婴儿死亡率, 中国为4.9‰，俄罗斯 4.4‰, 美国 5.6‰
西方人说西方正在自杀
这些年，美西方所谓战略界一些人最怕听到“东升西降”。美国政客也是张口闭口“中国不要赌美国输”。问题是，“东升”不是中国人吹出来的，“西降”也不是西方人怕就能躲得开的。一时强弱在于力，千秋胜负在于理。一边是行大道、利天下，另一边是谋霸权、薅羊毛，孰优孰劣明摆着。
▲ 世界正在见证西方“灯塔”倒塌
近期，法国知名历史作家、人类学家托德（Emmanuel Todd）在新作《西方的失败》中直言西方因“自杀”而非“他杀”走向衰落，在法国乃至欧洲引发热议。西方主流媒体一边倒地批评托德“亲俄反美”“虚假宣传”，而广大网民却好评如潮，认为其“打破信息茧房”“发人深省”。早在1976年，托德就曾在《最后的坠落》一书中预言苏联解体，并因此在西方名声大噪。近50年过去，他的观点能否再次应验？不妨一观。
▲ 《西方的失败》，作者埃马纽埃尔·托德（Emmanuel Todd）
? 一、西方不配代言“自由民主”
西方阵营顽固坚持主观道德优越感，自诩“自由民主旗手”，但事实并非如此。狭义西方指“自由民主”的发源地，即英国（1688年光荣革命）、美国（1776年独立战争）和法国（1789年法国大革命）。广义西方则涵盖率先实现经济教育腾飞的国家，也可视作“美国权力体系”的代称，这才是政界媒体眼中的西方。
▲ 1899年4月，美国《法官》杂志刊登漫画《白人的负担》，英美两国的拟人化形象背着其他种族跨过“迷信”“野蛮”“堕落”“无知”等等阻碍，实现“文明使命”。
产生过法西斯、纳粹和军国主义的西方并非生而“自由”，通过全球化剥削压榨别国的西方也早就谈不上“民主”。当今最时髦的历史学主题之一就是奴隶制，欧洲人和美国人必须为自己犯下的滔天罪行赎罪。
? 二、权力“寡头化”加剧政治僵局
高等教育资源的有限性催生了掌握更多资源的精英阶层，与此同时中产阶级却在全球化进程中大幅萎缩。两种现象相互作用，导致西方国家权力寡头化和社会极化不断加剧。财富加速向塔尖人群集中，占人口1%或0.1%的寡头和占人口10%的精英形成近乎封闭的特权圈层，地位和利益不断巩固。
2006年，即大衰退前夕，美国的基尼系数（指判断收入分配公平程度的指标）为0.470，超过贫富差距过大的警戒水平；大衰退十年后的2021年，美国的基尼系数达到0.494，再创历史新高。
▲ 2022年7月，美国亚利桑那州凤凰城，无家可归者在道路两边的帐篷里躲避高温。
? 三、经济虚化掏空霸权物质基础
美国一手推动的全球化摧毁了自身的工业霸权。1945年，美国的工业产值曾占世界45%，2019年则已降至16.8%，而中国所占份额2020年升至28.7%。俄罗斯及白俄罗斯的经济规模仅为西方的3.3%，却能生产比西方更多的武器弹药，充分暴露西方实力虚空。
▲ 在美国，许多过去风光无限的工业城市早已沦为“锈带”。
美国人口虽是俄罗斯的两倍多，但培养的工程师却少33%。截至2019年，美国从国外引进的科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）人才多达250万，占STEM人才总数的23.1%。美国GDP泡沫虚高，实体经济贡献度仅约20%。美国农产品出口滑坡，未来10至20年可能随人口增长转变为粮食进口国。
美国医疗开支虽高达GDP的18.8%，但人均寿命预期却每况愈下，2021年降至76.3岁，比法国低6岁；婴儿死亡率2020年达5.4/千人，高于所有其他西方国家甚至俄罗斯。婴儿死亡率是反映一个社会深层次状况的重要指数。当年我正是通过观察苏联婴儿死亡率的上升，以及苏联停止公布有关统计数据，得出了“苏联已经走向末路”的判断。
