Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire and Socialist Register 2004, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
Scialabba, George
AFTER THE EMPIRE: THE BREAKDOWN OF THE AMERICAN ORDER by Emmanuel Todd Foreword by Michael Lind Columbia University Press, 2004 233 pp $29.95 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004: THE NEW IMPERIAL...
...Still, Todd's disinclination to dwell on (or, for the most part, even mention) these regrettable lapses should at least reassure thin-skinned American readers that he takes no pleasure in telling us the bad news...
...I HAVE (believe it or not) considerably simplified the argument of Todd's audacious and scintillating book...
...A worldwide plan of this sort would have made the United States the world's undeniable and definitive leader...
...Reindustrialization would have meant a modest redistribution of income, and the rich might then have had to work a little harder choosing investments...
...Once again, I hope Todd is right...
...tobacco exports pressed on unwilling countries by the Reagan administration under threat of trade sanctions will contribute to an estimated fifty million deaths in the first half of this century...
...Todd's other independent variable is family structure...
...If (as seemed likely in the early nineties) Russia had disintegrated, there would have been no military counterweight anywhere to the United States...
...Economic development in Asia and Latin America today is linked almost automatically to educational development, just as it was in Europe between the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth...
...If," Todd concludes, "we take into account, on the one hand, the diversity of traditional family customs in the original peasant world—the anthropological variable—and on the other hand, the universal advance of literacy—the historical variable— we can grasp simultaneously the unique direction of history and the diversity of particular phenomena...
...But Samuel Huntington is only superficially correct...
...And any attempt by external powers to do so (by capital flight and collapse of the dollar, for example) would surely elicit a savage U.S...
...and the general stupor induced by television...
...They also see different outcomes from America's current military adventurism...
...Unfortunately, though, he sometimes leaves the impression that he believes there is no other kind...
...and the forcing open of capital markets by the Clinton administration for the benefit of American financial institutions has left tens of millions of people in less developed countries without jobs, savings, or a social safety net...
...So the drift toward empire was also a result of the eclipse of egalitarianism in the United States, to which Todd devotes a fascinating chapter that I can do no more than mention here, except to note that it draws ingeniously on his anthropological model...
...We could relinquish the artificial financial advantages that kept money flowing into Wall Street even as foreign demand stagnated, American industry declined, and the American trade deficit grew...
...Panitch/Gindin see the U.S...
...the single-issue fanaticism of the religious right...
...War between liberal, capitalist democracies is, after all, unthinkable...
...As Rosa Luxemburg observed, it is "often hard to determine, within the tangle of violence and contests for power, the stern laws of economic process...
...Equal inheritance among brothers produces French republican universalism...
...The consequent diminution of the flow of funds for the U.S...
...Any politician who proposes such a package will almost certainly be howled down by the capitalist press and their ideologists and lose any election in the face of overwhelming money power...
...And eventually Russia will regain sufficient military strength to deter any American threat to an insufficiently submissive Europe or Japan...
...No doubt its unflattering description and grim predictions about the United States did not hurt sales...
...Todd doesn't seem to have considered our space-weapons program...
...And most important, if the United States attempts to make economic war on Europe and Japan, they can fight back, protected by Russia's nuclear deterrent...
...in 1976 he published La Chute finale (The Final Fall), one of the few books to predict the near-term demise of the Soviet Union, which he deduced from its falling birth rate and other demographic statistics...
...The American ruling class is even more rudderless and clueless than its European counterparts...
...Let's hope he is right...
...fundamentally, Francis Fukuyama has the right idea, even though he wrongly identifies economics rather than education and demographics as the agent of progress toward a "democratic convergence...
...The current American "obsession with Islam," Todd argues, derives from various peculiarities of our own situation...
...The Reagan years saw American companies flee abroad in droves...
...But this is just what the United States is unwilling to do...
...VERY INTERESTING...
