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”。
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
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.
Since then, what Mr. Todd writes about current events has tended to be received in Europe as prophecy. His book “After the Empire,” predicting the “breakdown of the American order,” came out in 2002, in the flush of post-9/11 national cohesion and before the debacle of the Iraq war, to which Mr. Todd was fiercely opposed. Anglophone (his doctorate is from Cambridge) and Anglophile (at least at the start of his career), he has grown steadily disillusioned with the United States, even anti-American.
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
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.”
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.