▲ 2023年9月，曾成功预言2008年金融危机的美国知名经理人、金融评论员彼得·席夫警告称，美国经济“将面临悲剧性结局”。
美国还深陷“美元诅咒”，印钞举债“饮鸩止渴”成瘾，经济脱实向虚、寄生成性，积重难返，再工业化举步维艰。
? 四、宗教退场导致礼崩乐坏
西方崛起很大程度得益于新教的崛起。随着新教及其积极的伦理观在西方社会基本退场，留下信仰虚无主义黑洞，正在造成系统性影响。
二是身份解构瓦解政治动员力。“国家信念”解体、人口结构多元化和社会原子化，导致统治阶级失去统一连贯的精神内核和集体动员能力。
三是“政治正确”助长歪风横行。跨性别意识形态等“政治正确”在西方大行其道，加剧社会反智和反真相趋势，严重挫伤西方作为军事盟友和外交伙伴的可信度。
▲ 2023年4月，一名儿童在美国印第安纳州枪支展会上"试枪"。
四是精神黑洞加剧社会暴力。虚无主义助长破坏冲动，美国枪支暴力、凶杀抢劫、毒品药品滥用等问题积重难返，欧洲社会“造反有理”、治安滑坡愈演愈烈。在国际事务中，这种虚无主义意识形态正在把美国履行承诺的原则本身变成一种过时的、消极的东西。正因如此，美国对别国的背叛成为常态。
? 五、内衰外扩透支实力信誉
? 六、西方衰落内卷内耗加剧
美国虽保留了帝国的军事机器，但其精神内核已经随新教退场而消亡，西方进入“后帝国时代”。美国实力、霸权下行，越来越倚重其权力基本盘，加大对盟友的压榨和控制，2021年美国对盟友贸易逆差达到3930亿美元，依赖盟友系统性“供养”格局形成。
▲ 2014年，立陶宛民众围观美国液化天然气（LNG）运输船到港。2022年起，欧洲成为美国LNG的主要买家。
帝国之后：美国秩序的崩溃
是法国人口统计学家和社会学家伊曼纽尔·托德(Emmanuel Todd)于2001年出版的一本书。在书中，托德审视了现代美国的根本弱点，从而得出结论认为美国正在迅速失去其在经济、军事和意识形态方面对世界舞台的控制。托德预测美国，作为现时全球唯一超级大国，将衰落。
1976年苏联解体预言
1976年，25岁的托德因预测了苏联的垮台引起了人们的注意，因此在20世纪70年代后期托德被广泛称为“反共主义者”。在《帝国之后》出版后，他也被攻击为“反美主义者”一样。不过托德对这些标签嗤之以鼻，他将自己描述为历史学家和人类学家。他指促使他写作《帝国之后》的动机是他作为历史学家对世界现况的关注，而不是政治狂热。2002年，托德认为美国将重蹈1970年代对苏联犯下的同样错误，耗费资源在侵略及军事活动的扩张。
冷战后的地缘政治气候
托德写道，在美国主要对手苏联突然解体之后，美国成为一个绝对帝国，但这种情况不是出于战略胜利，而是出于偶然。 随著经济全球化，美国沉迷于利用流入的资本进行炫耀性的奢侈消费，同时国家债务越来越多。托德认为由于过度的军备开支、不平等和国内的不满，美国事实上就像一个摇摇欲坠的罗马帝国。为了防止其债权人追债，美国需要做的就是挥舞大棒。[2]托德写道︰“真正的美国太弱了，除了可以对付军事侏儒之外无法与任何人抗衡， 这就是为什么美国只对朝鲜、古巴和伊拉克等国家充满敌意，因为这些国家只是欠发达国家，而且早已因为数十年的经济制裁而疲惫不堪。这种“代表很少或没有军事风险的冲突”允许美国军队在全世界的存在。此外，由于媒体的戏剧性报导，给了美国人一个基本事实完成不同的现实。[1]托德认为，美国无法直接挑战一个军事上更强大的国家。他写道︰“当今世界只有一个对全球稳定的威胁，那就是美国本身。它曾经是世界的保护者，但现在却是掠夺者。
