With Us or Against Us

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by Tony Judt


  petrated by the American defense establishment to advance its own

  interests. Meyssan’s approach echoes that of Holocaust deniers. He

  begins by assuming the nonexistence of a well-accredited event, and

  then reminds us that no amount of evidence—especially from firsthand

  witnesses—can prove the contrary. The method is well summarized in

  his dismissal of the substantial body of eyewitness testimony running

  counter to his claim: “Far from warranting their evidence, the quality

  of these witnesses just shows how far the US Army will go to distort

  the truth” (Loin de créditer leurs dépositions, la qualité de ces témoins

  ne fait que souligner l’importance des moyens déployés par l’armée des

  États-Unis pour travestir la vérité).12

  The most depressing thing about Meyssan’s book is that it was a

  best seller. There is an audience in France for the farther reaches of

  paranoid suspicion of America, and 9/11 seems to have aroused it.

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  T ony Judt

  More typical, though, is the shopping list of complaints in books with

  titles like Pourquoi le monde déteste-t-il l’Amérique?, Le Livre noir des

  États-Unis, and Dangereuse Amérique. The first two are by British and

  Canadian authors, respectively, though they have sold best in their

  French editions; the third is coauthored by a prominent French Green

  politician and former presidential candidate.13

  Characteristically presented with real or feigned regret (“We are

  not anti-American, but . . .”), these works are an inventory of

  commonly cited American shortcomings. The United States is a self-

  ish, individualistic society devoted to commerce, profit, and the

  despoliation of the planet. It is as uncaring of its own poor and sick

  as it is indifferent to the rest of humankind. The United States

  rides roughshod over international laws and treaties and threatens

  the moral, environmental, and physical future of humanity. It is

  inconsistent and hypocritical in its foreign dealings and wields unpar-

  alleled military clout. It is, in short, a bull in the global china shop,

  wreaking havoc. Much of this is recycled from earlier criticisms of

  America. Peter Scowen’s complaints (his chapter headings include

  “Les atrocités de Hiroshima et de Nagasaki” and “Une culture vide”),

  like those of Sardar and Davies (“American Hamburgers and Other

  Viruses”) or Mamère and Farbiaz (“L’américanisation du monde,”

  “Une croisade qui sent le pétrole” [A crusade smelling of oil]), blend

  traditional themes with new accusations. They are a mixture of

  conservative cultural distaste (America is ugly, rootless, and crass);

  anti-globalization rhetoric (America is polluting the world); and neo-

  Marxist reductionism (America is run by and for the oil companies).

  Some of the criticisms of American policy and practice are well

  founded; others are drivel. In their catalogue of claims against

  America, Sardar and Davies blame the United States for the Cold War

  imposed on a reluctant Western Europe: “Both France and Italy

  had major Communist Parties—and still do [sic]—but with their own

  very specific histories that owed little to Russia.” “International

  Communism,” in other words, was an American invention. This revi-

  sionist myth died many years ago. Its posthumous revival suggests

  that an older, political anti-Americanism is gaining new traction from

  the Bush administration’s foreign ambitions. Once a rogue state,

  always a rogue state.14

  According to Emmanuel Todd, however, there is no need to worry.

  In his recent book, Après l’empire (also a best seller), he argues that

  the sun is setting on imperial America. We are entering a post-American

  age. America will continue to jeopardize international stability. But

  Europeans (and Asians) can take some comfort from the knowledge

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  A New Master Narrative?

  23

  that the future is theirs. American military power is real, but redun-

  dant; meanwhile, its tottering economy is vulnerably dependent upon

  the rest of the world, and its social model holds no appeal. Between

  1950 and 1990, the United States was a benevolent and necessary

  presence in the world, but not anymore. The challenge today is to

  manage America’s growing irrelevance.15

  Todd is not at all a conventional “anti-American” and some of

  what he has to say is of interest—though English-readers seeking to

  understand the case for American decline would do better to read Charles

  Kupchan.16 Todd is right to say that asymmetric globalization—

  in which the United States consumes what others produce, and

  economic inequalities grow apace—is bringing about a world unsym-

  pathetic to American ambition. Post-communist Russia, post-Saddam

  Iraq, and other modernizing societies may adopt capitalism (“the only

  reasonable economic organization”) and even become democratic,

  but they won’t mimic American “hyper-individualism” and they

  will share European preferences on many things. The United States,

  in Todd’s view, will cling desperately to the vestiges of its ambition

  and power; to maintain its waning influence, it will seek to sustain “a

  certain level of international tension, a condition of limited but

  endemic war.” This process has already begun, and 9/11 was its

  trigger.

