Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the risks of activism

Even if it is hardly a priority, I suspect that a significant minority of my readers have heard about the Notre-Dame-des-Landes question. For those who haven’t, I will summarize it. Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Our Lady of the Moors in English) is a rather unremarkable village in the southern Breton countryside, which happens to have been chosen as the location of a future airport. Locals have predictably been upset about that choice and saying that the project has met with some resistance is the mother of all understatements. Things have turned even more messy when Jean-Marc Ayrault, mayor of nearby Nantes, has been appointed as Prime Minister of France with clashes between protesters and the anti-riot police making the headlines of the national papers.

The atmosphere has somewhat cooled down, but the project is still highly controversial, with a lot of people investing a lot of mythology in it. Of course, the promoters of the project live in a world which already no longer exists. Building a new airport while oil production has been stagnant for nearly a decade is patently absurd and only the prevalence of the mythology of progress in our society makes possible for this weird idea to be still defended.

Yet the opponents have their own set of issues, which are actually causing the support for them to erode. As always in such cases, the core of the opponents to the project are locals, with mostly local issues. Those can greatly vary. In some cases it is pure unadulterated not-in-my-backyard-ism, in others it is peasants clinging to their lands or villagers unwilling to abandon their rural lifestyle. Many elected officials refuse a project which will strengthen the already strong influence of nearby Nantes over the area and favor a distributed network of mid-sized cities over the center-periphery model so characteristic of French geography.

These reasons are perfectly legitimate, including the not-in-my-backyard-ism. The whole point of local democracy is after all to provide peripheries with the wherewithal to defend their interests. This is, for instance, what happened in Plogoff at the very end of the seventies.

This village had been chosen as the site of a nuclear plan – a public interest project according to the state and to the departmental council. Locals were not exactly enthusiastic, and protested with the help of ant-nuclear activist from all over Brittany. It was ,in many ways, the defining fight of a generation, and local mayors and councilors were at the forefront of it. This is probably why the struggle to keep the Baie des Trépassés plutonium-free was not highjacked by ambitious would-be ministers or militant professional revolutionists. This is also why when François Mitterand won the 1981 presidential election, he swiftly canceled the project.

Unfortunately, the fight against the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes is unlikely to go the same way. Even if the project is canceled after the resignation of Jean-Marc Ayrault as a prime minister (probably in 2014, after municipal elections which are likely to go badly for the conventional left), it will left a bitter aftertaste in many people’s mouth, and not only its promoters’.

France uses a two rounds voting system, even in elections with multiple winners, so smaller left parties have a strong incentive to ally with the dominant socialist party if they want to have elected officials. The Greens are no exception, but in the context of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes area, they also they also need to push the fires of contest to gather votes and support. The result has been rather schizophrenic. The Greens sit in every executive body supporting the project, from lowly municipal councils to the Government of France while vocally opposing it in the field. Of course, except for a few local mavericks, they will never vote against socialist candidates, and of course, their ministers won’t resign from the government.

The most likely response in such a situation is noisy tokenism. Politicians tend to love tokenism as it is a cheap way to get votes, at least for a time. Greens are more vulnerable to this temptation since they are basically a revitalization movement, the whole point of which is to perform symbolic acts so as to turn our society into a sustainable one without having to pay the price for it.

Of course, abandoning one’s core values for a few seats in a government or a municipal council has also a price. It tends to breed distrust. In France this process is already fairly well advanced, to the point that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading figure in French political ecology and Member of the European Parliament could recently write :

We exist in the Senate, in the Parliament and in the Government but no longer in the society at large. Our institutional successes are not associated with a dynamic among citizens, quite the contrary. Our image has become detestable. We have failed where we wanted to restore hope by doing politics another way. Today we embody the unbearable lightness of arrivism [...] When we see her in a documentary film, brandishing her pen and swearing she will never sign an agreement with the PS if it does not include the abandonment of nuclear power, then, of course, we sign it because it is a good agreement, it is devastating.

I might add it is also devastating for whatever cause they defend, even if they are sincere.

Radicals are another problem. There is nothing wrong with radicalism per se. I am quite radical in many ways and one can argue that the true radicals are the defenders of the status quo since their stated ambition is to go against the most basic laws of the universe.

There is however a difference between being a radical and being obnoxious, and this line has been crossed many times in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Fitting in, being a good neighbor is a big part of preaching by example. It is not ego-flattering, however. Being right against the rest of the world is quite a pleasure and I certainly did indulge in it at some point of my existence. It is a good way to alienate potential, or even actual, support, however, as nobody enjoys being at the receiving end of in your face self-righteousness.

This is why so many radical movements, from feminism to atheism, accumulated such an embarrassing surplus of bad press despite what they claim to be their basic tenets having becoming mainstream.

This is also why there is a widening rift between the local opponents to the Notre-Dame-des-Landes poject and those who have come from elsewhere to “help” them. Those activists have come from all over France, and even, albeit in smaller numbers from abroad, to occupy the area where the airport is scheduled to be built.

They have had some success, and their clashes with the police earned them a significant amount of media time. They have, however, failed to integrate within the local community, as, I must say, was to be expected.

