Published in France in January 2024 and subsequently translated in several languages, including Italian and Russian, The Defeat of the West is Emmanuel Todd’s latest work. The French analyst stated that he wrote his book as a sequel to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. The birth of the first European nations, according to Todd, is linked with the Protestant Reformation, which led to the translation of the Holy Bible in the national languages, so arousing a national consciousness well before the French Revolution. Incidentally, since Protestantism implied that every believer had to be able to read the Bible, a by-product of the Reformation was mass alphabetisation. But, at the same time, the peoples who embraced Protestantism, “after reading the Bible too much, ended up believing to be the Chosen People”. This, together with the sacrifice of the Catholic (and Orthodox) concept of equality among men – indeed it spread mostly among peoples with an inegalitarian family structures – led Protestantism to produce “some of the worst racisms of all times: the American anti-black one and the German anti-Jewish one”. But the actual trigger of this book has been the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict, which is actually taking place between Russia and the Washington-led “Collective West” rather than simply between Russia and Ukraine, and this led him to write about a Western defeat, rather than a Ukrainian one.
To explain the roots of the upcoming Western defeat, which Todd foresaw when most Western politicians and pundits believed – often sincerely – that the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive would have brought Russia to its knees and forced it to accept a Versailles-like humiliating peace treaty, Todd analyses the nature of “zero religion”, the final one of the three stages of the secularisation process which has affected most Western countries. If “active religion” (the first stage) implies a sincere belief and a regular practice, and while in the subsequent zombie phasis religion is no longer actively followed but still survives in terms of religion-associated practices and values, the final zero religion stage implies a loss of these long-standing practices and values. Todd choices the legalisation of homosexual marriage as a symbolical mark for the shift from the zombie to the zero state, since such a marriage “doesn’t have any sense from a religious point of view”; but the signs of such a shift can be traced way beyond this and include, for instance, the disappearance of baptism and the spread of cremation.
Since the “Western” part of Todd’s analysis is mostly focused on Protestant countries (not surprisingly, given the leading role played by Protestant countries in the “Collective West”), it may be asked what are the implications of “zero Protestantism”. If the Reform has been a main driver for alphabetisation and the subsequent Industrial Revolution (Todd, while an atheist with Jewish roots, calls it “the religion of progress”), the disappearance of both the religious practices and the values associated to Protestantism have caused, among the others, a radical deindustrialisation and an intellectual decline, which have somehow affected all countries affected by it. Todd uses many statistical indicators to show the measure of this decline, such as the low share of engineering students among their total number and the delusional nature of the U.S. GDP, half of which can’t be considered “real”, and the decline of its manufacture, which used to be the greatest in the world. This is also creating a democratic deficit in the Western countries, where the will of the majority is often disregarded or dismissed as “populism” and which are now turning into “liberal oligarchies”, where minorities are protected but whose ruling elites are disconnected from the overall population and often unaccountable to them. At the same time, for opposite reasons, Russia is defined as an “authoritarian democracy”, which he sees as the natural product of the country’s communitarian background and which managed to bounce back dramatically after its 90’s collapse.
A by-product of this shift to zero Protestantism and the related intellectual decline has been the development of what Todd calls the West’s “narcissism” and “nihilism”. The gradual loss of the awareness for cultural differences which characterised the West’s leading country during the Cold War, when it developed a prominent school of cultural anthropology (Edward C. Banfield, George Kennan and Margaret Mead are just some of its most prominent names), led to the narcissistic illusion that, at the end of the day, “all the world wants to be like us”. Likewise, nihilism was a product of the gradual loss of religious values, combined with a family structure which somehow favours it, and produced – among the others – the neoliberalism and the gender ideology which Todd considers respectively a form of mass greed and an affirmation of falsehood. Rather than an attempt to prevent a resurgence of Russia, the NATO enlargement eastwards has been initially a consequence of this narcissism and nihilism, as well as the hybris which followed the Western victory of the Cold War. Blinded by the idea of the end of history, nevertheless, the West failed to understand why the reaction of the average Russian to the Western policies was completely different from the expectations, as well as the loss of support from the rest of the world, which became way more attracted by Russia’s new conservative soft power rather than the Western post-modern one.
