Emmanuel Todd - İmparatorluktan Sonra

Sevgili Fikir Yongacıları,

17 Mayıs Cumartesi günü Emmanuel Todd’un İmparatorluktan Sonra adlı kitabını işlemek üzere 14.30’da toplanacağız.

Önermeler:

1 – 11 Eylül saldırısı sonrasında Amerika’nin (Amerikalıların) kafa yapısı belli oldu. Joseph Nye’nin Soft Power adlı yapıtında yazdığı şeyin gerçek olduğunu kavradık. Amerika sadece silahının gücüyle yönetmiyor, değerleri, kurumları ve kültürüyle dünyaya egemen oluyordu. Kısacası bizim Amerika’nın gönüllü köleleri olduğumuz ortaya çıkmıştır.

Soft Power - Fighting terror and extremism is not just a question of military action and law enforcement. Culture, ideas and non-military policies — often referred to as soft power — are just as important. And it is in this area that other countries — especially in Europe — can complement U.S. strengths. Joseph Nye, author of "Soft Power," outlines how in this excerpt.


2 – Amerikan dış siyasetini yönlendiren gizemli etken onun sahip olduğu aşırı güç değil, içine düştüğü zafiyettir. Amerika’nın baştan aşağı yanlışlarla dolu, saldırganlık üzerine kurulmuş stratejisi, tek güç şımarık tavırları ancak bu yetersizlik korkusuyla açıklanabilir.

3 – Eğitim düzeyini artırıp nüfusunun gelişimini sağlamış ve demokrasisini kurmuş ülkeler, Amerika olmadan da yaşayabileceklerini görmeye başlamışken ABD diğer ülkeler olmadan yaşayamayacağını anlamıştı.

4 - Demokrasi zayıf olduğu ülkelerde giderek güçlenmekte, güçlü olduğu ülkelerde ise zayıflamaktadır.

NOT: G: Monbiot yaz sonrası listemizde duruyor. Burada kısaca değiniyorum:
İki hafta önce, the Telegraph, benimsenmesi halinde yeni bir terörist saldırıyı engelleyeceğini öne sürdüğü, "Britanya kimliğinin 10 temel değerinin" listesini yayımladı. (6) Bunlar bağrımıza basmayı tercih edeceğimiz değerler değildi, ama "kimliğimizin tartışılmaz bileşenleriydi". Bunların arasında, "kraliyetin parlamentodaki egemenliği" ("Lordlar, Avam ve kraliyet bu topraklardaki en üst yetkeyi oluşturur"), "özel mülkiyet", "aile", "tarih" ("Britanyalı çocuklar ... bir dizi muazzam ulusal başarıyı miras alırlar") ve "İngilizce'nin konuşulduğu dünya" ("11 Eylül 2001'deki acımasız saldırılar yabancı bir ülkeye karşı değil, anglodünyaya karşı düzenlenmiştir") yer alıyordu. Bu tartışılmaz talepler teröristlerinkinden o kadar da farklı değil. Ebedi bir halife yerine ebedi bir monarşi. İslami bir tarih görüşü yerine Eton usulü bir tarih görüşü. Ümmet yerine, anglodünya.

5 – Evrensel terörizim kavramı sadece, sürekli savaş halinde olacak bir Eski Dünya’ya gereksinimi olan Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’nin işine yaramaktadır.

6 – Toplumların belli bir modernleşme sürecinden sonra barışı sağladığı ve erktekelci olmayan, çoğunluğun kabullendiği bir yönetim şekli oturtmayı başardıkları görülmektedir.

7 – ABD’den, yeniden diğer ülkelerden farksız liberal ve demokratik bir ülke olması, askeri kadrolarını azaltması ve dünyada barışın sağlanmasına katkılarından dolayı kendisine minnettar olan dış dünyanın takdirini toplayarak hak ettiği emekliliği alması istenecektir.

8 - İmparatorluk Boyutu: ABD İmparatorluğu! Atina’ya mı, Roma’ya mı benziyor?

9 – Hiç kuşkusuz ABD ilk zamanlarda dünyanın büyük bir bölümüne barış ve refah getirme iddiasında tamamen haklıydı.

10- Rakamlar (Sayfa.74) bize büyük ya da küçük servetlerin üretimle değil, dış dünya üzerinde kurulan siyasi egemenliğin sonucunda elde edildiğini anlatmaktadır.