  The problem with Emmanuel Todd, and it will be immediately

  familiar to anyone who has read any of his previous books, is less his

  conclusions than his reasoning. There is something of the Ancient

  Mariner about this writer. He is an anthropological demographer by

  training, has a demographic tale to tell, and he recounts it in book

  after book, gripping the reader relentlessly as though to say “Don’t

  you get it? It’s all about fertility!” In 1976, he published La Chute

  finale: Essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique, in which he

  prophesied the end of the USSR: “A slight increase in Russian infant

  mortality between 1970 and 1974 made me understand the rotting

  away of the Soviet Union back in 1976 and allowed me to predict the

  system’s collapse.” According to his account, the decline in the Soviet

  birthrate revealed to him “the likely emergence of normal Russians,

  perfectly capable of overthrowing communism.”

  Emmanuel Todd was not the only person back in the 1970s pre-

  dicting an unhealthy future for communism. Nevertheless, the link he

  claims to have uncovered between fertility and regime collapse has

  gone to his head. In his new book, world history is reduced to a series

  of unidirectional, mono-causal correlations linking birthrates, literacy

  rates, timeless family structures, and global politics. The Yugoslav

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  T ony Judt

  wars were the result of “fertility gaps” between Slavs and Muslims.

  The American Civil War can be traced to the low birthrates of the

  Anglo-Saxon settler class. And if “individualistic” America faces grim

  prospects today, this is because the “fami
ly structures” of the rest of

  the world favor very different political systems.

  In Emmanuel Todd’s parallel universe, politics—like economic

  behavior—is inscribed in a society’s “genetic code.” The egalitarian

  family systems of Central Asia reveal an “anthropology of community”

  that made communism more acceptable there (elsewhere he has

  attributed regional variations in French, Italian, and Finnish voting

  patterns to similar differences in family life17). Today, the “universalist

  Russian temperament” based on the extended Russian family offers a

  nonindividualistic socioeconomic model that may be the democracy

  of the future. “A priori, there is no reason not to imagine a liberal and

  democratic Russia protecting the planet against American efforts to

  shore up their global imperial posture.”

  Todd goes further. He absurdly exaggerates America’s current woes,

  real as they are. Extrapolating from the collapse of Enron (but what of

  Parmalat?), he concludes that all American economic data are as unre-

  liable as that of the Soviets: the truly parlous state of the U.S. economy

  has been kept hidden; and he offers his own variant on the “clash of

  civilizations.” The coming conflict between Islam and the United

  States brings into opposition the “effectively feminist,” women-based

  civilization of America and the masculinized ethic of Central Asian

  and Arab warrior societies. Here, too, America will be isolated, for

  Europeans will feel just as threatened by the United States as their

  Arab neighbors do. Once again, it all comes down to family life, with

  a distinctive modern twist: “The status of the American woman, threat-

  ening and castrating [castratrice et menaçante], [is] as disturbing for

  European men as the all-powerful Arab male is for European women.”

  The Atlantic gap begins in the bedroom . . .

  To leave Emmanuel Todd for Jean-François Revel is to abandon

  the mad scientist for the self-confident patrician. Revel is an august

  immortal of the Académie Française. He is the author of many books

  (31 to date), as the reader of his latest essay is firmly reminded.18 Revel’s

  style suggests a man unfamiliar with self-doubt and unused to contra-

  diction. He tends toward sweeping, unsupported generalizations—by

  his account, most of Europe’s political and cultural elite “never under-

  stood anything about communism”—and his version of French anti-

  Americanism, at times, approaches caricature. This is a pity, because

  some of what he writes makes good sense.

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  A New Master Narrative?

  25

  Thus, Revel is right to draw attention to the contradiction at the

  heart of much French criticism of America. If the United States is

  such a social disaster, a cultural pygmy, a political innocent, and an

  economic meltdown waiting to happen, why worry? Why devote so

  much resentful attention to it? Alternatively, if it is as powerful and

  successful as many fear, might it not be doing something right? As a

  Frenchman, Revel is well placed to remind his fellow citizens that

  France, too, has social problems—the much-vaunted French educa-

  tion system neither assimilates cultural and religious minorities nor

  does it support and nourish cultural difference. France, too, has slums,

  violence, and delinquency.

  And Jean-Marie Le Pen’s score in the presidential elections of 2002

  is a standing rebuke to all of France’s political class for its failure to

  address the problems of immigration and race. Revel makes legitimate

  fun of France’s cultural administrators, who can vandalize their own

  national heritage at least as recklessly as the barbaric Americans. No

  American booster could ever match Culture Minister Jack Lang’s 1984

  “Projet Culturel Extérieur de la France,” in which France’s cultural

  ambitions are described by Lang himself as “probably unequaled in

  any other country.” And what does it say about the sophistication of

  the French press and television who devoted so much credulous space

  to the elucubrations of M. Meyssan?

