How the West Was Lost

REVIEW ESSAY
Le Défaite de l’Occident
by Emmanuel Todd
Gallimard, 2024, 384 pages

Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), begins by listing the many surprises of the war in Ukraine. First, the war erupted in Europe, the paradise where history was supposed to have ended for good. The second surprise is that the war in Ukraine has relatively little to do with Europe; the decisive actors are Russia and the United States. Another is the resistance of Ukraine itself, which was perceived by many in both the West and the East as a failed state. The Russians did not expect that defeating Ukraine would be so difficult. Western societies, for their part, were astonished to see a nation find its raison d’être in the struggle for its own survival.

Russia’s economic resilience has also been met with disbelief. Mos­cow has developed an immunity to sanctions, while Western industrial weakness is increasingly on display. According to Todd, Europe’s geo­political and economic passivity has also been starkly evident. Moreover, he argues, the war exposed the ideological isolation of the West. The illusion of an integrated world under American hegemony has burst, revealing the final truth that the French thinker wants to impart to us—the defeat of the West.

Each of these insights into the current moment expands on topics that Todd has been addressing in his work for years. Not yet published in English, La Défaite de l’Occident offers a synthesis of the contrarian sociologist’s views. This intention seems to be confirmed by the seven­ty‑three-year-old’s interviews with French media, in which he has also hinted that this might be his last book. Here, as elsewhere across his oeuvre, Todd pays court to no “isms”; no party or creed can claim him as its own. The pleasure he takes in running counter to conventional opinions makes Défaite—decried by a broad slice of French public opinion as “pro-Russian”¹—a fascinating read.

Euro Messianism

Whether we believe that Europe imprudently disregarded the possibility of war in Ukraine for ideological reasons, or simply lost the industrial capacity to prepare for it, Europe’s passivity stems, according to Todd, from the Maastricht Treaty. Maastricht, he argues, marked the ascendance of several related trends: the moment when elites enclosed them­selves within an intellectual bubble, the beginning of deindustrialization, and the loss of economic sovereignty for European nations, which has instilled a sense of permanent pessimism on the continent.

According to Todd, the triumph of the euro was not only the rise of a transnational currency but ultimately the victory of a surrogate reli­gion. Maastricht messianism appeared in the specific context of the dis­integration of collective beliefs; the grand narratives that allowed indi­viduals to form a community had vanished. Todd points out that history provides many instances in which a crisis in religious beliefs trig­gered people’s desire to find security in the worship of money.

Yet faith in the euro does not necessarily translate into hope for the future. In his 2020 book Luttes des classes en France au XXIe siècle, Todd argues that the single currency, embodying the ideology of the oligarchy, led to a loss of faith in the future among the French people. In addition to continually declining living standards in France, Maastricht messianism has led to depressive resignation among much of society. After 1992, it is not narcissism, as described by Christopher Lasch, that has prevailed, but “passivism,” as analyzed by Alain Ehrenberg in The Weariness of the Self. People have stopped rebelling because they don’t believe that tomorrow can be any different from today. Apathetic indi­viduals create an apathetic society incapable of real political conflict.

Meanwhile, European elites have yielded to what Todd calls the anti-ideology of “Europeanism.” It is an anti-ideology insofar as it does not allow for any active political community to emerge: the upper classes have been captivated by the belief that nations should not exist. In this respect, Europeanism is very similar to Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism, which also dismisses the nation as a pernicious fiction. According to Todd, this belief manifests in various ways, primarily through efforts to abolish nations via European integration or to fragment them by geo­graphically separating minorities, ultimately increasing atomization in the name of multiculturalism.² Without a shared moral compass, society disintegrates “into isolated bubbles, confined to their own problems, pleasures and pains.” In this condition, the governing establishment constitutes nothing more than another “autistic group,” says Todd, with the only difference being its greater visibility.³

At a more practical level, the abandonment of the national framework in economic thinking has led to many policy mistakes that have weakened European states. Alternatives to liberalism have been stamped out, reducing economic policy exclusively to making the labor market more flexible or to cutting public spending. Another consequence of rejecting the concept of the nation is the neglect of demographic issues.

