Emmanuel Todd is a prolific French anthropologist and historian, a student of family structure and its role in political and economic development. He has always cast his net wide; in 1976 he published La Chute finale (The Final Fall), one of the few books to predict the near-term demise of the Soviet Union, which he deduced from its falling birth rate and other demographic statistics.
After the Empire first appeared in 2002 and became a bestseller in Europe. No doubt its unflattering description and grim predictions about the United States did not hurt sales. But as Todd insists in his introduction to the American edition, “it would be a mistake to think of me as one more ‘typical French intellectual’ carrying the same old anti-American virus that has infected so many Parisian intellectuals.” He trained as a scholar in England, his family is partly American, and he initially opposed the Maastricht Treaty and European unification. Quite rightly, Todd has no patience with reflexive, a priori anti-Americanism. Unfortunately, though, he sometimes leaves the impression that he believes there is no other kind. For example, on the book’s first page he describes America’s role in the world after World War II as “the guarantor of political freedom and economic order for half a century,” a judgment he occasionally repeats and never qualifies. Au contraire, as most Dissent readers know, at various times since 1945 the United States has strongly supported governments hostile to political freedom in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Zaire, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines; while American agribusiness and mining companies have wrought widespread economic and environmental havoc, tobacco exports pressed on unwilling countries by the Reagan administration under threat of trade sanctions will contribute to an estimated 50 million deaths in the first half of this century, and the forcing open of capital markets by the Clinton administration for the benefit of American financial institutions has left tens of millions of people in less developed countries without jobs, savings, or a social safety net. Still, Todd’s disinclination to dwell on (or, for the most part, even mention) these regrettable lapses should at least reassure thin-skinned American readers that he takes no pleasure in telling us the bad news.
The bad news is that America “has made foolish strategic choices, and … Americans must prepare for a reduction of their power and, most likely, of their standard of living.” A less-than-astonishing conclusion, perhaps, but Todd’s path to it is unusual. First he outlines a theory of modernization. One of the theory’s independent variables is literacy. Progress on this front, though uneven, is steady: universal literacy (expected for the younger half of the world’s population around 2030) is about as inevitable as any social outcome can be. As literacy rises, so do most indicators of political, economic, and gender equality, even though the transition is often mediated by revolutionary violence. Exogamy also increases, and fertility declines. “Economic development in Asia and Latin America today is linked almost automatically to educational development, just as it was in Europe between the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.”
Terrorism is a transitional phenomenon: “The move into modernity is frequently accompanied by an explosion of ideological violence.” Nevertheless, rising literacy rates and falling birth rates across most of the Islamic world guarantee that eventually these countries too will achieve political and economic modernity. The current American “obsession with Islam,” Todd argues, derives from various peculiarities of our own situation.
Todd’s other independent variable is family structure. Traditional family relations and other anthropological features determine the forms that modernity will assume in each society. Drawing on his earlier work (The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems, 1985), Todd sketches some correspondences. Anglo-Saxon liberalism derives from the relative independence of children from parents and from the inequality among brothers reflected in primogeniture. Equal inheritance among brothers produces French republican universalism. German authoritarianism results from a combination of paternalism and sibling inequality; Russian communism from the egalitarian patrimonialism of the Muzhiks. Arab family structure is complicated, featuring strong vertical and horizontal linkages among fathers and married sons, low status for women, and endogamy, resulting in an egalitarian and communitarian ethos but a weak state. All these correspondences help explain the apparent “clash of civilizations” during the present period of transition to modernity. But Huntington is only superficially correct; fundamentally, Fukuyama has the right idea, even though he wrongly identifies economics rather than education and demographics as the agent of progress toward a “democratic convergence.” “If,” Todd concludes, “we take into account, on the one hand, the diversity of traditional family customs in the original peasant world – the anthropological variable – and on the other hand, the universal advance of literacy – the historical variable – we can grasp simultaneously the unique direction of history and the diversity of particular phenomena.”
