Eastern Europe’s pro-West shift is ‘inauthentic’ - Emmanuel Todd’s ‘The Defeat of the West’

From Bloc to bourgeois so soon? France’s top new book blasts the East’s phony Liberal Democracy

(This is the 2nd part in a multipart series on Emmanuel Todd’s French-only it-book of the moment The Defeat of the West (La Defaite de l’Occident).)

In Chapter 1, “Russian Stability”, Todd explained why Russia has thrived despite the Western imposition of Iran-level sanctions: essentially, Todd asserts, Western analysts didn’t want to admit that all the readily available data on Russia’s economy, society and leadership was as good as it obviously was. In order to follow the actual thread of the data and conclusions he presented himself, I suggested renaming Chapter 2 from “The Ukrainian Enigma” to “The Ukrainian Suicide”, and the article analysing that excellent chapter is found here.

Chapter 3, which this article analyses, is titled “In Eastern Europe, a postmodern Russophobia”. Postmodern doesn’t have much to say if we assume it merely implies something like “contemporary”, but it means quite a lot if we assume it is being used in a pejorative sense, and thus synonymous with “nonsensical”, “phony” and “superficial”. This is the sense Todd obviously comes to mean.

Especially as the Ukrainian situation can worsen, we cannot assume - as most Westerners do, per Todd - that Eastern Europe is one undifferentiated mass. This is a reminder that that Western Europe and “the West” is as ignorant of Eastern Europe as they are of the Muslim World, Africa, India, East Asia, etc. I’m sympathetic - it’s a big world, after all, but the point is: let’s not assume Westerners even know their neighbors.

What Todd doesn’t note is that your average jingoistic Westerner also sees Eastern Europe as an undifferentiated mass of anti-socialists upon whom socialism was forced. In their false reading of history there were no local, grassroots groups working willingly with Moscow, but instead was more akin to a relationship between a plantation owner and his slaves. Total nonsense of course - the USSR was rightly called the first empire where the center was bled for the periphery.

Todd’s excellent book dares to examine the unsaid stupidities of Western views of geopolitics, even if Westerners would sputter at suggestions like: perhaps Eastern Europe’s hatred of Russia is not a justified, logical and moral stance due to Moscow’s (alleged) imposition of socialism after WWII:

“It was as if, since the end of communism and, even more so, since the start of this war, the Russophobic nature of Eastern Europe and its membership in the Western camp were as natural as could be, part of a history that had been familiar since the dawn of time and needed no explanation. However, none of this was self-evident.”

It is not at all self-evident because in 1945 socialism was victorious on the East European battlefield because, crucially, it was victorious in tens of millions Eastern European hearts and minds. This is something which if one cannot accept one will be doomed to a foolish, inaccurate, jingoistic view of Eastern Europe because it totally ignores the on-the-streets reality.

This is not a point which Todd makes, but why do so many people assume that “popular revolutions” - like in Cuba, China, Iran, 1917 - were somehow not actually “popular”? This same distortion also goes for Eastern Europe in 1945. The West likes to present these grassroots movements and resistances as aberrations, accidents, failed experiments - it’s not at all accurate, and that leads to jingoistic stupidities.

Todd notes, crucially, that today’s Russophobia comes even though in 1991, “Russia withdrew itself from combat, and even with a certain elegance”, meaning that they peacefully departed, precisely as a non-imperialist project - one based on willing cooperation - would do….

The historical inauthenticity of Eastern Europe’s pro-Western policies

Todd notes the irony that the places with two most successful anti-Soviet protests - mass strikes in Eastern Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 - are currently the home of the most pro-Russian sentiment. This provides the other surprising side to this ironical coin: the mass conversion of Eastern Europe to liberalism, which surely would have “surprised Stalin”. Stalin did not defeat the Nazis on his own, after all, and he surely would be surprised that Eastern Europe would have forgotten the failure of European liberal democratic actions from 1848-1945, which is no small period.

Even in the supposedly eternally anti-Russian Baltics it doesn’t make sense:

“In the Constituent Assembly elections of 1917, the average Bolshevik score throughout the former Tsarist Empire was 24% of the vote. In Estonia, they obtained 40%, in Livonia (modern day Latvia) 72%! Let's not forget the Latvian Guard, which Lenin cherished and which played such an important role during the Russian Revolution as a force for maintaining order. A 1918 survey of the first members of the Cheka, the Bolshevik political police and forerunner of the KGB and FSB, reveals Latvians' affinity with communism. Out of a sample of 894 individuals (the upper echelons of the hierarchy), only 361 were Russians, but there were 124 Latvians, 18 Lithuanians, 12 Estonians, 21 Ukrainians, 102 Poles and 116 Jews. The over-representation of minorities in a revolutionary institution is in itself normal, but the proportion of 13.8% Latvians when they represented at most only 2% of the population within the Russian Empire is still a very fine achievement.”