The zadistes, as they are called here, are radicals living in the margins of society, with mostly an anarchist background and a relatively high level of education. They certainly have to be lauded for putting their mouth where their money is. Beside clashing with the police, they have created a kind of communal counter-society with “non-hierarchical decision-making processes”. It tend to be skeptical of these. Private property has bad press, at least among left-winger, but in really hard times, it is an insurance against starvation and homelessness. As for “non-hierarchical decision-making processes”, well, we are pack hunters and hierarchy is a part of our genetic heritage. We can and must tame it, but trying to suppress it entirely is as efficient – and dangerous – as denying the existence of the panther which has just sneaked inside you bedroom.

That’s not the problem, however. The problem is that setting this micro-counter-society put them at odd with the locals who don’t intend to share their house with anybody but family and think that sitting in a district committee is a lousy way of spending an evening.

There is nothing wrong with living apart from the main body of society. Buddhist and Christian

monks have done that for a very long time. These, however, don’t want to reform society, and while they may consider the lifestyle of the majority to be somewhat inferior, they don’t deny its legitimacy.

The zadistes themselves are here to fight “capitalism” (which has become pretty much a snarl world in the French radical left, by the way), and that means ipso facto, denying the legitimacy of the values of the community around them. This has led to weird incidents, such as when zadistes decided to cut barbed wires around locals’ meadows... because of their symbolic values. Needless to say, said locals were not amused. There are also stories of reprisals against those who, to quote Brecht, “don’t take part to the struggle” and notably to its financing.

More important, this breeds an hollier than thou attitude which unfortunately runs rampant in radical organizations. This is an easy to fall in trap. After all, setting oneself as a member of a kind of vanguard ideological elite, miles ahead of the crowd, preparing the shape of thing to come and / or fighting against all odd a corporate behemoth or another, is quite a temptation, especially if you are a small minority in the general population. Feminists, marxists, local nationalists, radical right wingers have all given into it, so it is no wonder that radical environmentalism has done it too.

It is, however, a self-defeating attitude. Of course, it won’t make opponents to the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport become its staunch supporters, albeit it may sway a few undecided people the wrong way, but it will make your cause more unpopular than there is any need for. The struggle against the airport may or may not be won, but unless you believe, as some do, that the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport not being built will induce some paradigm shift, bring “Capitalism” to its knees and magically provides us with a sustainable society, you’ll agree that the decline of the industrial civilization will continue unabated.

In fact, one can argue that whether the airport is built or not is pretty much irrelevant to the fate of the area. In hundred years from now it will be a forest ruin locals will search for scrap metal. In a region which will at least partially flooded by the rising sea and lies downstream from a couple of nuclear plants, it probably won’t matter on the long run.

What will matter is whether we will be able to soften the coming long descent, among other things, by preserving survival techniques and by teaching them to those who will need them when the really hard times will come. This won’t be possible without trust. This trust can be achieved many ways, depending from the local culture. I am pretty sure however that instrumentalizing local struggle to grab political power or public subsidies is not conductive to that, and neither is insulating oneself in an self-righteous ivory tower.

We are social animals and pursuing our goals outside the community won’t get us anywhere.

In memory of the Bank of Saint-George

There have been a lot of talks about banks lately in France, both because of the Cypriot debacle and because the minister in charge of the French IRS has been caught red-handed hiding a substantial amount of money in some Swiss bank. This has given renewed impetus to the fight against tax heavens and bank secrecy – which is indeed a good thing – and a renewed credibility to the many narratives, which present banks as some kind of vampires’ conspiracy bent on sucking all the world’s economies dry.

Those narratives are old and, as often happens, they were promoted by the far right – and notably the Larouchies – before being adopted by a part of the left, and, of course, they are totally wrong.

While banks have some leverage and can influence governments int adopting measures favorable to them, but so does the entertainment industry, or the Unions. More important, this leverage, like any power center’s in our societies, is highly dependent upon the continuity of the system. Should it collapse, or change in a sufficiently dramatic way, banks, and more generally, the finance industry, would lose their power nearly overnight, as the (not so) sad story of the Bank of Saint-George shows.

The Casa delle compere e dei banchi di San Giorgio was founded in 1407 by a number of Genoese oligarchs, among whom the Grimaldi and Serra families (yes, those Grimaldis). The Republic of Genoa was a merchant republic, under the control of a handful of noble and trading families. It had been a major power in the Western Mediterranean during the crusade era but had lost most of its positions to Venice, then to the nascent Ottoman Empire, and was progressively becoming a French and Milanese protectorate.

As the Republic became feebler and feebler, the Bank acquired greater and greater power For a time several Genoese provinces – notably Corsica and Southern Crimea – were even ruled directly by the Bank – the strapped for cash republican government had simply pawned them. The bank’s influence was such that Niccolo Machiavel could write :

On the other hand, as the city had at first conceded the customs, she next began to assign towns, castles, or territories, as security for moneys received; and this practice has proceeded to such a length, from the necessities of the state, and the accommodation by the San Giorgio, that the latter now has under its administration most of the towns and cities in the Genoese dominion. These the Bank governs and protects, and every year sends its deputies, appointed by vote, without any interference on the part of the republic. Hence the affections of the citizens are transferred from the government to the San Giorgio, on account of the tyranny of the former, and the excellent regulations adopted by the latter. Hence also originate the frequent changes of the republic, which is sometimes under a citizen, and at other times governed by a stranger; for the magistracy, and not the San Giorgio, changes the government. So when the Fregosi and the Adorni were in opposition, as the government of the republic was the prize for which they strove, the greater part of the citizens withdrew and left it to the victor. The only interference of the Bank of St. Giorgio is when one party has obtained a superiority over the other, to bind the victor to the observance of its laws, which up to this time have not been changed; for as it possesses arms, money, and influence, they could not be altered without incurring the imminent risk of a dangerous rebellion. This establishment presents an instance of what in all the republics, either described or imagined by philosophers, has never been thought of; exhibiting within the same community, and among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, integrity and corruption, justice and injustice; for this establishment preserves in the city many ancient and venerable customs; and should it happen (as in time it easily may) that the San Giorgio should have possession of the whole city, the republic will become more distinguished than that of Venice.