Incidentally, Todd remarks that it’s namely this West in industrial and intellectual decline and gradually losing its democratic character (the annulment of the Romanian Presidential elections and the support for the attempts of the Georgian opposition to overturn the results of the recent parliamentary elections are two good cases in point) which has taken a lead in this anti-Russian crusade. And it is very hard to overlook the role of zero Protestant countries in this crusade, not only because of their relative weight, but also for the stances they took. If we exclude Poland, a country whose rivalry with Russia dates back to the 16th century at least, and the Baltic Republics, which we are going to analyse later for their traits-d’union with Finland, the European countries which took the most bellicose stances in the Ukrainian conflict are the United Kingdom and the Northern European countries. All of them traditionally Protestant countries, they are now heavily secularised and switched officially to the zero status in the early 2000s, using Todd’s parameter (the roots of this switch, nevertheless, are much older: in Britain’s case, for instance, they date back to the Thatcher era according to Todd himself). Germany, also a zero Protestant country (albeit with a strong Catholic component), is excluded by Todd from this Russophobic core for a number of reasons – analysing them is not the aim of this article – and in spite of the role it played in the support of Euromaidan, for instance, the French analyst is sure that “Russia and Germany, in the end, will find an understanding”.
The Defeat of the West has been rather successful in France, where it sold over 80,000 copies (a considerable number for an essay), and it’s now repeating these results in the other countries where it has been translated, including Italy. But, as it often happens for Western figures dissenting from the official viewpoints on the Ukrainian issue, Todd has been under several attacks: Le Monde accused him of “defeatism” and of being “a copyist of the Kremlin’s propaganda”, while Jacobin, a magazine of the American progressive left, even retorts to ad hominem arguments, by stating that “perhaps the “nihilism” and the “narcissism” which characterize their [ed. The Western leaders’] politics are in the eye of the beholder”. Perhaps it’s not surprising that The Defeat of the West still lacks an English translation, in spite of the potential interest. But, at the same time, it is very hard to deny that this analysis has solid foundations; and, as it happened for other prophecies Todd made at a time few people would have imagined and mainstream opinions often suggested otherwise, also this prophecy is increasingly likely to prove true.
On the introduction of his book, named “The 10 surprises of the War in Ukraine”, the seventh surprise is Scandinavia’s dramatic U-turn from pacifism to militarism. Norway and Denmark, to be clear, are NATO members since its foundation, their alignment with the Anglo-Saxons can hardly be disputed, and – not surprisingly – they have been characterised by hawkish stances on the Ukrainian crisis since the beginning (although they played a secondary role on it). But the U-turn of Sweden and Finland is not only rather surprising, given their long-standing neutrality tradition (Finland since 1945, Sweden since 1809), but it is hardly explainable from a rational point of view. Moscow never showed any interest in taking anything Finnish since 1945. It wanted merely to keep good trade relations with its affluent neighbour and enjoy a neutral platform where to discuss strategic issues with the Western countries. The 1975 Helsinki Agreements, the 2014 Boistö Plan, a 24-point peace plan elaborated by a pool of high-ranking Russian and U.S. experts on the aforementioned Finnish island, and the 2018 Helsinki Summit between Putin and Trump are just three prominent examples. About the possibility Russia may attack Sweden, as put by Todd, “it must be said clearly and without rounding around the bush that it’s pure delirium”. Why did then Finland and Sweden abandon their long-standing neutrality, which also helped them reach one of the highest standards of living in the world, to protect themselves from a non-existent threat?
