Disunited Kingdoms

In 2014, Scotland will decide whether it should leave the United Kingdom or not. At this point, the pro-independence opinion is still a minority, even though the unionist parties do their best to make it a majority by the time the referendum is held. Should Alex Salmond win his gambit, a new state would appear on maps of Europe, probably the first of a long series.

Of course, the maps of Europe have been anything but static in the last seventy years. The collapse of the Soviet Union has spawned a bevy of newly independent republics, not all of which survived infancy, and the banks of the Dniester is still controlled by what one may diplomatically call an unrecognized state : Transnistria A few core western states have shed territories during this time period. Denmark has had to let Iceland go in 1944 and France has left Algeria in 1962 – I know it sounds weird but at the time it was considered a part of France and a significant French population lived there.

Those were just cases of states in relative decline losing control of their periphery, however. Denmark had lost its colonies in India to Britain during the 19th century and sold its last American possessions to the United States in 1917. France had been militarily defeated in Indochina and even though it held the upper hand in Algeria, it could not politically sustain a decade long war.

The departure of Scotland, like the possible departure of Flanders or Catalonia, is of a different nature. The Scottish Highlands, like Wales or Ireland, were on the periphery of Britain – the so called "Celtic Fringe". The Lowlands, however, were not. It was to gain access to the English market that the Scottish elite agreed to the Treaty of Union in 1706 and their wishes were definitely granted. Until the American Revolution, Glasgow dominated tobacco trade and the Scottish elite eagerly joined the English aristocracy in its pursuit of imperial glory.

The losers, of course, were the highlanders, who had maintained a rugged semi-autonomy  in the north of the country. The army, which crushed the clans at Culloden included a significant Scottish contingent and the highland clearance, which depopulated the northern counties were done at the order and for the benefit of the Scottish aristocracy.

Even now, Edinburgh and Glasgow are large and prosperous cities and the real divide is with the now largely empty Highlands.

The break between Scotland and England, like the one between Catalonia and Spain or the one between Wallonia and Flanders, is a break within the core, and there shall be a lot of it while our civilization slides further down Hubbert's curve.

Civilizations work by concentrating wealth from the periphery to the core. That is how they gather enough resources to get things done which incidentally means that a little territorial inequality is not necessarily a bad thing if you want to produce some culture somewhere. A fact often overlooked, however, is that civilizations are fractal, that is their low-level structure mirrors their high-level structure. The city of Nantes, where I work may be a periphery to the Parisian region, it is definitely the core of Brittany and while Saint-Nazaire, where I live is a periphery to Nantes, it is the core of the coastal region, and Paris itself is a distant periphery of New-York or Shanghai.

The system holds because everybody, except those who are at the bottom, has an interest in its holding together, and because it is easier to jockey for position inside it than to try and overthrow it, at the risk of being crushed.

The various dominant cores dominate their periphery – and are dominated by the cores higher up – through a mix of sharing and dependency, with brute force a very rarely used ultima ratio. How the sharing works is easy to see : subordinate elites get the right to exploit their own periphery, and a small part of the resources funneled upward.

Dependency is more subtle. Basically, the core uses the resources of the periphery to build infrastructures, both material and immaterial, and organize the economy in a way which suits the core’s interests. That means that whatever funds are spent in the periphery  further the interests of the core, notably providing it with manpower, specialized services or raw material, or producing goods which will be sold by corporations whose seats are located at the core, and therefore taxed, at least in part, there.

The periphery is therefore under the (false) impression, it cannot get by without the help of the core. Of course, this argument will be used to scare the periphery away from autonomy. This has been done in Quebec, for instance, and will doubtlessly be done in Scotland as well.

The end of cheap energy and the global shortage of resources which will ensue, shall make things a little more complex, however. It is easy to share resources when they are plentiful. Sharing shortages, however, is far more difficult and we can expect every country, region or city, whatever its place in the national or global hierarchy, to squeeze its periphery, internal or external, to squeeze its periphery for the resources it needs.

What this means for Scotland (and Wales, and Northern England, and Wessex), is that its resources – namely dwindling but still sizable oil reserves and rather large investments in wind and wave power – are likely to be funneled southward to prop up an south-eastern English economy which has unwisely bet on globalization and high finance. In a way, it is already happening.

The Scottish elite – at least a part of it – is using the tools of nationalism and historical myths to get a better control over its resources (and its own periphery's, we are not in carebears' country) whether it be through full independence or what the SNP calls “devo-max”

The outcome, of course, will depend on the respective strengths and weaknesses of the two contending elites and on their ability to manipulate historical myths. Fortunately, nobody intends to use the Kings' last arguments, so the British army should remain in its barracks.

There is no shortage, in Europe, of elites, or would be elites, willing to imitate the Scots. Some of them, like the Basques, the Catalans or the Flemings, may succeed. Other won't be so lucky, either because the territories they claim are too dependent, or because they have no national myth to rely upon, or because they are just a bunch of clueless amateurs.

Having roamed a few international congresses, I can tell you that the latter category is in no danger of immediate extinction.

Of course, you don't need to have a distinctive culture or identity to be stripped of your resources. Wessex or Northern England are in the same position as Scotland. So are the Scottish Highlands or the Shetlands, relative to Scotland, by the way. It is, of course, possible for, say Cumberland to remember that a Celtic language was spoken in the area until the twelfth century, or for Northern England to discover it used to be a kingdom during the Dark Ages. Let's just say it's likely to remain restricted to a few fringe groups or even individuals.