In 1528 the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V allied with Genoese Admiral Andrea Doria and ousted the French, restoring the independence of the Republic under Spanish protection. The Bank began then to finance the Spanish monarchy, acquiring considerable influence in the process. Spain, ruled by the Hapsburg, had become very wealthy from the pillaging of the Inca and Aztec Empire. American gold and silver had, however, to be transported across the Atlantic to be of any use – a lengthy and dangerous process, which pirates and privateers soon made yet more lengthy and dangerous.

The Genoese bankers provided therefore the Habsburgs with fluid credit and a dependably regular income. In return, they took the lion’s share of American silver and accumulated, quite predictably, an indecent amount of money in the process.

The Bank used this money to invest in colonial ventures, competing with Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, and was a major player in European economy up to the end of the XVIII^th century despite the decline of Spain... then evaporated overnight.

Genoa happened indeed to lie uncomfortably close to revolutionary France. It was invaded in 1797 by a French general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte turned Genoa into a French client, the Ligurian Republic. In 1805, the same Bonaparte, who had become an emperor in the meantime, annexed the area.

Bonaparte had also created what would become the Bank of France in Paris, and given it a monopoly on money printing. The idea was to create a stable currency and a reliable source of cash for France’s foreign ventures. Bonaparte happened to be a major shareholder and, being practically-minded, he quickly understood that concurrence was bad for business – his own anyway. The Bank of Saint-George was therefore told, politely but firmly, to please cease operations as soon as possible, which it did – French emperors tend to be very convincing, especially when their words are backed by an indecent number of infantry divisions.

It was not, however, French military power that enabled Napoleon the First to annex Genoa and dissolve the Bank of Saint-George, but the fact he was not a traditional monarch and was not bound by the traditional rules of statesmanship. The problem, indeed, with owing one’s throne to tradition, was that you had to obey traditional laws, lest you undermine your own legitimacy. The French kings could boast as much as they wanted about being the State, their actual power was fairly limited. They couldn’t, for instance, raise new taxes without the assent of the États Géneraux.

Napoleon, on the other hand, was the heir of a violent revolution. He based his power on military force, but also upon a variant of the enlightenment which emphasized equality, rationality and national sovereignty – albeit not freedom of the press and electoral democracy. It was not founded on tradition and therefore was not bound by it. Of course, that also meant he was not protected by it either and could be only as strong as his last victory.

Our situation is, mutatis mutandis, similar to the ancien régime kings. Even though we are theoretically in position to severely restrict or control the activities of the banking industry, or of any other sector of the economy, we are, in fact prevented to do so by a corset of self-imposed rules.

This is partly due to the diffuse nature of power in developed societies. Power centers are so numerous and so balanced that it is becoming increasingly difficult to effect meaningful change. The resistance Gay Marriage is meeting today in France, while it is a painless reform, is a case in point.

This is also partly due to the effects of peak energy, both because governments increasingly lack the means to implement reforms and because, since the energy surplus available to actually do something in our societies is dwindling, those who want to become rich shy away from industry and flock into finance and banking, aka summoning of imaginary wealth.

Add to this the rise, after the eighties, of laissez-faire ideologies exemplified by Reagan or Thatcher, and it is easy to understand why the finance industry has become so powerful. By the way, and ironically, the come back of those once discredited laissez-faire ideologies originated from the left moving away from social issues such as wages or working conditions during the seventies and adopting a generally more individualistic and anti-authoritarian stance – what we call in France the 68 thought.

This power is, however, as brittle as the Bank of Saint-George’s, perhaps even more. Bankers and traders have no army and command no loyalty. They can’t even hire mercenaries like the Bank of Saint-George did. The cost would bankrupt them and they would probably be quickly defeated. Their power lies in their ability to use and manipulate the corset of rules our society has given itself and to influence politicians who belong more or less to the same world.

Should society decides to play by other rules, or should political elites distance themselves from the finance, their influence will just disappear. You does not necessarily need a revolution for that, by the way. Franklin Delanoe Roosevelt and French President Charles de Gaulle both made sweeping changes in their countries’ policies without using violent or unconstitutional means – De Gaulle came into power through a quasi coup, granted, but he did not use violence and the regime he installed was, and is still democratic.

What matters is not the supposed power of such or such economic power center but our collective ability to accept the idea that the ultimate sovereignty belongs to the political and that private and factional interests prevail only because we allow them to do so.

That does not mean, of course, that you can wish away the political and sociological consequences of peak energy or, for that matter, that it is a good idea to oppose bare-handedly a government both able and willing to use force against you – those who have tried have gotten into real troubles.