(I should relate that Todd foresees an especially bad end for the Baltics’ conversion to Western liberal democratic Russophobia: "Furthermore, if, as I believe, the current war results in a defeat for the West and a de facto disintegration of NATO, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia can indeed expect to be three of the main losers in the new geopolitical configuration of Europe.” He does not elaborate.)

These historical deviations, Todd will repeatedly note, make contemporary East European politics seem “inauthentic”.

Of course they are inauthentic: liberal democracy is not grassroots and lower-class based, but aristocratically imposed by the upper and upper-middle classes. Todd doesn’t say this but if half its members have inauthentic politics, what does this say about the legitimacy of the entire pan-European project? This is a basic, fundamental question which is simply ignored; the EU’s political authenticity is simply taken for granted despite the constant protests and proofs otherwise.

Todd continues by relating how the newly converted/sellout Eastern European liberal democrats chose policies which are inexplicable in terms of recent history:

“The enthusiasm with which the Czechs sold Skoda to Volkswagen and not to Renault was astonishing. Given the importance of the automotive industry, it was a choice to enter the German sphere from which Bohemia had struggled to extricate itself.” I should relate that Todd sees the former Czechoslovakia as a true cousin to France, but it’s not like there was a linguistic tie which could explain such a tie-up? He continues: “In fact, that countries that were often martyrs to Nazism should have decided to do so raises a real question. […] A final oddity: the mutual love that Poland and Ukraine temporarily pledged to each other at the start of the war. Poland, however, had long dominated a more or less vast part of western Ukraine, where the Poles were nobles and the Ukrainians not only peasants but serfs. As we have seen, Ukrainian nationalists killed many Jews, but also many Poles. This 'We've kissed and made up, just now!’ mindset will only seem natural to those devoid of any historical awareness.”

The only explanation here is that in liberal democracy the leaders aspire merely to be part of a globalist anational 1% - they have no nation except their bank account and no awareness of anything historical excepting only their last bank statement. What do you think an ardently capitalist system will produce as their leaders, of course?

This explanation results in another policy: the refusal to talk about socialism’s gains and only its failures. This, of course, requires rewriting history. “Rewriting history” is merely a synonym for “manufacturing inauthenticity” because it cannot explain current events from the true facts and antecedents.

Without authentic politics, what this all translates into practically in the Eastern European context is that the only political glue can be: Russophobia.

Indeed, the war in Ukraine is aimed to be an answer to this primary problem of the dysfunctional, perpetually underperforming pan-European project. For years I have written wonderingly about what on earth could bring this failed, imploding pan-European project together, and it looks like the current hope is “Russophobia”.

Todd really only rather touches upon this crucial idea which I think should be stressed, however.

The differences between West and East Europe - a millennia which the pan-European project seeks to ignore

The proceeding second section of Todd’s chapter gets right to the heart of the matter: “Our first Third World”. Todd correctly insists that it’s wrong to see the Soviet era as some temporary aberration in a long marriage between Western and Eastern (or Central, as it used to be known) Europe:

From even before the Black Plague trade with Eastern Europe was quintessentially imperialist: their natural resources (grain, timber) for Western European manufactures. He cites Engels’ concept of a “2nd serfdom” for Eastern Europe post-Black Plague, which described the deepening of landlord and noble power, as opposed to the Plague’s lessening of landlord power in Western Europe; this trend also further thwarted urbanisation, another major difference between the histories of Western and Eastern Europe. Todd notes how this all gave Eastern Europe a smaller middle class, yet another difference, and also how the 20th century Judeocide left Eastern Europe in 1945 with an even smaller middle class than the West. Todd, not being an open socialist, views politics and history with a bias for the idea that human history revolves around the all-important middle class.

Todd believes these differences made Eastern Europe even less susceptible to liberal democracy and more inclined to socialist democracy, and - as he’s an anthropologist as much as a historian, and given that he’s studied this specific topic so extensively - created the large-family culture of Eastern Europe which Western Europe does not have.

So how did Eastern Europe catch up with the West? Of course, it was the gains brought by socialism.