Of course, according to most Western analysts, the main triggers are fear and historical memory. Finland fought two wars against the Soviet Union (the Winter and the Continuation Wars), while Russia and Sweden crossed their swords numerous times for the control of the Baltic Sea, with the Great Northern War being just the most important conflict. In this contest, according to them, the launch of the Special Military Operation reawakened old fears and, perhaps, a desire to revenge past defeats. History, nevertheless, is not a trigger in itself: Turkey fought twelve wars against Russia between 1569 and 1918, for instance, while the last war between Georgia and Russia took place in 2008. Still, neither Ankara nor Tbilisi have had a reaction akin the one of the two Scandinavian countries. Turkey – true, a NATO member, but de facto a self-centred regional power with imperial ambitions – has maintained an overall neutral stance on the Ukrainian conflict, offering itself as a mediation platform, and its relations between Russia are characterised as usual by a blend of economic cooperation and fair competition. The relations between Moscow and Tbilisi, on the other hand, are gradually improving, as shown by the introduction of visa-free travels to Russia and the reinstatement of direct flights between the two countries, and the victory of an openly neutralist party on the last Georgian Parliamentary Elections clearly shows that most Georgians do support such course. Revanchism exists in Finland, and the Winter and the Continuation Wars are frequently mentioned by Finnish officials, but the idea of Greater Finland is currently supported only by a bunch of ultranationalists, and the foreign-based organisations trying to fuel separatism among the Uralic minorities of Russia are mostly based in Estonia, rather than Finland. Sweden, as put by Todd, “has always been a valid and tough nation, but I don’t believe that it renounced its neutrality to reconquer the Baltic Region”. The remaining element is fear, which is totally unjustified for the aforementioned reasons (the term “Russophobia”, which denotes an irrational fear of Russia, is therefore totally appropriate) but which still needs to be analysed.
Emmanuel Todd tried to find an explanation to this Russophobia (in the case of Sweden, which requested to join NATO after Finland, he added a more strategical concern of losing influence over the Baltic once totally surrounded by NATO countries) and elaborates two possible explanations. One of them is a hidden malaise in their society, well concealed behind some of the highest GDPs in the world, a highly-educated population, a still strong welfare state and all those elements which make these countries particularly attractive for many people (although not very strong in soft power). Like most Western countries, Finland and Sweden have also been hit by the democratic deficit leading to the rise of populist parties, namely the True Finns and the Sweden Democrats. As put by Todd, the great majority of their voters are males; and while not unknown in other Western countries (in the latest US elections, for instance, a clear sex vote gap, particularly strong among younger generations, has been identified between males – mostly pro-Trump – and females – who leaned for Harris –, this gap is for him a clear sign of a decline in the relations between sexes.
How does it relate to Sweden and Finland’s request to join NATO? Scandinavia has been often called the most feminist region in the world, feminism is often associated with pacifism – at least by Western mainstream authors –, and Todd himself, on Ou sont elles?, associates women empowerment with a decline in the sense of collective, which in turn leads to a lower interest for the military. Still, unlike most Western countries, Sweden has experienced an increase in the willingness of its people to fight for their own country. This allowed Stockholm to restore military service in 2017. This makes Todd launch the hypothesis that feminism, in this case, didn’t promote pacifism but militarism. He reminds us that both Finland and Sweden were ruled by women when they applied to join NATO – respectively Sanna Marin and Magdalena Andersson – and that some of the most prominent anti-Russian Western hawks are women: the cases of Victoria Nuland, Ursula Von der Leyen and Annalena Baerbock are self-evident. Is it just a chance, or there is something else? Todd didn’t answer this question, and he even admits he’s not too serious about it, but he ended stating that “in Scandinavia there is a real malaise in the relations between the sexes, and this malaise is reflected into politics”.