...The essays in Socialist Register 2004 about American empire are, in the tradition of Marxist political economy, not at all scintillating, but they are invaluable nonetheless...
...As a last resort, we could simply have bullied the entire world...
...However, we didn't...
...This: after the end of history, remember, there is no place for heroic prowess or contests for mastery— in short, for empire...
...Choosing to remain a leading nation rather than become an empire would have been by far the better long-term strategy for the United States...
...Like Turkey and Eastern Europe, it will integrate economically with the rest of Eurasia—all three have much more trade with the European Union than with the United States...
...engineers the overthrow of Chavez as well as Saddam, if it can stabilize or reform an armedtothe-teeth Saudi regime, . . . if it can move on, as seems likely, from Iraq to Iran and consolidate its position in Turkey and Uzbekistan as a strategic presence in relation to Caspian basin oil reserves, then the U.S., through firm control of the global oil spigot, might hope to keep effective control over the global economy and secure its own hegemonic position for the next fifty years...
...For another, the U.S...
...On the contrary, since well before September 11, it was envisioned as a means of intimidating our potential rivals for world economic leadership, all of them more dependent than we on imported oil...
...I also recommend two others, which I won't be able to discuss BOOKS here: Michael Klare's "Blood for Oil," which links the Bush administration's energy policy with its military plans, and Amy Bartholomew and Jennifer Breakspear's "Human Rights as Swords of Empire," which tries to reconcile respect for the norm of nonintervention with the protection of human rights...
...Four new military bases in Iraq plus several in Central Asia are meant to ensure cooperative regimes in the region (whether democratic or not makes not the slightest difference to the United States), who will favorably entertain American suggestions to raise oil prices or reduce supplies if Europe, Japan, or China should tire of propping up the dollar or move toward further regional economic DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 107 BOOKS integration...
...One of the theory's independent variables is literacy...
...He believes that Americans will adjust rationally to the inevitable "reduction of their power and, most likely, of their standard of living...
...the venality of legislators and bureaucrats hoping for lucrative future employment by the defense, energy, pharmaceutical, and other industries...
...This is what Panitch, Gindin, Harvey, Gowan, and their colleagues on the Marxist left are trying to do, along with a few non-Marxist mavericks like Todd...
...But Harvey can speak ordinary language too, and very bluntly: The U.S...
...The end of the cold war presented the United States with a fateful choice...
...If Todd and Fukuyama are correct, "the United States would have to become just one liberal democracy among others, scale back its military machine, retire from its geostrategic activities, and humbly accept the gratitude of the rest of the planet for its long years of exemplary service...
...American agribusiness and mining companies have wrought widespread economic and environmental havoc...
...Anglo-Saxon liberalism derives from the relative independence of children from parents and from the inequality among brothers reflected in primogeniture...
...An industrial strategy to revitalize manufacturing would also help...
...DAVID HARVEY'S "The 'New' Imperialism" argues that "expanded reproduction," the normal form of capitalist profitmaking, has been overtaken by "accumulation by dispossession," the generation of profits through fraud, political coercion, or legal fiction...
...But Russia has begun to recover...
...The United States responded by reneging on the Bretton Woods regime: going off the gold standard, establishing the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and turning the International Monetary Fund into a global enforcer for Wall Street...
...As literacy rises, so do most indicators of political, economic, and gender equality, even though the transition is often mediated by revolutionBOOKS ary violence...
...Exogamy also increases, and fertility declines...
...After the Empire first appeared in 2002 and became a best-seller in Europe...
...We lost our economic primacy long ago and have foolishly tried to compensate by a combination of financial gamesmanship and "theatrical micromilitarism," or military bluff...
...Reinvigorating developed economies on a regionalist basis would have permitted offering practical help to developing countries in the form of debt forgiveness in exchange for the return of protectionism...
...By around 1970 Europe and Japan had more or less recovered from the Second World War and were becoming economically competitive with the United States, which had recently wasted enormous resources in Southeast Asia...
