to the United States: its level of infant mortality is markedly lower and — if you subject the figures to judicious tweaking — it apparently trains more engineers, a distinctively French, almost Bonapartist criterion for a state’s success. Yes, Russia is a very authoritarian democracy, but there is no need to be too exercised about that: it has just the kind of polity you would expect its patriarchal and communitarian family patterns to generate. The important thing for him is that Russia is a “conservative” power largely content to live within its borders. It nurses no grand designs and its aging and stagnating population affords no demographic basis for expansion: Russia is not “interesting” in the “eyes of a geopolitician.”
Todd uses all the tools in his kit to cast Russia’s adversary as a “failed state.” Ukraine is a mess of different family types — what counts as laudable diversity in France becomes fragile artificiality here. Since the Orange Revolution of 2004, the rural West has tried to impose its peasant tongue on the urbanized and industrialized East, which naturally prefers the Russian language of science and high culture. Todd even takes Ukraine’s thriving trade in surrogate pregnancies as a sign of its imminent collapse, arguing that it shows a plummeting estimate of human life. Putin’s invasion becomes a preemptive strike to protect Russian speakers against the aggressive pawns of Washington. If the “suicidal” determination of the Ukrainians to subjugate the Crimea and the Donbass brought on the war, their “nihilism” has perpetuated it: conflict gives a rationale to their “levitating state,” which only Western subsidies keep aloft.
Todd’s Putin — an “intelligent” reader of world affairs, who gives “highly structured” speeches and outsmarts triflers like Emmanuel Macron with his “excellent” timing — bears little resemblance to the rambling spinner of historical fables who recently sat down with Tucker Carlson. Todd’s book gets more interesting when it moves from defending Russia’s war to asking why so many states came to see it as an existential matter for the West. It rightly criticizes the magical thinking which urged that sanctions would quickly collapse Russia’s war effort, or hoped that non-Western and nonaligned powers could be persuaded to enforce them. Even the United States does not have a sufficient industrial base to supply the Ukrainians with the tanks and shells that they would have needed to roll back Russian forces. So why the passion for this war?
Toward Point Zero
Once again Todd casts the West’s search for its enemies as the sign of a religious crisis. This time though, he points not to zombie Catholicism but to the implosion of Protestantism in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavian countries, who have been Ukraine’s cheerleaders in Europe. Writing for a French readership which imagines that its secular and republican model of state formation is normative, he emphasizes that states such as the United States and Great Britain had derived a sense of nationhood from the Bible long before the Bastille fell.
As a “good student” of Max Weber, he then adds the argument that their prosperity initially derived from Protestant habits of self-regulation and industry. No wonder, then, that their gradual but irreversible secularization is proving socially corrosive and politically destabilizing. Initially, this process strengthened democracy by producing a generation or two of “zombie Protestants,” who redirected their religious zeal toward the creation of welfare states. Even zombies, however, cannot live forever. “Phantasmal” Protestantism has given way to “point zero,” sweeping away what Todd wistfully regards as America’s once-benevolent WASP elite. It has been replaced by gangs of Washington insiders, whose only bond is their addiction to military grandstanding and the rentier profits of empire. Todd makes moralizing use of demographic data to suggest that dechristianization is sickening Protestant societies, as their godly industriousness degenerates into mere greed. The contrast between svelte Frenchmen and obese Americans suggests that the latter’s self-control has disappeared along with their God.
Weber would not have set so much store on waistlines. The breezy crudity with which Todd discusses Christianity blunts his insistence on its importance. For instance, his choice of gay marriage and the acceptance of transgender people as indicators of its passing is strangely arbitrary (not to mention echoing Russian diatribes against Western decadence). The emphasis on dechristianization is also inconsistent: he does not explain why it has not shaken Russia — where Orthodoxy is just as much in suspension — to the same extent.
All the same, Todd is surely right that societies flounder without the kind of public doctrine that churches once provided. It allows him to give a particularly shrewd account of the United Kingdom. He sees its Lilliputian bellicosity as a desperate attempt to revive its vanished standing as an elect nation. Although an inveterate enemy of the single currency and the neoliberal European Union, Todd is unimpressed by Brexit, which he presents as a symptom of a fraying Britishness, rather than a revival of it. Its leaders have fled this disarray by posturing as defenders of the West, even though decades of deindustrialization have so sapped its military that they cannot even emulate the French and make themselves “hated in Africa.” Boris Johnson embraced and armed Volodymyr Zelensky with an alacrity that surprised even the Americans.
From Ukraine to Gaza
While The Defeat of the West is less scientific and more anecdotal than Todd’s earlier books, it remains thoroughly “anthropological” in its insistence on the power of a political unconscious. To understand the decisions of individual politicians, one should consider the unseen and deep-seated structures that influence them. The risk of such an approach is that the analyst will find in the unconscious whatever they find amusing or convenient to put there. Todd’s book contains too many examples of such whimsy to mention. Let one example stand for many: he speculates that Antony Blinken’s Jewish roots in antisemitic Ukraine might be motivating him to keep it embroiled in a ruinous war as a “just punishment” for persecuting his ancestors. Todd’s references to his own Jewish ancestry hardly excuse such conspiratorial flourishes.
Todd has often essentialized and overdetermined the world as he finds it, a tendency evident in The Defeat of the West. His admittedly gripping portrait of America and Europe’s post-Christian nihilism is so overwhelming that it leaves little space for solutions. Only the Germans inspire him with some hope. Although Todd has always classed Germany as an authoritarian society and disliked its efforts to foist economic austerity on the European Union, he loathes American power more. He has long hoped that Germany might shed its status as an “inert” nation and team up with the Russians to break NATO’s hold over Europe, which has allowed America to “robotize” its political and economic elites. Todd impatiently anticipates Ukraine’s defeat primarily because it might reopen the opportunity for such an alliance, which seems neither a very plausible nor inviting prospect.
Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, it seems unlikely to vindicate Todd’s fading reputation as a prophet. For all their confused values and stuttering economies, European societies remain stronger and wealthier than his gloomy prognostications or his loaded comparisons with Russia allow. Perhaps the “nihilism” and the “narcissism” which characterize their politics are in the eye of the beholder. By contrast, the war in Gaza, which began just as Todd wrote the coda to his book, is vindicating some of its wilder flourishes. The unconditional support of America’s elderly political elite for Israel’s invasion does indeed suggest they are in the grip of a psychic crisis which finds expression in a “need for violence.” The “childish simplicity” with which President Biden likened Israel to Ukraine as beleaguered bastions of freedom show how quickly Western values can become discredited by their addled defenders. The “irrational” commitment of America’s military materiel to the destruction of Gaza’s cities — which met with the protracted, if uneasy, acquiescence of its European allies and the mainstream media — suggests that all is not well with the West.