Todd notes, “The communist ideology had an effect in common with Protestantism - an obsession with education.” Todd states, crucially (though it gets no credit for it), it was communism which created Eastern Europe’s middle class, via socialism’s guaranteed explosion in literacy rates and education. In a generation Eastern Europe saw an increase in literacy and in completed higher eduction by around 500% in many countries. The effect was tremendous: “The educational development under Soviet domination spawned new middle classes.” Rather a benevolent “domination” for the average illiterate and suppressed East European citizen… but this type of loaded, biased and flatly inaccurate word choice is common among fake-leftist Western analysts.

“But I'm not forgetting either that the aforementioned middle classes, which in the East today form the backbone of 'Western-style' democracy and are driving their respective countries' accession to NATO, owe their existence to the communist meritocratic system, to the Russians' 55-year takeover of their societies. Hatred of Russia seems to me to testify to a certain inauthenticity. I don't know whether it's guilt or impostor syndrome.”

It’s not a syndrome - they are indeed imposters, because Liberal Democracy is simply not representative of the grassroots, mass lower classes. The ideas held by the upper-middle class are pure aristocracy - they simply deserve to lead, if not because of genetics then because of their far superior ideas and culture, and never mind that these ideas benefit themselves personally more than the mass of society. These imposters have no guilt about their arrogance, and they have children and pass on these ideas, but the younger generation today is coming up against the mass economic and democratic failures of liberalism’s pan-European project.

Todd continues: "I'm opening up a line of research here, even if, in the very immediate present, we have to take seriously this Russophobia, particularly in Poland, which distant history doesn't explain. If Poland were to go to war with Russia in support of Ukraine, it would be the middle classes shaped by Russia who would lead it."

Perhaps this is the “guilt” - Todd speculated about: Eastern Europe’s middle classes know they are sellouts and betrayers, and they have to make war on Moscow because they guiltily fear punishment for their crimes. There’s no need to roll your eyes - as I wrote in the previous chapter Todd makes these types of highly speculative, “what’s going on inside?” guesses, because we’re all just trying to figure out why all this Russophobia, aggression and suicide. Basically, the Eastern European middle class is getting Moscow before Moscow gets them - this “come with a bigger gun to get them before they get you” is the essence of non-cooperative capitalism-imperialism, of course.

Indeed, it doesn’t make rational sense, so I understand the eye-roll. Moscow is no longer “controlling” Eastern Europe, and they didn’t do that terrible a job anyway, and they left when asked, and can’t we all just get along - or at least agree that the joint project of the Eastern Bloc was not such a terrible “failure” and not waste time with Russophobia and non-diplomacy?

We only see the rationality when we see that liberal democracy, with its imperialism and racism, has always been an essentially middle-class thought, which seeks to control a lower class it despises and exploits on behalf of an upper-class to which it toadies. The ideology is also insistent on censoring the real, obvious, actually-in-our-lifetime gains which Socialist Democracy creates. Todd is in disbelief that Eastern Europe could be so ignorant of their own history, but he also likely believes that liberal democracy doesn’t censor leftist thought, which is false, and that liberal democracy is fair, balanced and promotes the “right answer” more than merely the answer which is “right” for the 1%’s needs. Todd’s book is great because he’s in the mainstream yet asking basic questions about Western stupidities regarding Russia, Ukraine, and, here, Eastern Europe, but he lacks leftism’s reminder that “we’ve seen all this before”.

The sad thing is that if a war did expand across Eastern Europe it would ruin the very real gains brought by socialism - but that’s liberal democracy for you, and we’ve seen all this before.

Western imperialism began with Eastern Europe - the EU, in desperation, comes back to the source

"The inauthenticity I impute to the Eastern middle classes can be fed by another, complementary quirk: the reintegration of the People's Democracies into Western space has returned them to their status of dominated periphery, specialising in the most thankless economic activities. In the Middle Ages, it was agricultural production; in the age of globalisation, it's industrial production, serving, for the most part, Germany."

Here we have the most necessary analysis of what the pan-European project has turned out to be: the neo-imperialism of the European north against a Southern Europe and Eastern Europe which was nothing but a patsy in this scheme. The inauthentic, ignorant middle class of Eastern Europe rushed to join the West, and this has provide a boon to none but the 1%. Neo-imperialism, I always stress, is not just the Western 1% using puppets in non-Western countries which they once explicitly controlled but also the Western 1% exploiting their own countries in ways once reserved only for non-White countries.

After northern banks enriched themselves via trapping Southern Europe into debt via awful US, bad-mortgage NINJA-style loans, and then securing bailouts of these northern banks, the European Union’s main goal has been the entrapment of Eastern Europe’s economies. It is common knowledge, by now, that Western Europe has “offshored” their manufacturing sector to Eastern Europe - to take advantage of lower wage costs and to gut the collective power of West European labor, which then allows for the unopposed dismantling of West European social democracy (not to be confused with socialist democracy) into mere US-stye liberal democracy. My book on the Yellow Vests makes all this plain and with over a decade of reporting data from inside Europe.