三个因素表明西方转向衰落
埃马纽埃尔·托德认为“西方已被打败的论断基于三个因素：首先是美国工业存在不足以及美国的经济表现是虚假的。我在书中去除了美国国内生产总值虚高的部分，并指出了美国工业衰退的深刻原因：工程师培训不足，以及自1965年以来教育水平的普遍下降。第二个重要因素是美国新教的消失。”
德国《世界报》网站1月21日刊登题为《“三个因素表明西方已被打败”》的文章，作者是亚历山大·德韦基奥。全文摘编如下：
原文提要：1976年，法国历史学家和人类学家埃马纽埃尔·托德预测了苏联的解体。现在，这位“预言家”再次展望未来世界——我们只能希望他这次错了。
亚历山大·德韦基奥问：您说您的新书《西方的衰落》源于您一年前接受法国《费加罗报》的采访，当时访谈的题目是“第三次世界大战已经开始”。您现在确认西方失败，但乌克兰战争尚未结束。
埃马纽埃尔·托德答：没错，但西方不再相信乌克兰能取得战争的胜利。我开始写这本书时，并非所有人都清楚这一点。但在夏季反攻失败以及人们意识到美国和其他北约成员国无法向乌克兰提供足够的武器后，美国国防部也会同意我的观点。我关于西方已被打败的论断基于三个因素：首先是美国工业存在不足以及美国的经济表现是虚假的。我在书中去除了美国国内生产总值虚高的部分，并指出了美国工业衰退的深刻原因：工程师培训不足，以及自1965年以来教育水平的普遍下降。第二个重要因素是美国新教的消失。我的书基本上是马克斯·韦伯《新教伦理与资本主义精神》一书的延续。
问：它在什么程度上是续篇？
答：韦伯在第一次世界大战爆发前不久的1914年正确地认识到，西方的崛起主要源于新教世界在英国、美国、普鲁士统一的德国和斯堪的纳维亚半岛的崛起。法国当时的幸运之处在于，它的地理位置与这一领先群体比邻。新教带来了人类历史上前所未有的高水平教育。它还带来了全民扫盲，因为它要求每个信徒都能自己阅读《圣经》。此外，人们还害怕被诅咒，需要能够感到自己是上帝的选民。这导致了一种职业道德以及强烈的个人和集体道德观。然而从消极的角度看，它也导致了有史以来最严重的种族主义——在美国针对黑人，在德国针对犹太人，新教宣称的“选民”和“弃民”与天主教的人人平等正相反。与此相应的是，新教最近的崩溃造成了知识分子的衰落、职业道德的下降和大众的普遍贪婪。西方的崛起正在转为衰落。
问：第三个因素是什么？
答：世界其他地区更青睐俄罗斯。俄罗斯在世界各地都找到了谨慎的经济盟友。当人们意识到莫斯科能够承受经济冲击时，俄罗斯新的保守软实力开始高速运转。在世界其他地区看来，我们的文化现代性在很大程度上是疯狂的。由于我们依靠前第三世界男女老幼的廉价劳动为生，我们的道德是不可信的。在这本书中，我希望避免我们周遭的情绪化和持续的道德评判，应该对地缘政治局势进行冷静的分析。
问：我们真的可以将之称为一场世界大战吗？俄罗斯真的已经赢了吗？我们目前不如说处于一种现状……
答：美国人会尝试达到一种能够掩盖自身失败的现状。但俄罗斯人不会允许这样。他们不仅知道自己目前在工业和军事上的优势，也清楚自己未来在人口上的劣势。普京希望在节省人力的情况下实现自己的战争目标。他希望将稳定俄罗斯社会所取得的成果保留下来。他不想让俄罗斯再次军事化，并高度重视推动俄罗斯的经济发展。然而，普京也知道，人口低谷的几年即将到来，几年后部队征兵肯定会变得更加困难。因此，俄罗斯现在就必须解决掉乌克兰和北约，不能让它们有喘息的机会。我们不要自欺欺人：俄罗斯人还会变本加厉。
问：您的意思是什么？
