Blurred Vision
WEBER, EUGEN
Blurred Vision After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order By Emmanuel Todd Columbia. 233 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Eugen Weber Professor of history emeritus, UCLA; author, "The...
...As I agreed and disagreed with his testimony, I could not help remembering what Tocqueville once wrote about France that could as easily apply to the Republic whose self-assertion France supported long ago: "The most brilliant and dangerous of nations, and the best designed to become in turn an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of indifference...
...After the Empire is a good example of such elucubrations...
...Hold ON TO the word "may...
...They have a talent for expansion, a real capacity to integrate outsiders and fuse with them, yet they also tend to designate excluded "others"—whether native Americans, blacks, Jews, Irish, or Latinos...
...Unable to subsist on our own production, we preach free trade but honor it in the breach when our precepts do not suit us...
...The generous democracy of yore, liberal and productive, has withered...
...Its "expanding narcissism" cuts off the branch it sat on...
...The epithet stuck, but not the pre-eminence...
...He is not sure what "Europe" represents: A civilization...
...Since 1995, real GDP in the U.S...
...Its military and financial adventurism causes domestic and foreign deficits to soar...
...No wonder the Economist's November 8 special issue on America, even though it confirms Todd's fears of a worrying exceptionalism that goads a dangerous world, concludes that our demographic vitality, productivityled economic vigor, working hours, and innovativeness suggest the need for the other countries to follow America's example if they want to keep living standards up and unemployment low...
...One of them, published in 1976, foretold The Final Fall of a Soviet empire at a time when few doubted it would endure...
...He knows that, after the Soviet collapse, "America thought it could extend its hegemony over the whole planet...
...For some...
...Hence its "theatrical micromilitarism" focused on Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, which diverts energy from "a realist strategy that should focus on maintaining U. S. control of the industrial poles of Europe and Japan...
...Todd is a brilliant provocateur...
...An American trade deficit appeared in the 1970s, became "a basic structural element of the world economy" in subsequent decades, and has lately soared from $ 100 billion to $450 billion a year...
...In 2002, before our Iraq bungle, he presented The Breakdown of the American Order as imminent...
...This may be why Todd predicts "a marginal, isolated United States situated far from a highly populated and hardworking Eurasia, where most of the history in a newly pacified world may be written...
...while Americans work 300 hours a year more than their European cousins...
...author, "The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s" The French are obsessed by America, meaning the United States...
...True power, Todd repeats, is economic power...
...First, though, let's pursue Todd's prophecies, which become more surprising as we read on...
...Comfortable in our credit-card mindset, we buy today and paytomorrow...
...Capital inflow to the U.S...
...We jettison notions like quality and durability for cheap effects and "new improved" designs designed to self-destruct once the warranty runs out...
...into a major factor of world disorder and armed conflicts...
...no less risky than our own precarious balancing act...
...Happily, Todd tempers his prognosis...
...This is where Todd,the anthropological theorist, lays out his dubious threefold division of humanity...
...Yet the dollar is weak, interest rates are low: Perhaps to call this tribute is no misnomer...
...rose from $88 billion in 1990 to $865 billion in 2001...
...The book is now available in a translation from the French that is adequate, though a bit plunky...
...Outsourcing the production of useful industrial goods, we diminish opportunities for gainful employment...
...In its present weakened and nonproductive state, however, the country is neither as confident nor as tolerant as it once was...
...That the investment capital we attract deprives developing countries of the financial resources generated by Europe and Japan is a secondary consideration...
...Ebbing economic strength, diplomatic overextension, narcissism, anxiety, and theatrical displays of micromilitarism (i.e...
...So the United States today is economically dependent, militarily inadequate and ideologically ill prepared for empire...
...We pay attention because we are ourselves uneasy about some of our policies...
...But without a "vision of a united humanity composed of its many peoples, America will not be able to reign over such a vast and diverse world...
...Would that Todd were as modestly tentative in other assertions...
...Muslim Jihad, for instance, is simply a passing fever of disruptive modernization comparable to the English revolution(s) of the 17th century or the French revolutions) of the 18th century: crises of transition from underdevelopment to liberal democracy...
...Inspired no doubt by hypermarchés— the super-supermarkets then sprouting across France—Hubert Védrine, the Foreign Minister in Lionel Jospin's 1997 Socialist/Communist Cabinet, dubbed the U.S...