What that means is that the finance industry is not the nearly invincible behemoth described by far left (or far right) mythology. It has not the means to coerce the society and deprived from the support of those who can, it will prove as brittle and evanescent as the theoretically all-powerful Bank of Saint-George.

If you want to curb its power, I suggest you go to your nearest congressman and tell him about the Bank of Saint-George... and of the man on the white horse who decreed it out of existence... and of the way he got into power... and of what happened to those who got in his way.

He might listen.

Cultural diversity

Modern societies like cultural diversity, preferably when it is far away, reasonably photogenic and does not inconvenience them politically. They also like to marginalize minority cultures and transform them either into folkloric caricatures or into assimilated ghosts of their former selves. During the last two centuries, modern civilization has absorbed most of Earth's cultural diversity and is currently quite busy assimilating or destroying the rest while multiplying the subcultures in its midst. It is a typical case of replacing geographical cultural diversity by internal heterogeneity. It had to be expected from societies which had, until recently, accumulated an embarrassing surplus of cheap energy, but that is still a bad idea, and one which will become really problematic as our energetic surplus dries up.

Contrary to what many people think we aren’t a fangless, clawless maladapted ape which only its intelligence saved from extinction. We are superb long distance runners and walkers. We are very good at throwing things at mobile targets – for instances sharpened sticks at antelopes. We have a very good cooling system which makes us very heat-tolerant and a remarkable eyesight which makes us highly effective predators in an open or semi-open environment.

We are tropical savanna animals, at home in steppes and prairies provided there are at least a few trees in them but ill at ease in dense forests, where a predator can strike without warning. It is not by chance that we wrestled the world from our competitors at a time when most of Eurasia was covered by cold steppes. The outcome would have been very different in a warmer, wetter climate.

It is obvious, however, that we don’t all live in tropical savannas. In fact, a significant part of the human population lives in ecosystems totally unsuited for our species such as swamps (where our cooling system kind of underperform) or tundras (remember, we are tropical animals). We have to some extend adapted our bodies to those new environments but this remains limited. People living in cold climates are lighter-skinned, not fur-covered.

In fact, humanity has a very low genetic diversity, to the point it could become a problem should a really nasty bug arise, and the diversity which matters (for instance the prevalence of haemochromatosis in north-western Europe) is most of the time totally unrelated to today’s ethnic and cultural realities.

During most of our history, we have adapted to new environments, or to changes in our environment, by developing new technologies or social devices. Thus, when the climate changed 12,000 years ago and the herds which kept our paleolithic ancestors fed and clothed retreated northward, the tribes of Western Europe adopted the bow, a weaker but more accurate weapon than the spear-thrower, to hunt in the dense forests which soon came to cover Europe. Their cousins in the middle-east gathered around fields of wild cereals, changing their social structure to adapt to their new situation.

This is by now way a foolproof process. The native population of Kangaroo Island, or, more recently, the Greenland Vikings failed to adapt to a changing environment and went extinct, as did the first inhabitants of Palau.

Developing and maintaining a technology or a set of customs is costly and in small populations even basic technologies can be lost. The natives of Sentinel Island, for instance, no longer know how to make fire and the Mesolithic tribes of Western Europe quickly discarded the spear-thrower when reindeer were replaced by more elusive deer and roes.

Indeed, human groups tend to discard technologies they no longer need. After the late bronze age collapse, for instance, the highly organized Mycennian kingdoms were destroyed and replaced by a collection of independent villages too poor and too small to need a bureaucracy. The royal scribes became peasants and writing was forgotten in a mere generation.

The result has been a specialization of human groups, a trend reinforced by linguistic and cultural drift – inevitable in a low-tech environment – but also by our tendency, as social animals, to build our collective identity around cultural markers. Of course mergers, more or less voluntary, happen as does cultural diffusion but even a cursory look at a linguistic map of pre-industrial Europe or of pre-contact America will show that their effects have been temporary at best.

A wave of newcomers could unify culturally a large areas, as the Indo-Europeans did in Europe, the Bantus in Africa and the Pama–Nyungan in Australia, but they will soon fall to the combined forces of specialization and cultural fragmentation.

The advent of cheap and plentiful energy changed the rules of the game, however. Long distance conquest and tribute extraction are probably as old as empires, and in no way a Western specialty. Imposing one’s culture in an ecosystem to which it was not suited was quite another matter. European invaders could conquer the precolombian American states, which, by definition, were located in areas suited to agriculture. They could colonize the eastern seaboard which has roughly the same climate as Western Europe. Permanently occupying the rain forests, the deserts or the pampa was far more problematic. Those areas remained under effective Indian control until very late in the game. It was even worst (or better, depending from your point of view) in Africa where diseases played against us.

Fossil fuels, however, enabled us to fit the environment to our culture rather than the other way around. This is not an uncommon occurrence in nature and something very similar happens every time we flood a meadow with manure. This sudden glut of nutrients favors fast-growing weedy species which will soon smother out more efficient but less profligate plants, leaving very verdant but quite monotonous grass meadows. A similar process has been happening all over the world since the beginning of the industrial age, causing growth-oriented variants of European and East-Asian cultures to spread to areas where, in normal times, they could not have thrived. It also has caused the rise of a global meta-culture characterized by a common faith in progress.

The other, more specialized cultures, survive only in margins and should industrialism have proved sustainable, they would have had to choose between dying out and becoming a mere variant of the the global culture.

