Diversity made Europe

Emmanuel Todd graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies and holds a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge. He has published numerous books, notably "La Chute Finale", a premonitory work which, from 1976, announced the implosion of the Soviet System. He is an anthropologist, historian, demographer, political scientist, and sociologist. The central hypothesis in many of his books is the key role of the family systems in the constitution and evolution of large-scale collective phenomena, such as political ideologies, election behaviors, and religion. Therefore, the goal of his books is to show the link between the diversities of the family systems and the diversity of the historical paths in Europe starting from 1500 to 1990.

Human history develops through time and space. However, historians always prefer time to space. For example, they consider the Reformation as being a typical phenomenon of the 16th century localizing it in the German world, Scandinavia, Holland, Scotland, and Southern France. According to the author, there is a preeminence of time over space in history conception. "Space is not absent in the historical description, but it is in general totally rejected from the explanation.". Thus, Emmanuel Todd is focusing on the "space" aspect. Why the Reformation took place in a certain region and not in others? Why the industrialization started in England and not in Germany? He sees, in some spaces, areas specificities that haven't changed through time and that occur to mark each geographical area. These specificities are the family systems.

He found 4 major family systems in Europe. They define the core values of the relationship between parents and children and the relationship between brothers and sisters. The values organizing the connections between parents and children can be liberal or authoritarian. Concerning the brothers and sisters, they can be egalitarian or non-egalitarian. The two dichotomous variables that are the couples liberal/authoritarian and egalitarian/non-egalitarian generate 4 possibilities.

1) Absolute nuclear family -> liberal and non-egalitarian

2) Egalitarian nuclear family -> liberal and egalitarian

3) Stem family -> authoritarian and non-egalitarian

4) Community family -> authoritarian and egalitarian

The values, as seen above, determine the family types. Therefore, the application of these values leads to different forms of society, ideology, and religious practice, to say a few examples. An application of that reasoning seems necessary at that stage if the reader wants to have a clear understanding of this approach. Protestantism exists on two simultaneous plans: earthly and metaphysical. Those two have a fundamental contradiction between their earthly and metaphysical components. The terrestrial component is the democratization of religious consciousness through the abolition of the Roman Church's monopoly on religious life. This resulted in Luther's affirmation "We are all priests", therefore rejecting the authority of the priests and the inequality of men. On the other hand, the metaphysical's component claims the servitude and the inequality of men through the concept of "predestination", God decides to save or to damn men. A region will accept the Reformation and so Orthodox Protestantism only if these two components (terrestrial and metaphysical) fit within. Thus, Todd explains that to fulfill the requirements of the earthly's Protestantism component you need alphabetization to challenge the power of the Roman Church, plus your localization following the axes Rome/Wittenburg, meaning the closer you are from the focus of the Reformation (Germany, Wittenburg) the more inclined you can accept it. It is not meaningless that the Reformation was born in the regions the most advanced culturally, which are Center and South Germany, also where the printing press was invented, and where the stem family already existed. "The protestant predestination, with the idea of an almighty God and unequal men before salvation, has been accepted easily where the family organizations including an authoritarian father and unequal brothers (primogeniture concept) preexisted, the stem family" . The terrestrial component itself can work for most of the regions (Ireland, Portugal, Spain) but in other areas such as Northern France, it is not enough. Indeed, if we have a look at Northern France during the 16th century, the cultural level and proximity with Germany made it an obvious place of acceptance of the Protestant Reformation. Nonetheless, its family's values, egalitarian and liberal, opposed the Lutheran conception of the relation between men and God. Protestantism wants a powerful divine authority but refuses the delegation of this power to a human institution. Equality is situated in the present, inequality is situated in the future. For the other regions and family types, the acceptance or not of one component or another will lead to a deformation of the Reformation such as England, where it accepts the inequality before God, but keeps free will. It is roughly summarized but the general idea is there.