答：西方拒绝从逻辑、动机和优劣势等方面真正思考俄罗斯的战略，这导致了普遍的盲目性。从军事角度看，对乌克兰和西方而言最坏的情况尚未到来。俄罗斯当然希望征服乌克兰40%的领土，并在基辅建立一个傀儡政权。如果普京宣布敖德萨为俄罗斯城市，我们的电视节目仍会声称前线正趋于稳定。
这位预言家学者现在预见到西方的失败
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-decline-west.html
2024 年 3 月 9 日
克里斯托弗·考德威尔 作者：克里斯托弗·考德威尔
考德威尔先生是《观点》撰稿人，也是《权利时代：六十年代以来的美国》一书的作者。
“如果这个房间里有人认为普京会在乌克兰停留，我向你保证，他不会，”拜登总统在周四晚的国情咨文演讲中表示。 他在欢迎北约最新成员国瑞典首相乌尔夫·克里斯特松时补充道，欧洲“处于危险之中”。
但拜登也表示，他仍然“决心”不需要美国士兵来保卫欧洲。 正如白宫发言人上周所说，使用地面部队的可能性“非常明确”。
克里斯特森先生一定是头晕目眩。 俄罗斯进一步入侵的前景是美国将北约拉入战争以及吸引瑞典等新成员国加入北约的最有力论据。 但如果这种入侵确实令人担忧，那么地面部队几乎肯定会成为美国及其盟友的一个选择。
正当人们期望北约参与俄罗斯-乌克兰战争的理由变得更加清晰的时候，它的理由却变得越来越模糊。
这是个问题。 欧洲人和美国人一样，厌倦了战争。 他们越来越怀疑乌克兰能否获胜。 但也许最重要的是，他们不信任美国，美国在这场战争中几乎没有采取任何行动来消除二十年前在伊拉克战争期间产生的对其动机和能力的怀疑。 尽管美国人有时认为他们的两极分化是独一无二的，但所有西方社会都有一个版本。 在欧洲“精英”看来，北约正在打一场反击俄罗斯入侵的战争。 但在“民粹主义者”看来，美国精英正在领导一场战争，以击退对其自身霸权的挑战——无论附带损害如何。
美国的领导力正在失败：这是一本古怪的新书的论点，自一月份以来，这本书一直稳居法国畅销书排行榜的榜首。 它被称为"La Défaite de l'Occident”（"西方的失败"）。 该书的作者伊曼纽尔·托德 (Emmanuel Todd) 是一位著名的历史学家和人类学家，他于 1976 年在一本名为《最终的堕落》的书中利用婴儿死亡率统计数据预测苏联即将崩溃。
从那时起，托德先生所写的有关时事的文章在欧洲往往被视为预言。 他的著作《帝国之后》于 2002 年出版，该书预言了“美国秩序的崩溃”，当时正值 9/11 事件后国家凝聚力达到顶峰，伊拉克战争崩溃之前，托德先生对这场战争感到强烈不满。 反对。 作为一名英语母语者（他的博士学位来自剑桥）和亲英派（至少在他职业生涯的开始阶段），他对美国的幻想逐渐破灭，甚至反美。
托德是美国介入乌克兰事务的批评者，但他的论点并不是我们现在所熟悉的持不同政见的政治学家约翰·米尔斯海默（John Mearsheimer）提出的历史论点。 与米尔斯海默一样，托德对比尔·克林顿和乔治·W·布什总统领导下的北约的热心扩张、促进民主的新保守主义意识形态以及官方对俄罗斯的妖魔化提出了质疑。 但他对美国介入乌克兰的怀疑更深了。 他认为美帝国主义不仅危害了世界其他国家，也腐蚀了美国的品格。
在过去一年的采访中，托德表示，西方人过于关注战争的一个意外：乌克兰有能力对抗俄罗斯规模大得多的军队。 但还有一个被低估的惊喜：俄罗斯有能力反抗美国试图摧毁俄罗斯经济的制裁和扣押。 即使有西欧盟友的支持，美国也缺乏让世界上新的大型经济参与者保持一致的影响力。 印度利用了俄罗斯能源的甩卖价格。 中国向俄罗斯提供了受制裁商品和电子元件。