However, the pan-European project’s effort to make Europe more like the United States is making Eastern Europe even less like Western Europe: Todd notes how the percentage of workers in the manufacturing sector is 50-100% higher in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, which only adds to his conclusion that:

"The whole idea of identifying Eastern Europe with West Europe is false and, once again, inauthentic. The integration into the European Union of these certainly democratic countries, but with their middle classes born of communist meritocracy and their proletariats of globalisation, was not an addition to Western European nation-states of nation-states which resemble them. On the contrary, societies with different histories have been introduced into the Western European space, and in some areas this difference has only become more pronounced. The Russophobia explosion, concomitant with the desire to integrate the EU and NATO, far from expressing a verifiable closeness with the West, amounts to a denial of historical and social reality.”

For the far-right and nativists in Europe these “foreigners” are ok simply because of their skin color, but Todd is reminding us that not all Whites resemble each other, just as not all Yellow, Black, Brown or Red people are “all the same”. You have the leftist CCP and far-right Taiwan just across a small body of water, for example.

Yet another key differentiation to add between West and East Europe which Todd does not add is: the role of imperialism. Of course this is gigantic, but this is too leftist of a focus for Todd to stress. However, the differences between the two naturally accelerated tremendously with Western Europe’s discovery of the Western Hemisphere and the resulting economic motherlode - and the totally ignored cultural motherlode which was interaction with these totally different societies - which was the era of colonialism. Imperialism, of course, was not totally a boon for Western Europe, so they have many negative traits which Eastern Europe necessarily does not suffer from.

This produces what should be Todd’s second main point, which he touched upon in his previous chapter on Ukraine but did not (could not?) stress strongly enough: that Russophobia is needed to bring together the EU precisely because identity politics, demonisation, racism and xenophobia are vital to any imperialist project, from international slavery to Palestine.

Todd fails to see how liberal democracy is also class warfare - the 1% versus the 99% - just as socialist democracy is, too - the 99% against the 1% - and that liberal democracy is not the one and only “democracy” as he repeatedly implies. Todd apparently has no esteem for the indirect democratic measures in socialist democracy, yet also no contempt for the indirect democratic measures in liberal democracy: the Electoral College, France’s 500 mayor signatures to run for president, the House of Lords, etc.

This is why Todd is so perplexed and keeps returning to his “Why so much Russophobia?” question: because he cannot see how liberal democracy relies on lies and misdirections. He is stupefied as to this “how” but also convinced “… in the idea that persistent Russophobia in the former people’s democracies could quite simply result from of a historical debt, unconscious and repressed, unacceptable, inadmissible towards the former occupier.” This guilt of the “Russian Man’s Burden”, so to speak, is reminiscent of Todd’s explanation of “nihilism” for many of Ukraine’s choices, and it’s a social-psychological “answer” which is less satisfying than what we get when we - unlike Todd - simply use the time-tested lenses of socialism and imperialism to see contemporary Eastern Europe through.

Todd fails to see that liberal democracy relies on distorting the past of the 99%, and this is not me needlessly repeating. It’s vital to remember that - on the other hand, ideologically - socialist democracy so very stridently insists on telling the truth of monarchy, feudalism, Liberal Democracy, imperialism, etc. So, of course, liberal democratic-controlled Eastern Europeans are not discussing how they rose from the ashes of WWII, Hapsburgian elitism and feudalism so quickly precisely because of socialism. Acknowledging this debt - i.e. admitting the gains of Socialist Democracy - is terrible only to the elitist Western middle class and Western liberal democrats, though Todd doesn’t note this, but it does help us understand why East European politics have become so inauthentic.

“Basically, Eastern Europe was our first Third World. […] But it was the first of the peripheries to be subordinated to a rapidly rising Western Europe.”

This is the kind of modern analysis which moves beyond hemispheres, colours and identity politics - it shows how capitalism-imperialism truly is color-blind. They came for Eastern Europe first, in fact….

It also describes how post-1991 Eastern Europe’s future will look exactly like it did for much of the previous near-milennia: as an area of the world which is essentially imperialised by Western Europe. Thus the EU and Eurozone actually represent the desperate end of a Western imperialism which has lost its firm grip over the rest of the world and thus has to try and re-nourish itself on its very first victims. I’d love it if Todd wrote this, but it’s a leftist bridge too far for him to traverse.

