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Sunday, April 4, 2010
Reading List: Après la démocratie
- Todd, Emmanuel. Après la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. ISBN 978-2-07-078683-1.
-
This book is simultaneously enlightening, thought-provoking, and
infuriating. The author is known for having forecast the
collapse of the Soviet Union in
1976 and, in 2002, the
end of U.S. hegemony
in the political, military, and financial spheres, as we are currently
witnessing. In the present work, he returns his focus to
Europe, and France in particular, and examines how the economic
consequences of globalisation, the emergence of low-wage economies
such as China and India in direct competition with workers in
the developed West, the expansion of college education from a
small fraction to around a third of the population, changes in
the structure of the family due to a longer lifespan and marital
customs, the near eclipse of Christianity as a social and moral
force in Western Europe, and the collapse of traditional political
parties with which individuals would identify over long periods of
time have led to a crisis in confidence among the voting public in the
élites who (especially in France) have traditionally governed
them, escalating to a point where serious thinkers question the
continued viability of democratic governance.
Dubiety about democracy is neither limited to the author nor to
France: right-like-a-stopped-clock pundit Thomas Friedman
has
written
admiringly of China's autocracy compared to the United States,
Gaia theorist James Lovelock argues that “climate change”
may require the West to
“put
democracy on hold for a while” while other
ManBearPig
fabulists argue that the “failure of democracy”
on this issue requires it to give way to
“a form of authoritarian government by experts”.
The take in the present book is somewhat different, drawing on Todd's
demographic and anthropological approach to history and policy. He
argues that liberal democracy, as it emerged in Britain, France, and
the United States, had as a necessary condition a level of literacy
among the population of between one third and two thirds. With a lower
level of literacy the general population is unable to obtain the information
they need to form their own conclusions, and if a society reaches a very
high level of literacy without having adopted democratic governance
(for example Germany from Bismarck through World War II or the Soviet Union),
then the governing structure is probably sufficiently entrenched so as
to manage the flow of information to the populace and suppress democratic
movements. (Actually, the author would like to believe that broad-based
literacy is a necessary and sufficient condition for democracy in
the long run, but to this reader he didn't make the sale.)
Once democratic governance is established, literacy tends to rise toward
100% both because governments promote it by funding education and because
the citizenry has an incentive to learn to read and write in order to
participate in the political process. A society with universal
literacy and primary education, but only a very small class with
advanced education tends to be stable, because broad political
movements can communicate with the population, and the élites
which make up the political and administrative class must be responsive
to the electorate in order to keep their jobs. With the broad
population starting out with pretty much the same educational and
economic level, the resulting society tends toward egalitarianism in
wealth distribution and opportunity for advancement based upon merit and
enterprise. Such a society will be an engine of innovation and production,
and will produce wealth which elevates the standard of living of its
population, yielding overall contentment which stabilises the society
against radical change.
In the twentieth century, and particularly in the latter half, growing
prosperity in developed nations led to a social experiment on a massive
scale entirely unprecedented in human history. For the first time,
universal secondary education was seen as a social good (and enforced
by compulsory education and rising school-leaving ages), with
higher (college/university) education for the largest possible fraction
of the population becoming the ultimate goal. Indeed, political rhetoric in
the United States presently advocates making college education available
for all. In France, the number of students in “tertiary”
education (the emerging term of art, to avoid calling it “superior”,
which would imply that those without it are inferior) burgeoned from 200,000 in
1950 to 2,179,000 in 1995, an increase of 990%, while total population grew just
39% (p. 56). Since then, the rate of higher education has
remained almost constant, with the number of students growing only 4% between 1995 and 2005, precisely
the increase in population during that decade. The same plateau was
achieved earlier in the U.S., while Britain, which began the large-scale
expansion of higher education later, only attained a comparable level in
recent years, so it's too early to tell whether that will also prove
a ceiling there as well.