然后，事实证明，美国及其欧洲盟国的制造基地不足以向乌克兰提供稳定战争所需的物资（特别是火炮），更不用说赢得战争了。 美国不再有能力兑现其外交政策承诺。
人们等待这一刻已经有一段时间了，但并不是所有人都像托德先生那样远离权力走廊。 拜登在 2017 年的回忆录中提到，巴拉克·奥巴马总统曾警告他“不要向乌克兰政府做出过度承诺”。 现在我们明白为什么了。
托德先生认为，美国人不经意地投入全球经济是一个错误。 其他作者可能会熟悉他的部分案例：美国生产的汽车比 20 世纪 80 年代少； 它生产的小麦较少。 但他的部分案例涉及更深层次、长期的文化史
fts 常年与繁荣联系在一起。 我们过去称其为颓废。
托德先生认为，在像我们这样先进、受过高等教育的社会中，太多人渴望从事管理事物和发号施令的工作。 他们想成为政治家、艺术家、管理者。 这并不总是需要学习智力上复杂的东西。 “从长远来看，教育的进步带来了教育的衰落，”他写道，“因为它导致了那些有利于教育的价值观的消失。”
托德先生计算出，美国培养的工程师数量比俄罗斯少，不仅是人均数量，而且是绝对数量。 它正在经历“内部人才流失”，因为年轻人从高要求、高技能、高附加值的职业转向法律、金融和各种仅仅在经济中转移价值的职业，在某些情况下甚至可能摧毁经济 。 （例如，他要求我们考虑阿片类药物行业的破坏。）
在托德看来，西方将其工业基地外包的决定不仅仅是糟糕的政策，而且是错误的。 这也是一个剥削世界其他地区的计划的证据。 但增加利润并不是美国在世界上所做的唯一事情——它还传播自由主义价值观体系，这些价值观通常被描述为普遍人权。 作为家庭人类学专家，托德先生警告说，美国人目前传播的许多价值观并不像美国人想象的那么普遍。
例如，英美家庭结构传统上比世界上几乎任何其他地方的家庭结构都没有那么重男轻女。 随着美国的现代化，它开始拥护一种性和性别模式，这种模式与传统文化（如印度）和更父权制的现代文化（如俄罗斯）的模式不太协调。
托德先生不是一个说教者。 但他坚持认为，传统文化对西方的各种进步倾向有很多恐惧，并且可能会抵制在外交政策上与支持它们的人结盟。 同样，在冷战期间，苏联官方的无神论对许多本来可能倾向于共产主义的人来说是一个破坏性的因素。
托德先生确实认为我们的某些价值观是“非常消极的”。 他提供的证据表明西方并不重视年轻人的生命。 半个世纪前，拜登领导下的美国婴儿死亡率（5.4%）高于普京领导下的俄罗斯，比首相文雄领导下的日本高出三倍。 岸田。
虽然托德先生对性问题不做任何评判，但他对智力问题却有评判性。 在乌克兰战争的每一次转折点上，他都无法区分事实和愿望，这让他感到震惊。 在托德先生看来，美国在战争初期希望中国能够在针对俄罗斯的制裁制度中进行合作，从而帮助美国改进一种有朝一日针对中国本身的武器，这是一种“痴心妄想”。
对于研究越南战争的学生来说，托德先生的书中有很多内容让人回想起历史学家洛伦·巴里茨 (Loren Baritz) 1985 年的经典著作《适得其反》(Backfire)，该书利用流行文化、爱国神话和管理理论来解释是什么导致美国在越南战争中误入歧途。 越南。 巴里茨总结道：“越南的问题出在我们身上。” 巴里茨反思道，如果林登·约翰逊能够将自己的意志强加于越南人，“整个文化就会因美国人内心的善良而被彻底摧毁。”
人们经常在报纸上看到弗拉基米尔·普京对西方秩序构成威胁。 或许。 但西方秩序面临的更大威胁是其统治者的傲慢。