A more interesting thesis compares the two countries – especially Sweden – to the United Kingdom, which in Todd’s opinion is now a “Nation Zero”. Like and even more than Sweden, let alone Finland, Britain – not to be confused with England, its dominating nation – is a nation based on Protestantism. Its birth was made possible by the Reformation, which led Presbyterian (Calvinist) Scotland to abandon its traditional anti-English alliance with France, which remained Catholic, and to lean towards Anglican England in the name of their shared Protestant faith. The latter’s gradual decay, which according to Todd reached a zero state during the 80’s in most of Britain, removed also the main foundation of the British nation, with dramatic consequences. Scotland went very close to achieve independence, and we cannot exclude that it will get it in the future; in Northern Ireland, the decline of the local Unionism can’t be ascribed only to a change in the demographic balance, but also to the transition from zombie to zero Protestantism among the local Unionists (needless to say, the great majority of them are from a Protestant background, since most local Catholics support Irish unity); and even Brexit, rather than unifying Britain or even England in a fight for national independence, created new divisions and just led Britain into a lazy merger into the Americanosphere (a term Todd prefers to the more conventional “Anglosphere” to denote not only a clear American dominance, but most of all the disappearance of the “Anglo” character of the U.S. establishment).
It is probably this latest merger to lead this Zero Britain to try to find a new reason to be as a “defender of the Western Civilisation” against China and especially Russia, perhaps in an effort to revive the good old times of the Battle of Britain or of the Atlantic. Unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, where London was a mere follower of Washington’s military ventures, after the launch of the Special Military Operation Britain assumed an even more radical stance than the United States themselves, disrupting the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022 and being the first to send to Kiev tanks, long-range missiles and depleted uranium munitions. The British militarism, in Todd’s opinion, is “both sad and ridiculous”; at the end of the day, while during World War II Britain fought “for the global civilisation”, at this point, unlike the French one, “the British Army wouldn’t even be able to carry out military actions in Africa and to get itself hated”. One would be tempted to add that, unlike during World War II, in Ukraine Britain is fighting mostly through the Ukrainian Army and the only Brits who are dying are the (few) ones who enlisted in the International Legion. But, at this point, what matters is analysing the reasons why Britain assumed a radically militarist attitude, which Todd considers “the sixth surprise” of the Special Military Operation and its aftermath, just like Sweden and Finland’s U-turn from pacifism to militarism was the seventh.
Apart from this rediscovery of militarism, what do Sweden and Finland – and Scandinavia as a whole – have in common the United Kingdom? Unlike the latter, they are not “nations of nations”, but nations in their own right; therefore, they are not at risk of falling apart. It should be remarked, at this point, that even zero composite nations which fail to find a new unifying element may hold together for a long time if its constituent parts have the interest to do so. Still, according to Todd, Protestantism does not merely work as a faith for these countries, but as the foundation of the nations themselves; therefore, the disappearance of Protestantism and of the values associated to it are leading to a national sense of insecurity. This is something we have seen for England, which may not disaggregate but whose crisis is not much different to the one experienced by the Scandinavian countries. This combines with another element: if most Western European nations live in a post-historical dimension, and therefore are mostly focused on the well-being of their citizens rather than to non-economic elements such as national pride, faith and power, Sweden and Finland are the quintessential post-historical nations which don’t pursue power in international relations, in spite of their relatively large army.
Does the reawakening of history, with the decline of American dominance and a return of great power rivalry, somehow frightened those countries which have grown on the illusion of perennial peace? This is a common trope among some Western analysts, such as the Italian Dario Fabbri. But, for Todd, the point is not a non-existent external threat, but “a general sense of danger which arises from not knowing well what to do in history”. And, at the end of the day, “what Sweden and Finland expressed by asking to join NATO… is not protection from Russia, but a more basic quest for a sense of belonging”.
After analysing both hypotheses, one could ask himself which one is more solid. Both of them have good foundations, but at the same time Todd himself states that “he doesn’t believe too much” in his attempted explanations. Let us analyse them one at a time, starting with the assumption that no decision is merely a result of a cause-effect relationship.