As a result, French national politics became a “great comedy” after Maastricht. Since the 1990s, elites have primarily been concerned with putting on a spectacle, concealing from the electorate that they have lost the ability to act in a meaningful way as the euro architecture has taken away economic sovereignty. For Todd, a second, even more hollow phase of this simulated politics began in 2008, when, after the Great Financial Crisis, “France became a mere satellite of Germany.”⁴

Todd, a true Gaullist, believes that the critical mistake of the French elites was agreeing to German unification.⁵ Washington’s approval was a major strategic miscalculation as well. In the early 1990s, Americans felt invulnerable and could not imagine a united Germany dominating Eu­rope over the next twenty-five years. The French elites, however, sealed their own fate: they were the ones who pushed for the euro and urged Berlin to adopt it. The Germans, in contrast, were able to foresee that the common currency would become a tool of their hegemony.⁶

If America is a liberal oligarchy, according to Todd, and Russia is an authoritarian democracy, then the French system needs no description, because it doesn’t matter. It is either Washington or Berlin that provides the main policy directions for Paris. This feeling of impotence provokes inward-directed aggression. In Luttes des classes en France au XXIeme siècle, Todd applies the phrase “Aztec elites” to those capable of extreme violence against their own nation. Todd primarily points to the brutal suppression of the gilets jaunes protests. In this context, he also points to studies demonstrating that, after the 2008 financial crisis, France re­doubled its outsourcing efforts with particular vehemence, at least compared to other European countries. Between 2006 and 2016, on average, large European companies increased their workforce on the Old Continent by 14 percent, while French companies reduced theirs by 17 percent, moving jobs abroad.⁷

In a previous book, Todd quotes a speech by one of the last Gaullist leaders of the Fifth Republic, Philippe Séguin. Prior to the Maastricht vote, Séguin stated in parliament that the logic of political and economic integration would lead to the erosion of democracy. In Défaite, Todd develops this idea: adopting the euro was intended not only to contain a dangerous Germany but also the recalcitrant French, “Gauls resistant to reform,” as Macron called them.

Moreover, just as the attempt to keep Germany down ended in submission to Berlin, the attempt to stimulate the economy through monetary union ended in deindustrialization and stagnation. One of the goals, however, was accomplished: “They succeeded in abolishing de­mocracy; the French people were stripped of their sovereignty.”⁸ Politicians, selected for their ability to present themselves well in the media, are fundamentally unprepared for the era we are about to enter. They were caught off guard by the Ukraine war and the constraints that deindustrialization has imposed upon them.⁹

Political Economy and Power Politics

No intellectual has tried to bring Friedrich List’s ideas back into French public discourse with as much verve as Todd, who penned the foreword to the French reprint of List’s most famous work, The National System of Political Economy. In the Listian vision, globalization is not the pur­suit of peace through trade, but the struggle of nations to expand their productive forces. Those that do not produce will eventually become subservient to those that do. Globalization, therefore, does not mean a grand leveling of states in a single network, but rather an increase in asymmetries or, to borrow a more recent coinage, “weaponized inter­dependence.”

As globalization has failed to disrupt the logic of power politics, some states have gained control over important choke points. Before the First World War, for instance, the British controlled the communications infrastructure associated with international trade and used it against their opponents.¹⁰ Today, the reign of the dollar and the hege­mony of the U.S. financial system can be seen as another example of weaponized interdependence. To illustrate this dynamic, Todd mentions the often overlooked (in the United States) story of how Swiss banks were stripped of their secrecy.

The U.S. nullification of Switzerland’s historic banking secrecy became a watershed moment, according to Todd, after which Euro­pean elites would have to park their money in tax havens subject to U.S. control.¹¹ According to researchers, “the US law enforcement authorities managed to coerce the transformation of Swiss banking secrecy regula­tions against the preferences of Switzerland’s government and financial sector.”¹² Swiss secrecy, which benefited the continent’s richest people, was unilaterally pierced by Washington. From the beginning, Americans framed the issue as a legal matter, thus avoiding politicization. The atmosphere after the financial crisis was conducive to such arbitrary actions. Washington hollowed out Swiss secrecy using the principle of extraterritoriality, and Switzerland alone could not stand up to a country with the world’s deepest financial markets.

In Todd’s view, however, Washington has now entered a postimperial stage. The United States still possesses an imperial war machine, but the culture and vitality of empire are gone. It is a country that launches itself into military adventures while simultaneously destroying its own indus­trial base.