We know, however, that industrialism is not sustainable. Earth’s innards holds only so much recoverable fossil fuels and we have already extracted the best part of it. Production of crude oil has plateaued and it is only a matter of time before other fossil fuels follow suit. Ultimately our civilization will be left with only what wind sun and water can provide. While this does not mean that all our technologies will become unsustainable, our current strategy of adapting our environment to ourselves clearly will.

Add to this that the environment itself is likely to drastically change thanks to our deplorable habit of dumping truckloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it becomes quite obvious that cultural diversity will come back with a vengeance. Western – and East-Asian culture will have to retreat from areas unsuited to their preferred lifestyle, or change so much in the process that it will amount to the same. The poster child for this will probably be American desert cities such as Phoenix or Las Vegas, but northern China or the Southern Spain are prime candidates for such an evolution too. Whoever will inhabit those areas two centuries from now will have to adopt the same lifestyle as preindustrial desert tribes.

The problem is that those who have kept the technologies, both social and material, needed to thrive in ecosystem hostile to European or East-Asian style agriculture are likely to be early casualties. Even when they still form viable cultural units, they are too specialized to survive intact the effect of global warming. Besides, they are militarily extremely weak and would be destroyed without the protection of modern nation states – even the Sentinelese, who have made an habit of shooting down everybody sailing too close to their island will be soon overrun when Indian policemen will stop protecting them.

This means that we will have to rebuild a cultural diversity anew by acquiring skills and social habits adapted to ecosystems which do not yet exist at the exact moment the few people who still master those skills are on the verge of cultural extinction. Moreover, those people won't profit in any way from our collapse for the world we will left will be different enough that , to survive, they will have to completely reconfigure their culture. The Inuits, for instance, may still exist two centuries from now, especially in Greenland, but they will be more likely to raise cattle than to hunt seals, they will have horses, not sled dogs and the place of snow and ice in their culture will have been seriously reduced.

Even so, rebuilding cultural diversity is by no mean an impossible task. As a species we are very good at borrowing technologies and cultural features from our neighbors and calling them our own. Here in Brittany we eat a very typical buckwheat pancake called “galette”, yet buckwheat is a Chinese, which was never cultivated in Western Europe before the XIV^th century.

In fact, the internal diversity of our own society, doomed as it is, can be an asset in that matter. While I fail to see the point of most of our subcultures, their sheer number means that there always will be someone to document or perpetuate the technological and societal skills of some half-forgotten tribe. Whether it will be enough, however, is quite another matter as it means preserving a knowledge which will be quite irrelevant to our everyday life until quite late in the game. This implies a serious amount of geekery and self-marginalization and definitely won't get you money or influence.

A bit like copying Latin books in Dark Age Britain.

Client states

As you probably know, France has been at war for two weeks now. This does not change everything to our daily life and I don’t plan to raid the nearby supermarket for supply (well, maybe for cat food but that’s a vital necessity) and I am more likely to be stricken by a stray meteor than blown up by an islamist bomb. The bulk of the political class supports the war and while the anti-imperialist crowd can still be heard, it is far less loud and numerous than usually and while there are a few questions to ask our president about the procedure – he didn’t notify the National Assembly, for instance – the principle of the intervention is contested only by marginals and outsiders.

What is most interesting in this affair, however, is not the war, or whether it is just or not it is justified, but the fate of client states in the time of decline.

It is not the first time a bunch of religious fanatics ride out of the desert to take over a country. Students of Spanish history will remember the Almohads and the Almoravids, who nearly stopped the reconquista. More recently we had the Mahdist state in Sudan and the Wahabi of Arabia, who threatened the Ottoman Empire and sacked the Shia holy city of Karbala in 1801.

This has never been a muslim speciality, by the way. Driven out of Acre, the Teutonic Knights set up a monastic state along the southern coast of the Baltic coast during the early XIX^th century. They "converted by the sword" the Baltic tribes and found themselves at war with nearly all their (Christian) neighbours. As for the Roman Empire, it had to fight Jewish apocalyptic sects, often on the battlefield.

It is not the first time France intervenes in the area either. Mali was conquered by France at the end of the XIX^th century after the defeat of the last native state, Samory Toure’s Ouassoulou Empire. It was then integrated within the French colonial empire.

Moreover, unlike in Indochina or Algeria, France was not driven out. It decided to leave.

After the take over of the French government by De Gaulle in a quasi coup in 1958 and the drafting of a new constitution, the African French colonies were stuffed into an ad hoc structure, the French Community, headed by the French president. In practice that meant that the colonies were now free to run their internal affairs as they saw fit while France kept the control of military and foreign affairs and of the economy. There was an attempt at creating a federal structure uniting west-african colonies into a coherent whole, the Federation du Mali. It failed, because the richest colony, Ivory Coast did not want to subsidy the other ones, and only Senégal and Mali joined.

The French Community was dissolved de facto in 1960 as France granted independence to everybody. The Fedération du Mali disappeared quickly, following a slight disagreement about the name of the president, and what remained was a string of weak, artificial states with often unstable governments, subject to regular coups.

Of course France did not really left. Only its civil servants did. They were replaced by large corporations such as Elf-Aquitaine or, more recently Areva, and by a network of “advisors” nicknamed the “Foccard Network”, from the name of the French (not so) official in charge of France's African policy.

