With Us or Against Us
Page 5
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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22
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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24
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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26
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