In After the Empire, written in 2001, Todd claimed that the reason for America’s “theatrical micromilitarism” was to prove that it was still an indispensable power in a post-USSR world. In his latest work, however, he revises this thesis, arguing that it would imply attributing rational intentions to Washington.¹³ The American liberal oligarchy is not driven by any clear project. On the contrary, its absence of ideas is responsible for the decline into which the Western world is plunging.

The Trumpian Moment

After 2016, Todd began to believe that the era of neoliberal nihilism in the West might be coming to an end. As historian Gary Gerstle put it, neoliberalism faced the wrecking ball of Donald Trump, whose victory represented the most stunning populist moment since Andrew Jackson.¹⁴ “Lucid populists have beaten the short-sighted establishment,” Todd wrote, with Trump’s pragmatic neomercantilism defeating liberal ideologues.¹⁵

Todd abandoned his theses from After the Empire, in which he claimed that America had turned into the world’s number one problem. In an interview with Le Figaro, he argued that the United States had become self-sufficient in energy, produced one-third of the world’s patents, and could implement efficient protectionism if it chose to do so. He saw China as a colossus with clay feet: its massive trade surplus with the United States couldn’t compensate for weaknesses in innovation and a loss of its most dynamic citizens to emigration to the West. He was confident that America would have the upper hand in this geopolitical clash.

Trump heralded the return of economic nationalism, which, for Todd as for List, simply means the aspiration to economic independence. Sovereignty is the ability to produce; nations that do not produce will be dependent on others, and technological advances and increasing de­mands for both material and intellectual inputs will only exacerbate this dependence. Another Listian economist whom Todd frequently quotes, Lester Thurow, noted that “humans may be born to shop, but they are also born to build.” The desire to build fosters “producer economics,” which is fundamentally different from the “consumer economics” prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon world.¹⁶ The return of neomercantilism, personified by Trump, was meant to signify the victory of an economy of builders over an economy of consumers.

Todd hoped that Trump’s presidency would also act as a catalyst for a new geopolitical order, particularly in Europe. While in his 2008 book, Après la démocratie, he criticized President Nicolas Sarkozy for aligning with the United States and thus pushing away potential allies like India, China, or Russia, after 2016 his perspective drastically changed.¹⁷ In a globalized world, a nation constrained by the euro has only one option in a Europe under German hegemony: to ally with America. “Only one country can help France extricate itself from the euro . . . the one that refuses to accept a European empire under German domination: the U.S. The survival of France will be accomplished through America. I am tempted to say: as always.”¹⁸

Trumpiste Déçu

Todd was one of the most ardent Trumpist intellectuals not only in France but across Europe. The intensity of his support, however, is matched only by the severity of his eventual disappointment.

Todd’s pro-Trump optimism has since given way to a belief in the almost certain decline of America. Todd writes that the United States has transitioned from being the world’s factory to its largest consumer, and despite Trump’s nationalist rhetoric, seems unable to reverse course.

With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the West is sinking into a “false consciousness.” Having destroyed its own industry and working class, it is trying to prevail in a war that requires industrial might. Viewed through List’s prism, the United States is vulnerable, having lost its industrial base and instead placing its faith in the illusion of “infor­mation highways,” through which flows, in the parlance of Xi Jinping, spiritual opium.¹⁹

Within the United States itself, life expectancy for the poorer popula­tion is plummeting, and the hypertrophy of finance has turned politics into a pastime for the rich. The rest of the globe, Todd asserts, views the West not as a bearer of democratic uplift but rather as a constellation of liberal oligarchies holding the poor in contempt.²⁰ The “Global South” prefers Moscow and Beijing to Washington. Future historians, he says, will be astonished by the West’s narcissistic blindness to this fact.

Even in the realm of technology, the U.S. advantage no longer seems as formidable as Todd previously argued. While China may not yet be at the cutting edge in semiconductors or aviation, it has made remarkable progress in other areas. Chinese EVs pose a serious threat to European legacy firms, and their dominance in this sector has enabled them to overtake both Germany and Japan in car exports. In clean tech, China’s grip on the solar supply chain makes it hard for any observer to envision the “greening of the European economy” without Chinese involvement. As Dan Wang notes, China has a technological momentum of its own and retains considerable strengths, largely independent of its slowing economic growth or demographic challenges.²¹ Its strength lies in its workforce, which continues to advance in manufacturing complexity.