Very interesting; but what does it all have to do with empire? This: after the end of history, remember, there is no place for heroic prowess or contests for mastery – in short, for empire. War between liberal, capitalist democracies is, after all, unthinkable. If Todd and Fukuyama are correct, “the United States would have to become just one liberal democracy among others, scale back its military machine, retire from its geostrategic activities, and humbly accept the gratitude of the rest of the planet for its long years of exemplary service.” But this is just what the US is unwilling to do. Not, however, because we are too strong and proud, lusting for global dominion. The opposite is true: the United States is too weak to abandon militarism. We lost our economic primacy long ago and have foolishly tried to compensate by a combination of financial gamesmanship and “theatrical micromilitarism,” or military bluff. Rhetorical crusades against “terrorism” and “rogue states” are ideological ploys to keep our allies mobilized, since “economically dependent, America requires a minimum level of global disorder in order to justify its politico-military presence in the Old World.”
What lies behind Todd’s perception of American weakness? By around 1970 Europe and Japan had more or less recovered from the Second World War and were becoming economically competitive with the United States, which had recently wasted enormous resources in Southeast Asia. The US responded by reneging on the Bretton Woods regime: going off the gold standard, establishing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and turning the IMF into a global enforcer for Wall Street. Among its other benefits, this move conveniently positioned us to capture the flood of petrodollars that followed the oil price rises soon afterward.* The savage Volcker interest rate hikes later in the decade further weakened the US manufacturing sector and strengthened the financial sector. The Reagan years saw American companies flee abroad in droves.
The end of the Cold War presented the US with a fateful choice. We could relinquish the artificial financial advantages that kept money flowing into Wall Street even as foreign demand stagnated, American industry declined, and the American trade deficit grew. This would have meant military retrenchment and a period of economic austerity, but it would have restored our competitiveness, allowing for reindustrialization on a solid basis and with a more evenly distributed prosperity. But we didn’t. Instead, after declining through most of the decade, military budgets began increasing in the late ‘90s. Was this a deliberate decision by America’s rulers to go for empire rather than rejoin an international community of equals?
No, says Todd, they just … blew it. “The American ruling class is even more rudderless and clueless than its European counterparts.”
Choosing to remain a leading nation rather than become an empire would have been by far the better long-term strategy for the United States. Moreover, it would have been far easier to achieve in America given the continental proportions of the country and the centrality of its investment system. But it would have required a lot of organizational and regulatory hard work on the part of the administration. Most important, it would have necessitated an energy policy combined with a protectionist economic policy to defend industry. At the same time, this two-pronged domestic policy would have had as an external counterpart a multilateral foreign policy to encourage other nations and regions to move toward economic autonomy beneficial to all. Reinvigorating developed economies on a regionalist basis would have permitted offering practical help to developing countries in the form of debt forgiveness in exchange for the return of protectionism. A worldwide plan of this sort would have made the United States the world’s undeniable and definitive leader. But thinking it all up and putting it into action would have been so tiring.
The US could turn away from its current form of imperialism by engaging in a massive redistribution of wealth within its borders and seek paths to surplus absorption through … dramatic improvements in public education and repair of aging infrastructures. An industrial strategy to revitalize manufacturing would also help. But this would require even more deficit financing or higher taxation as well as heavy state direction, and this is precisely what the bourgeoisie will refuse to contemplate … Any politician who proposes such a package will almost certainly be howled down by the capitalist press and their ideologists and lose any election in the face of overwhelming money power.
Even more suicidal politically, within the US, would be to try to enforce by self-discipline the kind of austerity program that the IMF typically visits on others. And any attempt by external powers to do so (by capital flight and collapse of the dollar, for example) would surely elicit a savage US political, economic, and even military response. … This is where the huge modernization program within China … may have a critical role to play in siphoning off the surplus capitals of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. … The consequent diminution of the flow of funds for the US could have calamitous consequences.
*Peter Gowan argues in The Global Gamble (Verso, 1999) that Nixon colluded with our Saudi clients to raise oil prices in order to deal a blow to the Europeans and Japanese, more heavily dependent on imported oil.