...All these correspondences help explain the apparent "clash of civilizations" during the present period of transition to modernity...
...But it would have required a lot of organizational and regulatory hard work on the part of the administration...
...They also emphasize more than he its political and predatory aspect, as a means of reversing wage gains, unionization, worker protections, and environmental regulation, which by the late 1970s had improved many Americans' quality of life but had also dampened profits...
...Finance-led globalization generated colossal rentier profits, while the trade deficit created an illusion of wealth among an increasingly indebted working population...
...Traditional family relations and other anthropological features determine the forms that modernity will assume in each society...
...but what does it all have to do with empire...
...In effect, Todd claims that it is already too late for the strategy announced in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy Document of September 2002 to succeed...
...AFTER THE EMPIRE: THE BREAKDOWN OF THE AMERICAN ORDER by Emmanuel Todd Foreword by Michael Lind Columbia University Press, 2004 233 pp $29.95 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004: THE NEW IMPERIAL CHALLENGE edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys Monthly Review Press, 2004 280 pp, $25 EMMANUEL TODD is a prolific French anthropologist and historian, a student of family structure and its role in political and economic development...
...Even more suicidal politically, within the U.S., would be to try to enforce by self-discipline the kind of austerity program that the IMF typically visits on others...
...First, he outlines a theory of modernization...
...Not, however, because we are too strong and proud, lusting for global dominion...
...The opposite is true: the United States is too weak to abandon militarism...
...Army cannot win a land war against Russia in Central Asia, especially in view of its recent (and very creditable) unwillingness to accept casualties, which appears to be based on a humane reluctance to throw away young American lives for dubious geopolitical purposes...
...Among its other benefits, this move conveniently positioned us to capture the flood of petrodollars that followed the oil price rises soon afterward.* Paul Volcker's *Peter Gowan argues in The Global Gamble (Verso, 1999) that Nixon colluded with our Saudi clients to raise oil prices in order to deal a blow to the Europeans and Japanese, more heavily dependent on imported oil...
...could turn away from its current form of imperialism by engaging in a massive redistribution of wealth within its borders and seek paths to surplus absorption through . . . dramatic improvements in public education and repair of aging infrastructures...
...Rhetorical crusades against "terrorism" and "rogue states" are ideological ploys to keep our allies mobilized, because "economically dependent, America requires a minimum level of global disorder in order to justify its politico-military presence in the Old World...
...Moreover, it would have been far easier to achieve in America given the continental proportions of the country and the centrality of its investment system...
...At the same time, this two-pronged domestic policy would have had as an external counterpart a multilateral foreign policy to encourage other nations and regions to move toward economic autonomy beneficial to all...
...Nevertheless, rising literacy rates and falling birth rates across most of the Islamic world guarantee that eventually these countries too will achieve political and economic modernity...
...For example, on the book's first page he describes America's role in the world after the Second World War as "the guarantor of politi104 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 cal freedom and economic order for half a century," a judgment he occasionally repeats and never qualifies...
...For this, whatever our other differences, the rest of us owe them much gratitude...
...For one thing, Russia has plenty of oil, which it will sell to its (formerly our) allies...
...Drawing on his earlier work (The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems, 1985), Todd sketches some correspondences...
...Au contraire, as most Dissent readers know, at various times since 1945 the United States has strongly supported governments hostile to political freedom in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Zaire, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines...
...As one can see, the Marxists are generally gloomier than Todd about the prospects for capitalism's eventual harmonious readjustment...
...political, economic, and even military response...
...Though in fact Todd does allude, almost offhandedly, to the likelihood of "a stock market crash larger than any we have experienced thus far that will be followed by the meltdown of the dollar—a one-two punch that would put an end to any further delusions of `empire...
...106 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 And besides, as Todd points out, the rich were getting so much richer...
...Like Todd (and most other people outside the United States), Harvey does not believe the U.S...