When it comes to another technology likely to mold the future econ­omy and warfare—AI—the U.S. lead may be temporary, if not already lost.²² Moreover, American STEM education is in deep crisis.²³ China produces more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields annually as the United States. Washington’s technological hegemony is no longer unas­sailable, especially as China has become the greatest manufacturing power in the world.

Perhaps the last redoubt of American strength is its control of the global financial system. In La Défaite de l’Occident, however, Todd suggests that the dollar is America’s own resource curse. The United States has fallen into the habit of creating currency, which is easier than producing, say, machine tools. One can argue that this continuous injection of money into the global economy is precisely the reason why America will not be isolated anytime soon. Nevertheless, efforts to undermine the dollar’s dominance are gaining strength.

Todd’s views on the dollar’s waning hegemony intriguingly align with those of Zoltan Pozsar, a former analyst at Credit Suisse. Both believe that significant change is underway, which will surprise Western elites, as the emergence of a multipolar world threatens the dollar’s position.

Consider Chinese neomercantilism in development finance. Between 2010 and 2020, Chinese banks provided as much financing as all Western development banks have in the past seventy years.²⁴ Beijing has also learned to instrumentalize the dollar itself; instead of using its reserves to buy Treasuries, it lends those dollars to developing countries bur­dened by dollar debts. Saudi Arabia and Russia are applying the same strategy.

The phenomenon Pozsar terms “bricspansion” means, essentially, an expansion of the circle of countries bound by the fear of America’s “exorbitant privilege.” The West views sanctions as a morally legitimate weapon against its enemies, but they increasingly seem ineffective or even counterproductive. In the long term, the proliferation of sanctions may undermine the very foundation of the dollar order. As former secretary of the treasury Jack Lew admitted, if sanctions “make the business environment too complicated or unpredictable, or if they ex­cessively interfere with the flow of funds worldwide, financial transactions may begin to move outside of the United States entirely, which could threaten the central role of the U.S. financial system globally, not to mention the effectiveness of our sanctions in the future.”²⁵

The notion of de-risking has recently gained traction in the Atlantic world, but it’s important to remember that this practice first appeared in response to Western sanctions.²⁶ Many countries are trying to hedge against the weaponization of the U.S. financial system and joining forces to de-dollarize their trade flows. As President Lula of Brazil has stated, brics is not intended for defense but for offense against the hegemony of the dollar.

Pozsar argues that “Bretton Woods III” is emerging before our eyes. Beijing is establishing a new order in which it buys oil and LNG with renminbi and developmental investments. American energy self-suffi­ciency and rising exports further reduce the importance of the petrodollar. Moreover, China and Russia are working together to deepen the bifurcation of the global financial system with the mBridge project, a competitive payments pipeline based on central bank digital currencies. Within brics, there is ongoing discussion about establishing a new monetary unit for member countries. As a Chinese scholar notes, “After the expansion, brics countries account for 43% of global oil production, 46% of the world population, 30% of GDP, and 25% of merchandise exports.”²⁷ Brics, and China in particular, already dominate rare earth mineral supply chains.²⁸

But can the political damage from sanctions, the dynamism of Chinese financial mercantilism, and growing ties among the brics overturn the dollar’s hegemony? Gao Bai, a Chinese researcher living in the United States, argues that the scale and complexity of U.S. financial markets, combined with an ever-growing economy, will reinforce the inertia of the inter­national order.²⁹ Adam Tooze, discussing Pozsar’s theses on the dollar’s reign, contends that a realignment is unlikely because the current arrangement is “tied down by network economies” that prevent rapid and profound change.³⁰

Nevertheless, the asymmetry between the multipolarity of world politics and the hegemony of the dollar seems unlikely to persist indef­initely. It should not be forgotten that, as late as 1945, the British pound accounted for over 80 percent of global currency reserves, and well into the 1960s, it still represented a quarter. The dollar’s hegemony may or may not be ending, but history suggests that reserve currencies are lagging indicators of geopolitical and economic power.