...stabilization will follow automatically after "the transitional derailment that is part of the modernizing process...
...But if his book is sometimes depressing that is because it echoes many of our current concerns...
...To finance our improvident ways, we exact what Todd calls tribute: from arms sales, from control of certain oil producing zones, above all from foreign capital invested in U.S...
...Predictions are risky ventures...
...and its brief "triumph" in this respect is attributed to modesty and generosity...
...It is hard to see how we could sustain a huge trade deficit when total Federal revenues in 2003, at 17 per cent of GDP, are at their lowest level since 1959 and government spending is up 21 per cent since 2000...
...Todd believes that economic evolution since the 1980s has accelerated inequalities between Americans and others, and that the currently fashionable cult of diversity magnifies them...
...With 6 per cent of the world's population, we devour a quarter of the world's consumption...
...obligations...
...almost all is stimulating...
...The violence and religious frenzy are temporary...
...For the American empire, as he sees it, lacks not only the power to constrain that could maintain its exploitation of the world, but also the ideological universalism that would treat peoples and individuals as equals and let American hegemony make some sense...
...That America wants to reign is taken for granted...
...has steadily outdistanced that in the European Union, American fertility rates are higher than those in Europe or China, the United States spent more on research than any other country, and 90 of the world's top 100 universities are in the U.S...
...and breaking up its only real opponent, Russia...
...It is Washington's unflinching support of Israel that prolongs the donnybrook, exasperates it, generalizes it into a conflict with the wider Muslim world...
...picking only on weak foes to bully) have, Todd insists, turned the U.S...
...Maybe...
...He knows that "controlling the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia is obviously the rational goal of American actions in this region...
...Or simply an evolving entity whose expansion "threatens increased political disorganization...
...and we let that slip through our fingers...
...So the peacemaker becomes a troublemaker, the protector becomes apredator posturing because it is unable to maintain control over a world too big and too diverse to be controlled...
...Americans, like the British, hesitate between the two stances...
...A thriving intellectual industry demonstrates that the world's security and economy are threatened by American blunders or manipulations...
...We work hard but do not save...
...He does not differentiate between "Americans" and American policies that may or may not represent majority opinion in the country...
...He knows that the developing world is headed toward democracy, and that progress of democracy around the world masks the weakening of democracy in its birthplace...
...also because caricature and stereotype can cut close to the bone...
...Emmanuel Todd, an anthropologist, social analyst and prominent member of the French Institute for Demographic Studies, is a prolific author of books that tend to be both readable and provocative...
...Non-Muslims are annoyed by America's dramatization of unconvincing global dangers that supposedly make the world a menacing place in need of our protection...
...Todd writes about "highly populated and hard-working Eurasia," yet shows birthrates to be falling there and is wellplaced to know that those Europeans who can, prefer not to work either hard or long...
...The motor that now moves it is not equality but inequality...
...because we like to believe rational analysis can lead to rational action...
...Some of what he says is doubtful, some convincing (depending on one's prejudices...
...According t? Todd, the underlying reason is that Americans, or at least their rulers, have read the situation wrong...
...in the near future...
...A common currency...
...This, he intimates, is aggravated by approval of "Israel's increasingly ferocious behavior toward Palestinians," and shared U.S.-Israel prejudices about the inequality or disunity of humankind...
...We guzzle gas and encourage the introduction of more guzzlers...
...And he assumes a will to hegemony and empire that strikes this American as highly dubious...
...In other words, we have blown the financial and economic resources we need to back up our foreign policies...
...Given that unified Europe represents "a competing strategic entity," and given an American ruling class "even more rudderless and clueless than its European counterparts," all the ingredients are there for "a serious conflict between Europe and the U.S...
...The daily press, the corner bookstore, the dinner table, all testify to the fascination America exercises, and to the power for good or ill attributed to it...
...a "hyperpower...
...English-language readers will learn from it that, as a result of "foolish strategic choices," the U.S., already in decline, must prepare for a reduction of its power and, probably, of living standards too...
...A marketplace...
...Peoples whose traditional family structures do not define brothers as equal (ancient Athens, Germany) don't have an egalitarian attitude toward other men or nations, and tend rather to ethnically based self-identification as conquerors...
...Peoples with an egalitarian conception of family relations, among whom brothers especially are deemed to be equal (Rome, Russia, China, Northern France, the Arab world), tend to perceive men and nations as equal...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