11- Evrensellikten uzaklaşma: Amerikalılar, bazı yabancıları kendilerinin benzeri ve eşiti, bazılarını da kendilerinden farklı ve aşağı görüyorlar. Avrupa ne kadar evrensel?

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Emmanuel Todd: Kouchner's "Military-Without-Borders" Marianne2 Interview
Monday 17 September 2007
Emmanuel Todd, along with Youssef Courbage, has just published a book, "Le rendez-vous des civilisations"(1), which debunks the thesis of the clash of civilizations. For these two demographers, the rise in radical Islam is only one among many signs of the modernization of the Muslim world, the demographic aspect of which, moreover, is the most striking. The societies of the Muslim world have entered a demographic transition that sees men's literacy progress, then women's, before the number of children per woman approaches the level in the West. According to the authors, all that evokes a rise in individualism in societies. Demographic analysis consequently leads them to reject the idea of a difference in nature between formerly Christian and Muslim societies.
Marianne2: What is one to think of Bernard Kouchner's jackbooted statement about Iran?

Emmanuel Todd: His intervention reanimates a personal question that dates back to the war in Iraq when he already pronounced himself in favor of the American intervention: What can the psychology of a doctor who demonstrates a stable preference for war be? We go too quickly from Doctors-of-the-World to "Military-Without-Borders."
More seriously, Bernard Kouchner has only rather clumsily expressed the Sarkozy position, which, in fact, is the Washington position. Before the presidential election, I had suggested that the Americans would wait for Nicolas Sarkozy's election to attack Iran.
The Quai d'Orsay proposes another reading of that statement: It's not, in fact, about threatening Iran, but about showing its present leaders the economic cost of their refusal to obey the international community's recommendations.
They can say what they want, but the word war has been pronounced and the Quai d'Orsay will teach other news through the press.
Iran worries some observers more than Iraq did before the American intervention.
The question of Iran presents itself in the form of a stream of images and facts difficult to interpret as seen from France. There are the absurd statements of President Ahmadinejad, images of women covered in black and the ambient Islamophobia. All that masks the deep reality of Iran: a society in the midst of rapid cultural development, in which there are more women than men enrolled in university, a country in which the demographic revolution has reduced the number of children per woman to two, as in France or the United States. Iran is in the process of giving birth to a pluralistic democracy. It's a country where, certainly, not everyone can stand for election, but where people vote regularly and where swings in opinion and majority are frequent. Like France, England and the United States, Iran has lived through a revolution that is stabilizing itself and where a democratic temperament is blossoming.
All that must be related to a religious matrix in which the Shiite variation of Islam values interpretation, debate and, ultimately, revolt.
For a simple Western observer, the similarity between Shiism and Protestantism is not particularly obvious.
It would be ridiculous to push this comparison to the extreme. But it is clear that - just as Protestantism was an accelerator of progress in European history and Catholicism was a break - Shiism today brings a positive contribution to development, notably in the domain of birth control: Azerbaijan, certainly post-Communist, but also Shiite, has a 1.7 fertility rate, while the Shiite Alawite regions of Syria have completed their demographic transition, unlike the majority-Sunni regions. In Lebanon, the Shiite community, Hezbollah's social base, was behind on the educational and social levels, but is in the process of catching up with the other communities, as one sees in the development of fertility rates.
Iran is also a very big nation that demonstrates a realistic awareness of its strategic interest in a region where most of its neighbors possess the nuclear weapon: Pakistan, (and, via the presence of the American Army) Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel. In that context, the reasonable European attitude would be to accompany Iran in its liberal and democratic transition and to understand its security preoccupations.
In your book, you make the altogether surprising hypothesis of a possible secularization of Muslim societies.
To the extent that within the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Buddhist worlds, the drop in fertility has always been preceded by a weakening of religious practice, one must wonder whether the Muslim countries in which the number of children per woman is equal to or less than two are not also in the process of experiencing, unknown to us - and perhaps also unknown to their leaders - a process of secularization. That's the case of Iran.
Why have the Americans and Sarkozy adopted this strategy of confrontation with Iran?
The American diplomatic services are perfectly up-to-date with respect to the Iranian reality, the rise in democracy and the country's modernization. But they want to destroy a regional power that threatens their control of the oil region. It's pure cynicism exploiting the present lack of understanding of the Muslim world. In the case of Sarkozy, I would lean more towards the idea of incompetence or sincere ignorance that nonetheless leads him to initiate a foreign policy contrary to France's moral values and interests. Possible French economic sanctions against Iran will make the Americans - who no longer have interests in that country - laugh and make the Germans - who, like us, have many interests, but seem more realistic for the moment - smile.
(1) "Le rendez-vous des civilisations," Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage, Le Seuil, 2007.