  One could go on. Mocking the French for their pretensions (and

  their memory holes) is almost as easy as picking apart the hypocrisies of

  the U.S. foreign policy. And I agree with Revel that today’s antiglobali-

  zation activists came as a “divine surprise” for the European left, a

  heaven-sent cause at a post-ideological moment when Europe’s radicals

  were adrift. But Revel’s astute observations of what is wrong in France

  are devalued by his inability to find anything wrong with America. His

  entire book is a paean of blinkered praise for a country that, regrettably,

  does not exist. Like the anti-Americans he disdains, he has conjured

  up his American subject out of thin air.

  In Revel’s America, the melting pot works “fort bien” and there is

  no mention of ghettos. According to him, Europeans misread and

  exaggerate U.S. crime statistics, whereas, in reality, crime in America is

  not a problem. Health coverage in America works well: most Americans

  are insured at work, the rest benefit from publicly funded Medicare

  and Medicaid. Anyway, the system’s shortcomings are no worse than

  those of France’s own provisions for health care. The American poor

  have the same per capita income as the average citizen of Portugal;

  so, they can’t be called poor (Revel has apparently never heard of

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  T ony Judt

  cost-of-living indices). There is no “underclass.” Meanwhile, the

  United States has had social democracy longer than Europe, and

  American television and news coverage is much better than you think.

  As for American foreign policy: in Revel-land, the United States has

  stayed fully engaged in the Israel–Palestine conflict, is resolutely non-

  partisan, and its policy has been a success. The American missile defense

  program worries M. Revel a lot less than it does some American gen-

  erals. Unlike 50 percent of the U.S. electorate, Académicien Revel saw

  nothing amiss in the conduct of the 2000 presidential election. As for

  evidence of growing American anti-French sentiment, stuff and

  nonsense: pour ma part, je ne l’ai jamais constaté (“as for me, I’ve

  never seen it”). In short, whatever French critics and others say about

  the United States, Jean-François Revel maintains the opposite.

  Voltaire could not have done a better job satirizing traditional French

  prejudices. M. Revel is Pangloss in Wonderland.

  *

  *

  *

  Somewhere between Emmanuel Todd and Jean-François Revel, there

  is emerging an interesting European perspective on George Bush’s

  America; for anti-Americanism, in Europe at least, draws on a genuine

  Atlantic gap. The two sides of the ocean really are different today, in

  many ways. To begin with, there is religion. America is a credulous and

  religious society: since the mid-1950s, Europeans have abandoned

  their churches in droves; but in the United States, there has been vir-

  tually no decline in churchgoing a
nd synagogue attendance.

  In 1998, a Harris poll found that 66 percent even of non-Christian

  Americans believed in miracles and 47 percent of them accredited

  the Virgin Birth; the figures for all Americans are 86 and 83 percent,

  respectively. Some 45 percent of Americans believe there is a Devil. In

  a recent Newsweek poll, 79 percent of American respondents accepted

  that biblical miracles really happened. According to a 1999 Newsweek

  poll, 40 percent of all Americans (71 percent of Evangelical Protestants)

  believe that the world will end in a battle at Armageddon between

  Jesus and the Antichrist. An American president who conducts Bible

  study in the White House and begins cabinet sessions with a prayer

  may seem a curious anachronism to his European allies, but he is in

  tune with his constituents.19

  Second, the inequalities and insecurities of American life are still

  unthinkable across the Atlantic. Europeans remain wary of excessive

  disparities of income, and their institutions and political choices reflect

  this sentiment. Moreover, it is prudence, rather than the residue of

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  A New Master Narrative?

  27

  “socialism,” that explains European hesitation over unregulated markets

  and the dismantling of the public sector and local resistance to the

  American “model.” This makes sense for most people in Europe—as

  elsewhere in the world—unrestricted competition is at least as much a

  threat as an opportunity. Europeans want a more interventionist state

  at home than Americans do, and they expect to pay for it. Even in

  post-Thatcher Britain, 62 percent of adults polled in December 2002

  would favor higher taxes in return for improved public services. The

  figure for the United States was under 1 percent. This is less surpris-

  ing when one considers that in America (where the disparities

  between rich and poor are greater than anywhere else in the devel-

  oped world), fully 19 percent of the adult population claims to be in

  the richest 1 percent of the nation—and a further 20 percent believe

  they will enter that 1 percent in their lifetime!20

  What Europeans find perturbing about America, then, is precisely

  what most Americans believe to be their nation’s strongest suit: its

 

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