基于价值观进行战争需要良好的价值观。 它至少需要就所传播的价值观达成一致，而美国距离达成这样的一致比其历史上任何时候都更加遥远，甚至比内战前夕还要遥远。 有时，似乎没有国家原则，只有党派原则，双方都坚信对方不仅试图管理政府，而且还试图夺取国家政权。
在出现一些新的共识之前，拜登总统歪曲了他的国家，将其描绘成足够稳定和团结，足以承诺任何事情。 乌克兰人正在付出高昂的代价来学习这一点。
西方的失败？ 伊曼纽尔·托德和俄乌战争
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
现年 72 岁的伊曼纽尔·托德是少数几个预测苏联解体的人之一。 在《La chute Finale: Essai sur la Deposition de la sphere soviétique》（1976）中，他分析了婴儿死亡率、自杀率、经济生产率和其他指标，得出的结论是，苏联的长期停滞很快就会崩溃。
现在，在《La Défaite de l’Occident》（Gallimard，384 页，2024 年 1 月出版）中，托德将相同的法证数据分析应用于俄罗斯、乌克兰和西方。 他的结论是，俄罗斯将成功实现其战争目标，而西方正在走向失败——与其说是由于战争，不如说是由于其自身的“自我毁灭”。
在法国，托德的书受到了媒体的关注，就像名人一样：在高雅的电视讨论节目中进行长篇采访，获得了数十万的浏览量。 尽管《世界报》将他斥为“一位闭着眼睛的先知”，“不是第一个在法国传播克里姆林宫宣传的人”，但托德坚称自己不是普京亲信者。 他的分析是一位长期历史学家的分析，他以意识形态超然的态度来考虑长期趋势。
普京为何选择2022年2月发起“特别军事行动”？ 托德给出了两个答案。 首先，俄罗斯已经做好了准备。 自 2014 年因俄罗斯吞并克里米亚而实施制裁以来，俄罗斯一直在增强其军事能力（包括北约无法匹敌的高超音速导弹）和面向未来的经济，发展“伟大的技术、经济和社会能力”。 灵活性：需要认真对待的对手”。
其次，根据出生率和动员队列，托德得出结论，普京看到了击败乌克兰并击退北约的五年机会。 到 2027 年，有资格服兵役的男性人数将会太少。 托德坚称，俄罗斯在征服乌克兰后入侵欧洲只是“幻想和宣传”的内容。"事实是，人口不断减少、领土面积达 1700 万平方公里的俄罗斯根本不想征服新领土，她最想知道的是如何继续占领她已经拥有的领土。”
托德表示，人口因素也会影响俄罗斯的战争行为。 最初，俄罗斯在面积 60 万平方公里的国家仅部署了 12 万军队。（与苏联 1968 年入侵捷克斯洛伐克相比：面积 128,000 平方公里，军队 500,000 人）与许多西方评论家青睐的说法相反，俄罗斯当前的军事战略并不是将数百万人投入斯大林格勒绞肉机。 这场战争正在缓慢而有条不紊地进行，以尽量减少损失。 托德指出了车臣军团和瓦格纳民兵在冲突早期阶段发挥的重要作用，以及动员：部分、渐进、谨慎实施。“俄罗斯的首要任务不是征服尽可能多的领土，而是损失最少的人员。”
普京在国内的持续受欢迎并不令托德感到意外。 托德利用自杀率和酗酒相关死亡率，展示了普京时代的社会稳定。 一个特别重要的指标是婴儿死亡率：2000 年为 19%，2020 年为 4.4%, 低于美国的 5.4%。对于大多数俄罗斯公民来说，生活水平从未如此高。
在托德看来，俄罗斯将被经济战争击败的观点是接管西方政策制定和规划的律师和会计师散布的错觉。 制裁有赖于全球合作。 但许多国家对俄罗斯与北约的对抗漠不关心，并对战争给它们带来的代价感到不满，不愿意合作，也不愿意协助向俄罗斯输送重要设备以及从俄罗斯输送碳氢化合物。