The goal of this policy, nicknamed “Françafrique” was to make sure that France continues to enjoy a privileged access to African resources and that African wealth continues to flow toward Paris. African rulers were also supposed to support France internationally... and to send wallets full of banknotes to whatever party held power in Paris at the moment.

France also kept military bases it used to support dictators (such as Mbaa in Gabon) or to remove those who had become, let's say, annoying – for instance His Imperial Majesty Bokassa the First, Emperor of Central Africa. Of course, more shadowy, if not really subtle, methods were used. Just ask mercenary Bob Denard – or rather don't ask him, he has conveniently caught Alzheimer's disease before dying a near beggar.

Former French colonies have, in essence, become French client states. This situation has advantages, mind you. Paris guarantees the independence of its vassals and has proved perfectly able and willing to back its words with boots and guns. When, in 1983, Lybia launched 11.000 troops across the Chadian desert, France drew a line in the sand and sent 3.000 elite soldiers (mostly marines and legionaries) and several squadrons of Jaguars.

It did it again in 1986, and while Chadian technicals ousted Gaddafi during the 1987 Toyota war, it would have been far more difficult if the French air force had not grounded its Lybian counterpart, turning the Lybian army into a collection of isolated garrisons which could be defeated in details.

This protection had, however, the same consequence as for all client states in history : military impotence.

The armies of former French colonies, with the recent and possible exception of Chad, are walking farces. The 7.000 strong Malian Army has collapsed last year before a rebel force half as numerous and in 1977 the whole Comorian Republic was conquered by 43 mercenaries led by Bob Denard.

It is not a bug, it is a feature. When your independence is guaranteed by a foreign overlord, you have no incentive to build an even moderately efficient army – and said overlord may not be so happy at your doing it, as it makes regime change more costly. You may even have an incentive not to build an efficient army. This army might, after all, use its new force to topple you. If the armed force of Gabon hadn't be a pushover in 1964, President Mbaa would have had to find himself a new home and a new job, and, by the way, there is a reason why a third of the 5.000 strong Gabonese army belongs to the presidential guard.

Besides, when you can count on a powerful ally to intervene and save the day when things get rough, you tend to become complacent... and not to fight to hard. That's why a few hundreds rag-tag rebels managed recently to conquer a great part of the Central African Republic, sweeping away a 4.500 strong national army, which most of the time did not even bother to fight. Only French, South-African and Angolan sabre-rattling saved President Bozizé's regime and convinced its opponents that negotiating was a better idea than storming a capital held by somebody who could actually shoot back.

The problem, of course is that overlords have a limited shelf life, and their client states rarely survive them. We know, for instance, what happened to Indian princely states when the British Raj left. Many of them were to small to be viable (the state of Darkoti, for instance had 632 inhabitants for 5 square miles), but some were larger than many European states. Yet, their combined military amounted only to 18.000 men in 1941 and those native rulers who played with the idea of independence saw their dreams quickly quashed. The Indian army took a mere five days to crush the forces of the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1948. A mere threat was enough for the Kingdom of Travancore.

France is no longer a world power, but it still has an efficient and modern army. Man for man, the Legion or the Troupes de Marine can stand up to anything the United States can field. We can manufacture our own third generation tank (the Leclerc) and fourth generation fighter (Rafale) and are not dependent on any foreign power for small arms and ammunition. We even have our own modern combat suit (the FELIN program).

The problem is that our projection capability is limited, and more so with every passing year. During Operation Desert Storm France fielded 18.000 soldiers, less the Egypt, and only because we benefited of American logistics. Alone, and in a combat situation, we would be hard pressed to field more than 5.000 men, mostly the Legion and troupes de marines. That's more than enough to defeat a bunch of jihadists or the army of some African rogue state, but not enough to take on somebody serious. We played a major role in the Libyan Civil War, but only because Libya was in range of our air force, which enabled us to effectively support insurgents. We couldn't do the same thing in Syria, for instance, as our lone carrier is operational only 65% of the time. Even in Mali, our deployment would have been far slower, if the United States had not loaned us  three C-17ER Globemaster III transport planes.

And this won't get better with time. France is a medium-sized country, with few industries left and virtually no natural resources. We produce only a tiny fraction of our energy and even if some of our clients supply us with oil (mostly Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville) or uranium (mostly Niger), that's hardly sufficient.

As a privileged ally of the United States, we also benefit from the tribute economy they have set up, even if it is to a lesser degree. That means, however, that we will suffer from its decline – in fact we already do – as we depend upon them to continue to funnel a disproportional share of the World's resource our way. When the United States will cease to be a global power, we will no longer be able to keep the sea-lanes open and to guarantee our continued access to the many resources we need.

Besides, even though we manage our resources better than the US, we need a continued inflow of high quality resources to make our society work. If we don't get enough of it, our infrastructures will begin to decay and our society to unravel.

In fact it is what is happening right now. We are slowly dismantling our welfare state, either by selling it off to private interests, diminishing service quality, or by dumping whole services on local authorities. Of course, this also impacts our military. The project of second carrier has been cancelled and we can be sure that the Charles de Gaulle will never be replaced. The production of the Leclerc main battle tank has been stopped – even though we retain the capacity to produce them, should the need arise.