...He trained as a scholar in England, his family is partly American, and he initially opposed the Maastricht Treaty and European unification...
...invasion of Iraq had anything whatever to do with democracy, human rights, terrorism, or national security...
...Arab family structure is complicated, featuring strong vertical and horizontal linkages among fathers and married sons, low status for women, and endogamy, resulting in an egalitarian and communitarian ethos but a weak state...
...This would have meant military retrenchment and a period of economic austerity, but it would have restored our competitiveness, allowing for reindustrialization on a solid basis and with a more evenly distributed prosperity...
...DISSENT / Spring 2004 n I05 BOO KS savage interest rate hikes later in the decade further weakened the U.S...
...German authoritarianism results from a combination of paternalism and sibling inequality, Russian communism from the egalitarian patrimonialism of the Muzhiks...
...A less-than-astonishing conclusion, perhaps, but Todd's path to it is unusual...
...The bad news is that America "has made foolish strategic choices, and . . . Americans must prepare for a reduction of their power and, most likely, of their standard of living...
...could have calamitous consequences...
...This is a Marxist way (a novel and exciting way, I'm told by people who speak that language) of saying that finance has outstripped manufacturing, paper-shuffling has displaced production, and fictitious profits now outweigh real profits...
...Two of them in particular complement Todd's arguments: Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's "Global Capitalism and American Empire" and David Harvey's "The 'New' Imperialism...
...He has always cast his net wide...
...But thinking it all up and putting it into action would have been so tiring...
...Instead, after declining through most of the decade, military budgets began increasing in the late nineties...
...No, says Todd, they just . . . blew it...
...What lies behind Todd's perception of American weakness...
...It all appears to depend on how quickly Russia rebuilds and on whether America succeeds in militarizing space...
...This is where the huge modernization program within China .. . may have a critical role to play in siphoning off the surplus capitals of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea...
...manufacturing sector and strengthened the financial sector...
...But as Todd insists in his introduction to the American edition, "it would be a mistake to think of me as one more 'typical French intellectual' carrying the same old anti-American virus that has infected so many Parisian intellectuals...
...This "global gamble" (Todd's argument resembles that of Peter Gowan's brilliant book) might have paid off for the rentier class, allowing them to extract indefinitely what Todd calls their "imperial levy"—the huge capital inflow that translates into a cost-free trade deficit...
...As Harvey sees it, "If the U.S...
...108 n DISSENT / Spring 2004...
...Most important, it would have necessitated an energy policy combined with a protectionist economic policy to defend industry...
...Panitch/Gindin and Harvey tell much the same story as Todd about finance-led globalization, though in more detail...
...Todd thinks Russia's recovery will prevent this...
...I wish I could share his optimism...
...But this would require even more deficit financing or higher taxation as well as heavy state direction, and this is precisely what the bourgeoisie will refuse to contemplate...
...Was this a deliberate decision by America's rulers to go for empire rather than rejoin an international community of equals...
...Terrorism is a transitional phenomenon: "The move into modernity is frequently accompanied by an explosion of ideological violence...
...GEORGE SCIALABBA writes about books in Dissent, the Nation, the Boston Review, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere...
...foreign-policy agenda as the universalizing of this neoliberal program by means of pressure (exerted through the IMF and World Trade Organization) on European social democracies to privatize nationalized assets and reduce social-welfare expenditures, on the developed countries of East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and to some extent China) to open their markets and banking systems, and on developing countries to forget about retaining control of their economic destiny and instead become what the IMF calls "effective states...
...Quite rightly, Todd has no patience with reflexive, a priori anti-Americanism...
...Nor is he sufficiently aware, perhaps, of the deformations of American politics: the violent resentments of the southern and mountain states' flag-and-gun culture...
...Progress on this front, though uneven, is steady: universal literacy (expected for the younger half of the world's population around 2030) is about as inevitable as any social outcome can be...
Vol. 51 • April 2004 • No. 2