The author calls this “stagnation” in education and blames
it for a cultural pessimism afflicting all parts of the political
spectrum. (He does not discuss the dumbing-down of college education
which has accompanied its expansion and the attendant devaluing of the
credential; this may be less the case on the Continent than in the
Anglosphere.) At the same time, these societies now have a substantial
portion of their population, around one third, equipped nominally with
education previously reserved for a tiny élite, whose career
prospects are limited simply because there aren't enough positions at
the top to go around. At the same time, the educational
stratification of the society into a tiny governing class, a
substantial educated class inclined to feel entitled to economic
rewards for all the years of their lives spent sitting in classrooms,
and a majority with a secondary education strikes a blow at
egalitarianism, especially in France where broad-based equality of
results has been a central part of the national identity since the
Revolution.
The pessimism created by this educational stagnation has, in the author's
view, been multiplied to the point of crisis by what he considers to
be a disastrous embrace of free trade. While he applauds the dismantling
of customs barriers in Europe and supported
the European “Constitution”, he blames the abundance
of low-wage workers in China and India for what he sees as relentless
pressure on salaries in Europe and the loss of jobs due to outsourcing
of manufacturing and, increasingly, service and knowledge worker jobs.
He sees this as benefiting a tiny class, maybe 1% of the population, to
the detriment of all the rest. Popular dissatisfaction with this situation,
and frustration in an environment where all major political parties
across the ideological spectrum are staunch defenders of free trade,
has led to the phenomenon of “wipeout” elections, where
the dominant political party is ejected in disgust, only to be replaced
by another which continues the same policies and in turn is rejected by
the electorate.
Where will it all end? Well, as the author sees it, with Nicholas
Sarkozy. He regards Sarkozy and everything he represents with
such an actinic detestation that one expects the crackling of
sparks and odour of ozone when opening the book. Indeed,
he uses Sarkozy's personal shortcomings as a metaphor for what's
wrong with France, and as the structure of the book as a whole.
And yet he is forced to come to terms with the fact that Sarkozy
was elected with the votes of 53% of French voters after, in
the first round, effectively wiping out the National Front,
Communists, and Greens. And yet, echoing voter discontent, in
the municipal elections a year later, the left was seen as the overall
winner.
How can a democratic society continue to function when the
electorate repeatedly empowers people who are neither
competent to govern nor aligned with the self-interest of the
nation and its population? The author sees only three alternatives.
The first (p. 232) is the redefinition of the state from a
universal polity open to all races, creeds, and philosophies to
a racially or ethnically defined state united in opposition to
an “other”. The author sees Sarkozy's hostility to
immigrants in France as evidence for such a redefinition in
France, but does not believe that it will be successful in diverting
the electorate's attention from a falling standard of living due
to globalisation, not from the immigrant population. The second
possibility he envisions (p. 239) is the elimination, either
outright or effectively, of universal suffrage at the national
level and its replacement by government by unelected bureaucratic
experts with authoritarian powers, along the general lines of
the China so admired by Thomas Friedman. Elections would be retained
for local officials, preserving the appearance of democracy while
decoupling it from governance at the national level. Lest this seem
an absurd possibility, as the author notes on p. 246, this is
precisely the model emerging for continental-scale government
in the European Union. Voters in member states elect members to a
European “parliament” which has little real power, while
the sovereignty of national governments is inexorably ceded to
the unelected
European Commission.
Note that only a few member states
allowed their voters a referendum on the European
“constitution”
or its zombie reanimation, the
Treaty of Lisbon.