Todd’s stance about the relation between feminism and militarism is not immediately evident. Apparently, there aren’t any connections: more liberal attitudes among Western women, especially young ones, have usually little to do with foreign policy issues, but way more with domestic ones, especially those such as abortion or LGBT issues: the latest US Presidential elections are a good case in point. Still, this matters in a contest where Western countries – especially those who weren’t part of the Warsaw Pact – often presents the conflict in Ukraine as a fight for values, and the values promoted by the most bellicose components of the Western societies are the exact opposite of Russia’s. A foreign policy based on the promotion of certain values amounts to a crusade; the enemy, in this case, is not merely an opponent but a personification of the Absolute Evil, and it’s not surprising that some of the most ardent Russophobes are in the progressive left parties of the West (the Latin American left, on the other hand, is mostly neutral or even Russia-friendly in spite of being often as socially progressive as most mainstream Western left parties). And both Sanna Marin and Magdalena Andersson belong to that left.
Let us now go to the decay of Protestantism. As we have seen, its role as a main driver of the development of the concept of “nation” can hardly be objected, although it is often overlooked. Unlike the British one, the Swedish and the Finnish nations are not merely based on religion, but also on a number of other elements, first of all a national language, and the end of Protestantism is highly unlikely to cause its implosion. But, at the same time, no element is as strong as a nation builder as religion, and it’s not surprising if the countries which can be considered as “civilisation states”, such as Russia, Japan, India, Armenia and Ethiopia, often have also their own unique religion. The loss of the national religion does not imply national death, but unless replaced by something else it usually implies a much weaker nation, more unsure about its role in the world, and therefore more likely to be drawn into something bigger. This may be the explanation of Todd’s idea that Sweden and Finland, at the end of the day, are just looking for a sense of belonging by joining NATO. What they want to do, in this case, is remarking their belonging to the Western civilisation.
Of course, this came at a price. Apart from risking a war to Russia, the adhesion to NATO implied also spoiling the image of peacemakers and safe havens for pacifists (during the Vietnam War, for instance, Sweden offered refuge to many US draft dodgers) and persecuted minorities both Sweden and Finland carefully built throughout the years. An indirect consequence for Finland has been its unilateral closure of the border with Russia: a decision which not only stopped an until-then flourishing cross-border trade, but which also implied the breakup of ties between ethnic brethren on both sides of the border, as we have seen for the Saami. Or let us consider what joining an alliance including a prominent country like Turkey does mean: regardless of what one may think of the PKK and of the other Kurdish separatist movements fighting against Turkey, classifying as terrorists those you previously considered freedom fighters for political reasons is pretty close to a betrayal, including of your own principles. But a country unsure of itself may well be happy to pay this price to fulfil its ancestral quest for belonging.
As a whole, both points have their own merits; but, at the same time, they can’t provide a full explanation of Sweden and Finland’s decision to join NATO (the reasons NATO wanted Sweden and Finland are self-evident). Someone can criticise Todd’s scant interest for the history of Russia’s not always peaceful relations with Sweden and Finland, which he mentions on the book but he declines to consider a relevant factor. But, as we have seen in the cases of Turkey and Georgia, we can’t always find a historical determinism between past and present events; and this applies also in this case. The many wars Russia and Sweden fought between the 16th and the 18th century for the Baltic region and the latter’s ultimate degradation from a main European empire to a post-historical country should have left some scars in the Swedish psyche. Already in 2008, when hardly anyone would have expected the current crisis, the country was classified as a Russian “enemy” by Limes, Italy’s main geopolitical journal, together with other long-standing adversaries such as Britain and Poland. Still, if revanchism was the main point, Sweden would not have reintroduced conscription in 2017, when the one in Donbass was just one of the many (almost) frozen conflicts around the world and Western countries were mostly focused on internal events such as Brexit, Islamist terrorism and the growth of right-wing populist parties.