On the other hand, the end of the dollar’s dominance might not be as detrimental to America as it seems. As Byrne Hobart notes, the contrac­tion of the financial services sector could free up a lot of misallocated talent. Physicists developing complex financial tools might instead focus on building the next generation of rockets. While Americans might feel a drag on their consumption, reshoring and increased domestic competition could lead to higher salaries and make housing and health care more affordable.³¹

The Paradox of Education

Speculations on the future of the dollar notwithstanding, perhaps the greatest surprise that Todd’s book seeks to explain is the absence of effective opposition to the political decisions and worldviews that have brought about the decline of the West. How should we understand the passivity that has endured for decades, through the failures of American neoliberalism and foreign policy neoconservatism, and across the dis­appointments of euro messianism?

Todd’s explanation follows his conviction that education is one of the engines of history, particularly through its interactions with religion. The decline of Protestantism has been especially consequential. By promoting literacy—until the mid-twentieth century, countries where the Reformation prevailed had far higher literacy rates than Catholic countries—Protestantism created propitious conditions for intellectual development. In so doing, however, Protestantism was sowing the seeds of its own decline, which, in turn, has precipitated a downward spiral in secular intellectual achievement. “Therein lies the great paradox of this historical sequence: progress in education has ultimately caused edu­cational regression because it has led to the disappearance of the values that foster education.”³² The disappearance of Protestantism as a cultural force, with its emphasis on effort, has led to the deterioration of the educational capacity of the native U.S. population.³³

Todd claims that the decline of American universities began in the late 1960s. He cites studies showing the declining performance of American students and research on the reversal of the Flynn effect, indicating a decline in the average IQ in the United States. The intensity of education has also dropped: while students studied forty-eight hours a week in 1961, by 2003 they were putting in only twenty-seven hours.³⁴ At the same time, though, the spread of higher education has created a strong anti-egalitarian impulse. This impulse underlies the incurious and short-sighted conformism that reigns among the educated elite.

Beyond education, the decline of Protestantism has left the American empire without a moral center. The direction of the world’s greatest superpower began to be dictated by an atomized, anomic ruling class with no values other than the will to power. Todd’s portrayals of the figures in charge of the American empire increasingly resemble the French elites he describes in Les Luttes des classes en France au XXIeme siècle: devoid of convictions and liberated from the framework of com­mon morality. They do not accept any barriers to their ambition, whether moral or rational.

Without a national identity, effective collective action becomes impossible, leading to engrained passivism. The state, separated from the nation, is taken over by interest groups that owe their existence and status to monopolizing its resources. President Macron in France, and others like him, are simply the figureheads of this bureaucratized oligarchy.³⁵

The greatest manifestation of American nihilism is neoliberalism. It inaugurated an era of destruction—of industries, entire professions, and families, as evidenced by the epidemic of deaths of despair. Todd, per­haps too often, employs psychoanalytic terminology to explain certain phenomena, invoking in this context “the instinct of destruction hidden beneath the mask of economic theory.”

Neoliberalism arose with the decline of Protestantism and—rejecting any common good or collective future—has ushered in a period of stagnation and increasing inequality. Its most antimodern achievement, however, is depriving young people of the chance to achieve a better life than previous generations. Neoliberalism, in sacrificing the future to maximize immediate consumption, is the economic ideology of Western decline.

In elaborating this critique, Todd is among the few European intellectuals to echo a diagnosis of technological stagnation similar to those of Americans such as Robert Gordon, Peter Thiel, and Tyler Cowen. The extraordinary development of information technology should have sparked a Promethean sense of agency across society and among elites. Instead, both leaders and people have, each in their own ways, lost faith in the future, with definite optimism giving way to debilitating passivism. Todd suggests that no past technological break­through has induced such complacency as that which has confined technological progress to such a narrow cone as IT.

The End of the World as We Know It

If La Défaite de l’Occident has a weakness, it is that Todd’s unrelenting pessimism can overwhelm his appreciation of ambiguity. We are not living in an age defined by the clash of two systems, a second Cold War, but in a time without definition. Our “post–Cold War” period lacks structure, and as Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan suggests, the fortunes of states will depend on how well they navigate the uncertainty of our era.³⁶

For a book on geopolitics, Todd’s latest devotes too much attention to limitations and not enough to options. After all, America is a country that went from the target of Todd’s intense enmity, to his enthusiastic praise, and back again in barely two decades. With that in mind, it seems unwise to exclude renewal from the range of possibilities.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 4 (Winter 2024): 208–18.

Notes