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October 26, 2003
Review: Not a golden future
THE sub-title of the book, ‘An Essay on the Decomposition of the American System’, and its opening sentence, ‘The United States is in the process of becoming a problem for the world’, sets out the subject matter and approach of the book.
The argument of the book can be summed up as follows:
Once the world’s leading industrial power, today the United States’ industrial production is less than Europe’s and scarcely larger than that of Japan. The growth of its trade deficit from $100 billion in 1990 to $450 billion in 2000 indicates the extent to which the American economy and life-styles are becoming dependent on imported goods. The US has been meeting these ballooning deficits through the huge volume of foreign capital ($865 billion in 2001) that pours into the country every year, attracted by the dollar. If and when this influx of funds dries up, the dollar will cease to be the ‘magic money’ and will collapse as will confidence in the American economy (shaken already by the Enron and similar corporate scandals).
On the broader plane, America’s policy is no longer inspired by a universal ideal but is increasingly self-centred (rejection of the ban on anti-personnel mines, the protocol on gas emissions, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court) and inegalitarian (at home, continued deprivation of the black population; abroad, anti-Arab prejudice).
It allows the Middle East conflict to fester, when it has the absolute power to impose a settlement. The notion of the United States as the ‘indispensable nation’, the power responsible for maintaining the world’s peace and security is nothing but an American illusion.
In fact, says Todd, by targeting relatively weak countries, exaggerating the terrorist threat, achieving easy videogame-like victories, America indulges in a ‘theatrical micro-militarism’ that serves only to underline its military weakness and inability to assert world domination. Why, the author asks in a rhetorical question does the United States behave in this way — is it because it is an all-powerful superpower or on the contrary, because it fears that the new world that is in the making, will no longer be under American control?
It is Todd’s thesis that the world is at present in a crisis of transition. The third world is moving towards democracy and modernization as literacy spreads and population growth slows in the developing countries — the two essential elements of modernization. The process of mental modernization always provokes a fundamentalist reaction and explosions of ideological violence. This was witnessed in Europe in the past, which had its ayatollahs in the shape of Luther and Calvin and during the bloodletting of the French and Russian revolutions and the civil war in England.
Something of the same sort is going on today in Muslim countries. Iran, Todd affirms, is a case in point: during two decades of ideological excess and violent struggle, the country managed to achieve a high level of literacy and to lower fertility rates. Today Iran is on the way to democratic stability (even if America refuses to believe it). A number of other Muslim countries have also made the transition.
Of those that have not yet done so or are only now starting on the road to ‘mental modernization’, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will for at least the coming two decades, remain zones of the greatest upheaval and danger. (As for Pakistan, it is the United States itself — at the same time fireman and arsonist, in the author’s words — that must share the blame for its prevailing instability and the virulence of its Islamism).
The new world that is emerging, the author concludes, will not be the empire of a sole superpower, but a complex world in which countries of unequal strength and status would exist in an equilibrium and be governed, not always on the democratic models of the West, but in non-totalitarian systems rooted in the will and consent of their people. The American ruling class, he says, is troubled by the prospect of a world in which the United States would be just another country, a democracy among other democracies and not, as former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, put it, ‘We are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We look farther into the future.’
The book is written in an angry, often biting, tone that may make it sound like another shot fired in the polemical battle that has been going on between France and America since the Iraq war. This would not be a fair assessment for Emmanuel Todd (himself of mixed American-Jewish parentage) backs up his argument with facts and figures and a keen analysis that ranges over historical precedents and anthropological and sociological factors. For instance, he supports his contention by pointing out that the higher the incidence of cousin marriages in a society the more readily it accepts authority.
Specially enlightening is his analysis of the peaceful transformation of the totalitarian Soviet empire (whose demise he had predicted in 1976 in a book entitled La Chute Finale [The Final Fall]) into a Russia moving towards a democratic order and market economy. He visualizes such a new Russia forming, along with Japan and the European Union, a Eurasian partnership that would be a counterweight to American hegemony.
Some of this may appear a little simplistic and the book’s conclusion too optimistic. By no means is it obvious that the world is moving towards an equilibrium based on democracy and peace. Too many unresolved disputes and the ever-widening North-South divide continue to threaten the world’s political and economic order. Some of Todd’s specific premises are equally open to question. Thus, America’s military ventures in Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of the world, cannot all be dumped in the same basket. Each was triggered by circumstances specific to the case and in some cases, as in Kosovo and the first Gulf war, had the support of the world community.
Todd condemns Russian excesses in Chechnya but condones the action on the ground that if Chechnya were lost, other ethnic regions would also go and Russia might break up — not a very plausible rationale for a blood-thirsty campaign to retain a 19th century conquest when the departure of the much larger and more authentically Russian province of Byelorussia had no such dire consequence.
In his strictures against the United States, Emmanuel Todd does not always make a distinction between American aims and objectives and the policies of the Bush administration. He does pay tribute, in a couple of sentences, to America’s intrinsic qualities, namely, attachment to the principle of political liberty and the flexibility of the American economy. The fact is that for good or ill, America will remain for a long time to come, the world’s sole superpower, a superpower whose policies are determined not only by its own ambitions and interests but distorted by the influence of lobbies both domestic and foreign (not the least effective of which is the pro-Israeli lobby, now strengthened by the support of the fundamentalist evangelicals).
One has to live with the fact that until the new world that Todd envisages takes shape, the world’s only shield against American power will be these intrinsic qualities of the American people.
Apres l’Empire
By Emmanuel Todd
Gallimard, Paris
ISBN 2-07-076710-8
233pp. Euros 18.50
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