尽管（或由于？）制裁，俄罗斯经济已经反弹。 以小麦产量为例：2012年为3700万吨，2020 年为 80 万吨。（美国的产量从 1980 年的 6500 万吨下降到 2022 年的 47 万吨。）如果俄罗斯和白俄罗斯的 GDP 合计占西方国家（美国、加拿大、欧盟、 英国、日本、韩国）——能够在武器生产方面超过西方，那么整个GDP概念就必须重新考虑。 更严重的后果是，由于武器供应短缺，乌克兰正在输掉战争。
至于乌克兰，很少有人预料到，一个饱受腐败困扰、寡头控制的“失败国家”会发起这样的斗争。 “没有人能预料到的是，它会在战争中找到存在的理由，为自己存在的理由。” 托德呈现出一个无法挽回的分裂的乌克兰，南部和东部地区很久以前就选择退出乌克兰国家计划。 他说，2010 年的总统选举以“简单得几乎令人不安”的方式展现了这种分歧。 为公关投票
俄罗斯人维克多·亚努科维奇在顿涅茨克、卢甘斯克和克里米亚的支持率分别为90.44%、88.96%和78.24%，但在西部省份利沃夫、捷尔诺波尔和伊万诺-弗兰科夫斯克只有8.60%、7.92%和7.02%。
对于托德来说，2014 年 5 月的总统选举——导致彼得罗·波罗申科当选——是一个转折点。 顿涅茨克的投票率仅为 15%； 卢甘斯克，25%。锚点[2]“这些选举标志着[俄语]地区从乌克兰政治体系中消失的时刻。” 这是“乌克兰民主制度的终结，事实上它从未发挥过作用”，也是“乌克兰民族的真正诞生，通过西方极端民族主义和中央无政府军国主义的联盟，反对亲俄派”。 国家的一部分。”
在 2022 年 2 月之前，俄罗斯向乌克兰提出了三项要求：永久保留克里米亚、保护顿巴斯讲俄语（或者用托德的话说，俄语）人口以及保持中立。 托德坚持认为，“一个确信自己在西欧的存在和命运的乌克兰国家会接受这些条件”； “它甚至会摆脱顿巴斯。” 回顾捷克斯洛伐克的友好解体，托德指出，这个较小的政体可以集中精力将自己建设为一个真正的乌克兰民族国家，得到所有人的认可。
托德声称，乌克兰重新征服顿巴斯并收复克里米亚的决心是“一个自杀计划”。 它试图“维护对另一个国家人民的主权——一个比它强大得多的国家”。 他继续说道：“自相矛盾的是，基辅战略中自杀式的缺乏现实主义表明，乌克兰对俄罗斯有一种病态的依恋：需要冲突，却又无法与之分离。”
至于西方，托德将其描述为自恋和傲慢，与“世界其他地方”脱节。 它的“意识形态上的孤独和对自身孤立的无知”是美国主导的全球化和侵略性外交政策二十年来的结果。 在对典型家庭结构以及文化和宗教忠诚的分析的支持下，托德对世界其他国家支持俄罗斯、蔑视美国主导的单极霸权和“自由国际秩序”并不感到惊讶。
托德表示，俄罗斯并不是主要的地缘政治问题。"对于不断减少的人口来说，面积太大了，她将无法控制地球，也没有任何愿望这样做……相反，这是一场西方 — — 更具体地说是美国 — — 的危机，一场末期危机， 地球的平衡陷入危险。”
随着马克龙总统现在提议带头推动欧洲对乌克兰的军事支持，伊曼纽尔·托德似乎与法国当权派产生了分歧。 他的书中有很多内容挑战了我们自己的政治和媒体中的主流叙事。
马克·波隆斯基 (Marc Polonsky) 是一家国际律师事务所的退休合伙人。 他的执业重点是对俄罗斯碳氢化合物和基础设施领域的投资。 所有法语译本都是他的。
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.