If anything, what is really missing is an analysis of Finland’s situation based on the main staple of Todd’s analyses: the trait-d’union between local family systems and political leanings. Unlike the rest of Northern Europe, most of Finland has had exogamous communitarian families until very recently, and this makes it somehow unique in a region which is dominated by inequalitarian (traditional) family structures. Between the end of the 19th century and the second half of the 20th, almost all societies characterised by this kind of this traditional family have strongly leaned towards communism, which offered at a national level something similar to the traditional large rural families and communities, and Finland was no exception. Just after the October Revolution, the country was hit by a civil war, which divided “Red” and “White” Finns, causing 40,000 deaths over a population of around 3 million people. The war caused deep scares, with families on opposite sides living in a sort of apartheid for many years and a number of “Red Finns” – mostly educated people – fleeing east of the border, and after the Second World War it had one of the strongest communist parties in Western Europe, after the Italian and the French ones. In the other Scandinavian countries, the support for the local communist parties has been always much scanter.
On the chapter dedicated to Eastern Europe, Todd dedicates much attention to Estonia and Latvia, whose evolution into anti-Russian bulwarks was all but predictable one hundred years ago. While most modern research, especially from Anglo-Saxon countries, focuses on the Protestant roots and the strong Germanic influence of both countries, making them natural members of the Western civilisation – the author of The Clash of Civilisations Samuel P. Huntington, for instance, places both countries firmly within the West –, Todd underlines the communitarian structures of its traditional families, which explains why the local support for communism was well above the national average. At the 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, for instance, the Bolsheviks reached 40 per cent of the votes in Estonia – then limited to a coastal strip on the Gulf of Finland – and a staggering 72 per cent in Livonia (E. Todd, ibid, p. 129). It would make sense, at this point, to consider Finland not just as a Northern European country – albeit as a sui generis one –, but also as part of an Eastern Baltic subgroup of nations which includes also Estonia and Latvia. All of them should be considered as Western countries, but their dominant traditional family is similar to Russia’s, and this made them particularly attracted by communism at a time when their communitarian families started to crumble, gradually replaced by nuclear ones.
None of them was ultimately successful in establishing a Communist state on their own, in spite of the premises, and the local Communist elites had to flee eastwards, but the peculiar position of Finland and the two northern Baltic States, which in other circumstances would have been considered as “bridges” between the West and the East, goes a great deal to explain their complicated relations with Russia during the last 100 years. In Finland, which developed a nation within Russia rather than outside of it – the predecessor of the current Finnish state was the Grand Duchy of Finland, a self-governing duchy within the Russian Empire – and which remained independent after the Continuation War, this process was much slower, but at the end of the day the process it followed was very similar to the one of its southern neighbours.
Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1951, Emmanuel Todd is a prominent French demographer and political scientist. After rising to international prominence in 1976, when he foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union basing on the rise of child mortality and other demographic indicators, he dedicated his whole career to the study of the world’s traditional family structures, with the ultimate end of finding the trait-d’union between the latter and the locally dominant social and political values. This model has been the basis of his subsequent historical, sociological and geopolitical analyses, and it helped him to develop some concepts such as the one of “zombie state of religion”, which occurs when religion is no longer regularly practiced as in the active state but its core values and beliefs still survive.
Todd is renowned also for the prediction of other main historical events, based on the study of demographic and social trends: apart from the fall of the Soviet Union, for instance, he also foresaw the end of American global hegemony (After the Empire, 2002), the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Arab Springs and Brexit. A man of the left, who used to belong to the French Communist Party while young, Todd still praises Communism for being one of the two main drivers of mass alphabetisation (the other one, as we are going to see, is Protestantism); but, at the same time, he is a rather heretical leftist, whose stances on Europe and transgenderism hardly fit into the Western mainstream left. His analyses made him a target of several critics, often from opposite sides and for totally different reasons, and this led him to be often regarded as the enfant terrible of the French political sociology.
Giuseppe Cappelluti
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