The third alternative, presented in the conclusion to the work, is
the only one the author sees as preserving democracy. This would be
for the economic core of Europe, led by France and Germany, to
adopt an explicit policy of protectionism, imposing tariffs on
imports from low-wage producers with the goal of offsetting the
wage differential and putting an end to the pressure on European
workers, the outsourcing of jobs, and the consequent destruction of
the middle class. This would end the social and economic pessimism
in European societies, realign the policies of the governing class
with the electorate, and restore the confidence among voters in those
they elect which is essential for democracy to survive. (Due to its
centuries-long commitment to free trade and alignment with the
United States, Todd does not expect Great Britain to join such a
protectionist regime, but believes that if France and Germany
were to proclaim such a policy, their economic might and influence
in the European Union would be sufficient to pull in the
rest of the Continent and build a
Wirtschaftsfestung Europa
from the Atlantic to the Russian border.) In such a case, and
only in that case, the author contends, will what comes after
democracy be democracy.
As I noted at the start of these comments, I found this book,
among other things, infuriating. If that's all it were, I would
neither have finished it nor spent the time to write such a
lengthy review, however. The work is worth reading, if for
nothing else, to get a sense of the angst and malaise in
present-day Europe, where it is beginning to dawn upon the
architects and supporters of the social democratic welfare state
that it is not only no longer competitive in the global economy
but also unsustainable within its own borders in the face of
a demographic collapse and failure to generate new enterprises
and employment brought about by its own policies. Amidst
foreboding that there are
bad
times just around the corner
,
and faced with an electorate
which empowers candidates which leftists despise for being
“populist”, “crude”, and otherwise not
the right kind of people, there is a tendency among the Left
to claim that “democracy is broken”, and that only
radical, transformative change (imposed from the top down, against
the will of the majority, if necessary) can save democracy from
itself. This book is, I believe, an exemplar of this genre.
I would expect several such books authored by leftist intellectuals
to appear in the United States in the first years of a Palin
administration.
What is particularly aggravating about the book is its refusal to
look at the causes of the problems it proposes to address through
a protectionist policy. Free trade did not create the regime of
high taxation, crushing social charges, inability to dismiss
incompetent workers, short work weeks and long vacations, high
minimum wages and other deterrents to entry level jobs, and
regulatory sclerosis which have made European industry
uncompetitive, and high tariffs alone will not solve any of
these problems, but rather simply allow them to persist for a
while within a European bubble increasingly decoupled from the
world economy. That's pretty much what the Soviet Union did
for seventy years, if you think about it, and how well did
that work out for the Soviet people?
Todd is so focused on protectionism as panacea that he Panglosses
over major structural problems in Europe which would be entirely
unaffected by its adoption. He dismisses demographic collapse
as a problem for France, noting that the total fertility rate has
risen over the last several years back to around 2 children per
woman, the replacement rate. What he doesn't mention is that
this is largely due to a high fertility rate among Muslim
immigrants from North Africa, whose failure to assimilate
and enter the economy is a growing crisis in France along with
other Western European countries. The author dismisses this with
a wave of the hand, accusing Sarkozy of provoking the “youth”
riots of 2005 to further his own career, and argues that episode
was genuinely discouraged young versus the ruling class and had
little to do with Islam or ethnic conflict. One wonders how much
time Dr. Todd has spent in the “no go” Muslim
banlieues of Paris and other
large European cities.
Further, Todd supports immigration and denounces restrictionists
as opportunists seeking to distract the electorate with a
scapegoat. But how is protectionism (closing the border to
products from low wage countries) going to work, precisely, if
the borders remain open to people from the Third World,
many lacking any skills equipping them to participate in a
modern industrialised society, and bringing with them, in many
cases, belief systems hostile to the plurality, egalitarianism,
secularism, and tolerance of European nations? If the descendants of
immigrants do not assimilate, they pose a potentially disastrous
social and political problem, while if they do, their entry into
the job market will put pressure on wages just as surely as
goods imported from China.
Given Todd's record in predicting events conventional
wisdom deemed inconceivable, one should be cautious in dismissing his
analysis here, especially as it drawn from the same kind of reasoning
based in demographics, anthropology, and economics which informs his
other work. If nothing else, it provides an excellent view of how
more than fifty years journey down the social democratic
road to serfdom brings into doubt how long the
“democratic” part, as well as the society, can endure.
Posted at
20:59