More insidious, but more important, budget cuts will negatively impact maintenance and training and trigger a slow but steady slide into unreadiness. The intervention troops will remain fully operational longer, but they too will be hit by the erosion of our logistic and the increasing unreadiness of the support arms.

It is only a matter of time before we can no longer wage war even in Africa. We may experience a military defeat, or be quietly told to please vacate the place, or just throw the towel, the result will be the same for our erstwhile vassals : they will have to provide for their own defence.

They may find another overlord or rely on local alliances, as the Democratic Republic of Congo did during the Second Congo War. This will be a temporary solution at best, however,. Without fossil fuels, and without the technological superiority European polities enjoyed during the modern era, global empires will become a thing of the past. As for African states... if the Second Congo War proved that a few African states (namely Zimbabwe and Angola) can project their force to prevent a regime change, they are unlikely to keep this capability for long.

On the long run, if those states do not develop a real, autonomous military tradition – which would mean getting rid of today’s predatory elite – they will be overrun by rebels and warlords, islamist or not. Ultimately the polities they will create will coalesce into stable and permanent states. It may be a relatively quick process, like in Northern Somalia, it may be a long chaotic one like in Dark Age Britain or France. In both case this will involve severe cultural losses. A few of those losses will be beneficial - Africa could and should do without colonial languages and neo-colonial predatory elite – most won't. The idea of democracy will likely be an early casualty (the practice is not so widespread in the area).

It is in great part our fault. The native states we conquered during the scramble for Africa were hardly perfect but they were the emanation of coherent and healthy societies. We have replaced them by weak states dependent on us for their survival and for which the energy descent is likely to translate into utter chaos.

The only thing we can try and do now is eliminate the most barbaric threats while we still can do it – and that's why the present war is a relatively good thing – and help them develop the self-reliance they need.

By disengaging.

Political crisis and choices

Politics can be involuntarily funny. The 2000 presidential election certainly was, seen from this side of the Atlantic, and while the Dominique Strauss Kahn debacle was traumatic, the circumstances of our former president to be’s fall make the whole episode somewhat amusing, at least in retrospect. We just have had another of those Florida 2000 moments, but one which is very indicative of the situation of our political system and of why we shouldn't count on it to give a meaningful answer to our predicament.

After its defeat in may, Nicolas Sarkozy has retired from politics, but his party, the UMP, remained and, as could be expected his lieutenants fought over the succession. One, Jean-Louis Borloo, created a brand new party with the ambition to control the center of the French political spectrum. It is not an unprecedented strategy and it may succeed, or not. Two others, François Fillon and Jean-Louis Copé aimed for the party leadership. Those of you who can count will, I think, agree, that was one leader too many.

Once, the situation would have been resolved behind closed doors, with party officials scheming and backstabbing until a choice has been made – the winner would probably have been Copé, by the way, as he had the full control of the apparatus.

This way of proceeding has, however, somehow fallen out of fashion and those days we prefer to put such decisions into the hands of activists as it feels more democratic and make the elected leader's legitimacy less questionable. Unfortunately this method can also backfire spectacularly.

It certainly did in this case.

Officially Copé won the election with a lead of 98 voices, that is until one noticed that somebody had forgotten three overseas departments. Of course, and very conveniently, taking this couple of islands into account reversed the result, giving François Fillon a lead of some 126 voices. Predictably, the whole episode degenerated into opera-bouffe baboonery with both candidates accusing the other of having rigged the election, which they probably both did by the way. Copé, who had the loyalty of the party bureaucracy, clang to his presidency like a barnacle to its rock. Fillon send a bailiff to put the ballots under seals so they be not tampered with, then threatened to sue his own party. Finally he triggered a schism among UMP members of parliament, some 72 of which created a separate group in the French National Assembly : the rump (no, I didn't make that up, that's how it is called). Last I checked they have agreed to organize a revote in September.

This is not the first time such a misadventure happens to a French party. In 2008, the election of the first secretary of the Socialist Party had been a very close thing and both and Ségolène Royal (the loser) accused, for a short while, Martine Aubry (the winner) of having rigged the election. It has never before gone so far, however.

The irony is that there is no real ideological difference between François Fillon and Jean-François Copé. They are both pro-business and law-and-order conservatives, both dislike Muslims and both oppose any alliance with the far right National Front. Moreover, the schism has had no repercussion at the local level.

In fact, their ideological similarity is the very reason why thins got so heated.

Homo Sapiens is a savanna hunter ape with a dominance-based society, probably close, originally, to the baboons' – the primate genus occupying the ecological niche closest to our ancestors'. Baboon societies vary greatly and there is no need to think our ancestors' was as brutally patriarchal as the hamadryas'. They are, however, typically built around a core of competing dominant males which can cooperate to defend the band against predators but are otherwise rival.

Early humans were pack hunters, however, and successful pack hunting requires cooperation. So we evolved a number of social devices to limit the power of dominants and make sure even those at the bottom of the ladder get some part of the pie. Even a cursory look at human history will show that it is still pretty much a work in progress.

Ideology is one of those devices. Of course, when allowed free reins, it can generate social cancers such as Nazism, Bolshevism or our present obsession with growth. Within the framework of a sane democratic society, however, the existence of competing ideologies, what Max Weber called the polytheism of values, is a guarantee not only that the opinion of the common people will be heeded, since his support is needed for a cause to triumph, but also that the behavior of the dominants will be kept under control.