Then, Todd analyzed the various development: cultural, religious, and economic that happened in each country in Europe in a chronological aspect. Between 1730 and 1990, by steps, the Christian religion lost its ground in Europe. At the first scientific (Newtonian) and industrial shock, the religion fades away creating a metaphysical emptiness. Two competitive metaphysical constructions emerge, cohabitating and fighting each other: Nationalism & Socialism. As there are four family types, there are four nationalisms and four socialisms, each nesting conceptually and geographically in a family type and only one. To continue with the stem family, this produced social democracy, which is well and vertically organized, unlike the moderate-pragmatic Anglo and disorganized-utopian Latin equivalent, and ethnonationalism by its refusal of the concept of universal men and its fundamental belief in the inequality of men . This differentialism, turned outwards leads, for example, to the perception of French inferiority. Turned inwards, leads to the perception of a worker and Jewish inferiority. Nazism achieved and overpassed German's ethnocentric nationalism. Most of the time, two factors are used to explain the rise to power of the Nazis: 1) the Defeat of 1914-1918 and 2) the 1929 economic crisis. However, comparative history shows that the economic interpretation is not enough if we compare it to what it led elsewhere, such as in the USA, where the crisis allowed the triumph of Roosevelt, which means a reformative policy, in no way questioning liberal democracy . Here again, Todd argues that it has been possible because of the economic crisis, and the German ideological continuity. The trauma and crises -at every level- due to modernization, led to an "hystericization" of the fundamental country's values, which means the family systems specificities, explaining why those values are so visible at the beginning of the 20th century.

Then, come the end of Ideology 1965-1990. All over Europe, beliefs crumble. The causes are wealth and education. The universalization of secondary education dissolves the submission to traditional sacred formulas. Therefore, the individual is less and less supervised by organizations, and the rate of voters is diminished. The collapse of both religion and ideology left the individual free and alone in the world. According to Todd, "micro-ideologies" such as environmentalism, regionalism, or xenophobia appeared but they are not meant to be "progressive" but conservative through the fear of emptying every natural resource or the dissolution of the society because of uncontrolled migration.

Nevertheless, by having a look at Europe (and the Occident) now, we could tell that a convergence did happen through modernization. Todd claims the opposite. Instead, three different capitalisms appeared: 1) Producerist (stem family, e.g., Germany or Japan) 2) Consumerist (nuclear family) 3) Austere (community family). Therefore, he sees a persistence of the nation's values which make the dream of a perfect European convergence a historical impossibility. We need to take into consideration that the author wrote this book in 1990, 2 years before the Maastricht Treaty, in a way he tried to give an understanding of the possibility or not of a such European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), emphasizing the importance of taking into consideration the anthropological background of each region, conducting to different types of social organizations. In his reedition's preface of his book in 1995 he stipulated this:

My opposition to the Maastricht Treaty stems very directly from my knowledge of the anthropology and history of our continent. A real sensibility to the diversity of European customs and values can only lead to one conclusion: the central monetary management of societies as different as, for example, France and Germany, must lead to a massive dysfunction, first, to one or other society, and, then, to both. There is, in the ideology of unification, a will to break human and social realities which recalls, strangely but invincibly, Marxism-Leninism. […] I then hope that this book, which was written outside of any polemical context and of which I haven’t changed a line, will allow some unprejudiced Europeanists to think serenely about the problems posed, to delve into the anthropological and historical depth of the nations that are to be fused. I hope especially that some of them, starting as I do from good European sentiments, will arrive at the conclusion that the Maastricht Treaty is a work of amateurs, ignorant of the history and life of societies. […]Either the single currency is not realized, and L’invention de l’Europe will seem a contribution to the understanding of certain historical impossibilities. Or the single currency is realized, in which case this book will help to understand, in twenty years, why a statist unification imposed in the absence of a common consciousness will have produced a jungle rather than a consciousness.

Following the reader's opinion, this one may conclude whether he saw it right or not. However, we can find in this book an explanation of "The Great Divergence" or "European Miracle", that to say the rise of modernity. He writes: "The diversity of European values largely explains the prodigious dynamism of a continent which can never, at any stage of its history, enclose itself in a single and definitive mental system." Without Protestantism and Germany, there would not be literacy. Without France, no contraception. If we go back to his criticism of EMU, which intends to govern all of Europe monetarily as if it was a single entity, that would be equivalent to suppressing this so-called diversity (its surface only), thus breaking the dynamism of the continent.

We can’t deny the efficiency of its very solid data-based method and long-term analysis that Todd is using to prove his point. Moreover, his technic of combining demographic and anthropological factors has already proven itself by the past and allowed him to predict: the fall of the Soviet Union in 1976 (14 years before the USSR collapsed), the decline of the United States in 2002 , the democratization of the Muslim World in 2007 (4 years before the “Arab Spring”), and the economic stagnation of developed societies in 1997.

We must conclude by saying that Emmanuel Todd is a great intellectual even though he is underrated, especially in the university world. We would recommend this reading to anyone who wants to understand the History of Ideas and Cultural History in Europe, and we would encourage the reader to also have a look at Emmanuel Todd’s other works.