For Todd, No "Clash," but a "Rendezvous of Civilizations" By Le Yéti Rue89
Wednesday 19 September 2007
In 1976, when he was 25 years old, he predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union ("La Chute finale" ["The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere"]). Before he demurred, the paternity for the discovery of the "social fracture" in 1994 was attributed to him, following a study conducted for the Fondation Saint-Simon.
In 2002, he settled the fate of the United States ("Après l'empire" ["After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order"]) and in 2006, he waged war against the "empty candidates" he considered Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal to be. For this season, demographer/anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, grandson of the writer Paul Nizan, authors with sidekick Youssef Courbage, also a demographer, an essay that debunks the so-frequently-heralded "clash of civilizations." And demonstrates that we could be on our way to a convergence of the same. With a few punishing ignition failures, it is true.
The authors establish a correlation between two essential factors of human development that very frequently precede revolutions.
First of all, literacy, almost infallibly accompanied by an ebb of religious believers. Men's literacy generally precedes that of women, with a time lapse that differs between communities. Second, the reduction in fertility rates that arises almost naturally from the phenomenon of literacy and precipitates the decline of fundamentally natalist religions. These factors are obviously not the only ones at work.
A number of other parameters must be considered: the type of familial organization, the stranglehold of the religious order, demographic pressure.... As for economic takeoff, eternally advanced by Western societies to explain humanity's progress, it is much more a consequence of literacy than its main cause.
The phenomenon affects all human societies at different eras. In France, the 1789 Revolution punctuated the Enlightenment, but the fertility rate began to drop twenty years before those "events." In Russia, the literacy rate for men crossed the 50 percent threshold around 1900, or seventeen years before the Revolution. It took until 1942 for China to achieve the same level (victory of the Maoist People's Liberation Army in 1949). In Iran, adult male literacy (for at least 50 percent) occurred in 1964, that of women in 1981, with a fall in fertility as of 1985 (Khomeini arrived in power in 1979).
We note that revolutions are not solely liberating! The phenomena of transition induced by the modernization that the increase in literacy represents often entail reactions of rejection by a social body sandbagged by its traditions.
The history of our Old Europe is marked by violence, from the Protestant Reformation to the Second World War. Communism, a "substitution faith," prospered on the ruins of religious beliefs in Russia (Orthodox Christianity) and in China (Buddhism). In Muslim countries, the undermining of paternal authority, when the father is the central and significantly protective figure after God of the Muslim family, exacerbates and radicalizes tension. "Fundamentalism is but a transitory aspect of the shake-up in religious belief, the new fragility of which induces re-affirmative behaviors," note Courbage and Todd.
This need for religious re-affirmation strikes even those who have the most reason to be assailed by doubt: scientists, savants, philosophers.... Descartes and Pascal in their time; the engineer bin Ladin today.
Of course, one would like to think that growing literacy of populations inevitably leads to a happy convergence of civilizations in the long run. The suppositious and inevitable "clash of civilizations" that some advance acts above all as a decoy to hide the pitiless economic war based on control of energy resources that the Western bloc and the nations of the South are conducting against one another. For it's at this level that the shoe of optimism pinches. And someone like Kouchner may, still just recently, announce that we must prepare ourselves for the worst, even a "war" against Iran, without setting off anything but a few isolated and tired expressions of indignation.
One should not underestimate the unbelievable and hypnotic self-destructive capacity of human societies, their insatiable and blind appetite for power. Nor their inability to accept their human condition as ephemeral and imperfect beings, to vanquish their own demons, to jam the gears of the catastrophes that they themselves have provoked.
How to explain that, having reached an unequaled summit of material comfort and technical modernity as we have, the suicide rate of our so-very-rich societies is so elevated? With over 10,000 deaths in France, suicide kills more people than traffic accidents. Courbage and Todd cite sociologist Émile Durkheim who, in "Suicide," already pointed out man's "propensity to self-destruct in anticipation of reciprocal murder on a Continental scale during the First World War."
A happy or unfortunate Rendezvous? Or something in between? And when? We shall undoubtedly find out very soon.
(1) "Le Rendez-vous des civilisations" by Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage - Le Seuil / La République des idées.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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