In most complex human societies, leaders are leaders because they are born that way (your average king or baron) or because they are exceptionally good at rallying supporters (Timur or the Hongwu Emperor). While they may have had an agenda - the Hongwu Emperor was originally a member of a millenarian sect – it was generally quickly forgotten once victory achieved.

Ideology changes the game because even though the personal qualities of the leader remain fundamental, he no longer owes his position to them, but to being the spokesperson of such or such cause, and once in power, he is definitely supposed to keep his word. Lukewarm as he might be, our president would quickly lose power if he suddenly morphed into a clone of Margaret Thatcher and when Chinese republican leader Yuan Shikai tried to restore the monarchy in 1915 he was quickly ousted.

Political ideology, or to put it more specifically the tying of legitimacy to the professing of a particular ideology, is the daughter of revealed religions, most notably Islam and Christianity. The main particularity of those religions is that they tie salvation not to what you do but to what you believe. This explains the ferocity of doctrinal quarrels in early Christianity. Being mistaken about the nature of Christ could literally land you into the lake of fire. Precisely defining the tenets of orthodox faith was therefore of foremost importance.

Another consequence was that since legitimacy ultimately came from God, it could be withdrawn should you believe something He or His terrestrial representatives disapproved of. The lands of an heretic or pagan king could be seized with impunity. This is what happened to the Slavic princes of what is today Eastern Germany, but also to the Irish kings after the bull Laudabiliter allowed England to invade the country to “root out the corruption within the local church”.

The centrality of doctrine in the Christian and Islamic religions made nearly sure that at some point that disputes, which in other contexts would have been safely contained within the walls of some university, would morph into heresies then civil wars. In Islam this happened as soon as 657 with the formation of the radical (and quite militant) Kharijite sect. The medieval Church was very good at stamping down opposition but it was bound to fail at some point. This nearly happened during the Albigensian Crusade, when the Church was forced to create an institution dedicated to the destruction of heresies : the infamous inquisition.

This was not enough, however, to prevent the temporary victory of the Hussites during the early fifteenth century and, most importantly the spread of the reformation after 1514 which started a cycle of wars and civil strifes which lasted until the beginning of the eighteenth century. One of the consequences was the displacement of religion as the center of political life and its progressive replacement by secular ideologies, the foundations of which were laid by Hobbes, Locke and Voltaire but also, in a totally different way, Burke and Herder.

The rise of secular ideologies was helped by another factor : industrial revolution. The same way Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines were unlikely to leave the drawing board without fossil fuels to power them, the perfect societies designed by Plato, Tomasso Campanella or Thomas More were bound to remain fantasies without the huge surplus the industrial revolution and fossil fuels provided.

The huge surplus engendered by industrialization enabled us to try various social experiments, at least one of which, modern democracy, was a real success. More important, they enabled us to choose between different kind of policies, something which would have been impossible in a resource-poor world. These choices, of course, would have been unthinkable without the existence of competing political ideologies. This is, by the way, one of the reasons why non-european civilizations failed to industrialize.

Of course ideologies could, and did, run amok, but within the framework of democracy, they provided the intellectual basis without which no real choice was possible. The problem we face now is that the surplus, that enabled us to enact those choices are dwindling and will disappear in the near future.

The complexity of our society is such, that a very large part of our energy production is used up to maintain our infrastructures. This means that as we reach peak energy and begin the long descent, the resources available to actually get things done will diminish with every passing year, eroding the capacity of governments to do anything meaningful. Of course, this impotence is also due to the growth-oriented nature of our leading ideologies, but this is unfortunately unlikely to change before the first disasters shatter our world-view.

Without the resources to enact choices, political ideologies become hollow words, useful only at election time to mobilize what has essentially become a captive audience. The political game reverts then to the pure unadulterated baboonery it was before the emergence of ideologies. The goal of the game is no longer to get in power to enact such or such policy but to get in power to... well, enjoy it, very much like your average Roman Emperor or Chinese warlord.

It is also true, by the way, of those groups which have no realistic chance to get in power. Being a minor ally of the ruling party can bring real advantages and even outside of the circles of power, there is prestige and even money to be had in small political sects, such as the trotskyist groups or the Larouchist parties, or in anti-system movements such as the French National Front.

This is not so much hypocrisy as the result of a situation where real political change has become nearly impossible and where faction loyalty and cynicism are essential survival skill. While idealism is still present, even among veterans, it is progressively buried under "practicalities".

The most likely result will be a kind of quasi-oligarchy in which elections are decided by the capacity of both major parties to mobilize captive audiences and lobbies, and control smaller allies. Bitter personal feuds will replace in-party ideological quarrels and both the left and the right will focus on peripheral societal issues to mask the fact their actual policies are nearly indistinguishable. Frustration and apathy will rise and with them the probability some authoritarian boss takes over.

Those who are familiar with the French political life will recognize today's climate.

The only way out of this predicament -short of handing power to an uniformed thug, that is – is to accept that without a constant inflow of high-grade energy, growth-oriented ideologies are hollow and remove growth and material affluence from the equation. If we want democracy to continue, we must base our political choices upon something else than prosperity. It is easier said than done but if you look at the works of the founders of our democracies, whether they be on Locke's side or on Burke's, you'll find that they did not care so much about wealth. Values such as equality, liberty or tradition were far more important in their view.

Maybe we should return to them.