By failing to focus on imperialism Todd produces faulty work, and by failing to focus on class warfare there are more faults:

Todd is correct in that for the average East European life was very much unlike that of a West European for almost a millennia. However what he entirely fails to note is that for the East European 1% life was very similar to the 1% of Western Europe, with whom they intermarried and consorted. This failure is a significant error by Todd. The Hapsburg Empire (1282-1918) spans a 636-year pre-Soviet era, and there was not a spot of Europe which we can say it did not control - among the ruling 1% - either totally or culturally. The reactionary victory against the French Revolution was primarily the result of the Hapsburgs employing literally all of continental Europe against it (although the British were the only nation to fight in all seven “Wars Against the French Revolution”, as I term the era from 1792-1815).

(The fall of the great revolutionary Napoleon actually came with the popular disesteem for his taking of a Hapsburg for a wife in 1810 - Marie Louise of Austria. Never stated is the reality that this was an attempt by Napoleon to end the Hapsburg war on the French Revolution via marriage ties - this was common in that era. Furthermore, Russia’s monarchy turned him down endlessly ( the Protestant, reactionary British monarchy had eternal enmity to the French Revolution, so that was never even an option) , leaving Napoleon only the Hapsburgs. However, the 1% never would relent and the average French revolutionary was quite disheartened and rendered skeptical by this gigantic concession of Napoleon’s to true feudal monarchy. “Josephine”, Napoleon’s previous wife, was one of Napoleon’s final words.)

Indeed, it is a curious omission that Todd does not talk about the Hapsburgs even once - i.e. the ideology of monarchy, privilege and aristocratism, all of which have been subsumed into Liberal Democracy -, despite what we could round up to a millennia of control in their “core” of what was predominantly Eastern Europe. The Protestant Revolution would see the start of Northern Europe avoiding intermarriage with the Hapsburgs, but their cultural and political influence seems way too underestimated by Todd.

In the final section, “The Hungarian exception”, Todd could have discussed this Hapsburg-East European elitist dominance, but he does at least note that Hungary’s oft-overlooked 20% Calvinist minority helps give it its truly unique and tolerant point of view, explaining both its anti-Russophobia and its longtime tolerance of Jews. Viktor Orban himself is Calvinist. I should relate that Todd believes that Hungary - nationalist but tolerant and assimilationist for (non-Muslim) minorities - is “the safest nation to keep currently existing” in the region.

Todd’s final paragraph begins with: "There, as in Ukraine, and here, I'm convinced that, like all scapegoating, Russophobia reveals a deficiency in those who experience it. While it tells us nothing about Russia, it does tell us something about Ukrainians, Poles, Swedes, English, French or American middle classes. We will examine these various Western cases in the following chapters. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is characterised by blatant inauthenticity."

To sum up Todd’s chapters so far in one word: Russia - stable. Ukraine - suicidal. Eastern Europe - inauthentic.

Todd has his blind spots - as the leftist side of his eyeglasses is a bit too clouded over - but its superb to read the truth: that racism and Russophobia says more about your deficiencies than your political astuteness. From Todd’s pen to the eyes and ears of the Western middle-class, Inshallah.

Todd ends this chapter with his most leftist declaration yet: “The reality is that all these countries, in spite of their diversity, are dominated by middle classes created by communism and which, once liberated, put their proletariats at the service of Western capitalism.”

How do people not see the pan-European project as this truth? Why does Todd not yet declare that this is the true neo-imperialist aim of the pan-European project? Why does he not openly indict what his conclusions clearly convict? Perhaps he doesn’t get a major publisher if he does extend his conclusions to his current political structure….

What’s clear from this chapter is that Todd views today’s Eastern Europe as an inauthentic historical aberration. Of course, they are going against the interests of their own 99%, but also against their historical experiences dating back both nearly a millennia and of their own living elders. For those not leftist reading this: it is at least curious, and kudos to Todd for elucidating this.

Todd is saying that Eastern Europe is obviously not Western, nor West European, nor is it authentically itself, so what on earth is it? Todd doesn’t say - I say it’s clearly a tool being used by Western liberal democracy at the service of capitalism-imperialism, and that this cannot be considered progress even though that’s the very claim of the pan-European project. Should the war spread to Eastern Europe the idea that the pan-European project is a “peace project” will be totally exploded, Nobel Prize be damned, but of course this idea is exploded already to thinking people.

While the nature of contemporary Eastern Europe remains unclear, maybe the other half’s nature will be fully explained in his next chapter, “What is the West?”

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of these articles is approved and appreciated. He tweets at @RaminMazaheri2 and writes at substack.com/@raminmazaheri