It is, by the way, the situation of most French regions, for, while regionalism is reasonably common, the groups which defend it are too weak, electorally, ideologically, structurally, to make a difference.

The most likely outcome its that wherever it is possible, the core will squeeze its peripheries to further its existence, leaving only poverty and chaos in its wake. When the core will fail, the old periphery will probably be not only impoverished and depopulated, but also broken as a society and politically chaotic for centuries.

Ironically, it is a similar process, which enabled the old highland clans to rise after the devastation and the chaos brought by the wars of independence of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

I am not sure the result will be everywhere as colorful, however.

There is no easy way out of this conundrum, and in fact, the only way for a peripheral territory to win is to opt out of the game : embrace the decline, turn to the domestic economy and to local production and consumption. This, however, amounts to embracing poverty to avoid misery further down the road, and I frankly doubt the regionalist groups I know are prepared to that, even those which claim to be ecologist.

Speaking of France

 

 

France is an interesting case. It was long the most populous state in Europe and the main rival of England, then Britain for the title of world hegemon. Unlike Britain, however, it did not face the open sea but large and powerful kingdoms, whose alliance finally thwarted its ambitions, first at Blenheim in 1704, then at Waterloo in 1815; It then began to slowly decline, the way failed empires do. Unable to prevent German unification, it steadily lost ground and became an admittedly unruly American ally after World War II. If peak energy wasn't looming, it would become just another minor country dreaming of its glorious past  while history is written elsewhere.

That would not necessarily have been a bad thing. This is what happened to Athens after the Roman conquest. Deprived of what remained of its political independence, the city had become a prosperous cultural center, leading a quiet and protected life, far from the Empire's battlefields.

Such won't be our fate, however.

In premodern times, France was the prototypic agrarian empire. Born from a warlord state located between the Loire river and the Channel, it came to control some of the best lands in western Europe, which enabled it to feed a large peasant population – a whole quarter of the European population during the Middle-Ages – and field large, well armed and well trained armies.

In fact, we probably came very close to a French global empire during the 16th century, when Louis XIV's armies marched on Vienna, only to be crushed by the combined forces of England, Prussia, the Netherlands and Denmark at Blenheim.

It was, however, less well endowed in fossil fuels, which explains its relative decline during the 19th century. France's few coal resources are located along the north-eastern border, which proved quite inconvenient during World War I. It has virtually no oil and very little gas, mostly in Aquitaine.

As in other European countries, those resources are mostly depleted. The last coal mines have closed down during the nineties, around the same time, ironically, as the last uranium mines. Only 2% of our gas is extracted in France – mostly around Lacq in Aquitaine - and our oil production is negligible. There may be shale gas around Paris and in Provence, two densely populated regions, but it remains to be seen whether it will ever be exploited. Local populations are quite hostile, economics are dubious at best and the French Parliament has recently banned hydraulic fracturing.

To make things worse, the share of renewable energy, even though it is growing, is negligible, the result of decades of underinvestment and of the choice of the country to invest heavily in nuclear power during the seventies.

This, of course, is bound to cause problems as the age of cheap abundant energy comes to a end.

France has, like other developed countries, accumulated an embarrassing surplus of material and immaterial infrastructures : roads, administration, a health system far more efficient than the American one (granted, it's not very difficult), a reasonably efficient  education system... After the first oil shock, those infrastructures were increasingly funded by debt. In a growing economy, that was not necessarily a bad idea. After all, if the future is going to be more prosperous than the present, it may as well pay for it.

The problem, as we know, is that the future won't be more prosperous than the present, and at some point we are bound to find ourselves in the rather awkward situation of having to pay for the past without getting any subsidies from the future.

France is a close, if sometimes troublesome, ally of the USA, and even though it gets some benefits from the imperial system, its growth has been consistently inferior to America's and the state budget has been running at a deficit since 1974. Chronic unemployment has been a fact of life for more than forty years now, partly because of weak growth, partly because the French political system favors a protected middle class of civil servants an retirees over the working class.

This is only made worse by the structure of the French state itself. France formed by amalgamating small feudal principalities during the middle-ages and by conquering border lands afterward. As a result, all its infrastructures are centered on the capital region, which works as a wealth and manpower pump, extracting resource from the provinces to fund the lifestyle of the Parisian aristocracy and the infrastructures it needs. The railroad network, for instance, is organized around the six big Parisian stations and most big corporations have their seat in Paris, as close as possible to the political power.

Theoretically, most regions receive more from the state than they contribute, but it is an illusion. A great part of the money that flows out from Paris is made of pensions, wages and touristic spending, what we call the residential economy. They increase, not alleviate dependency.

Public spending, notably in education, is aimed at providing the core with the skilled manpower it needs, triggering a permanent brain drain from the periphery toward the Parisian region, and of course, the economy of the periphery is organized according to the need and the interests of the core. Under the guise of “national solidarity”, wealth movements are organized and controlled by the state, which makes the poorest regions yet more dependent on the core and prevents independent accumulation of capital, either human or material.

The result has been a pattern of regional specialization, with the superior functions, and most of the national wealth, concentrated in Paris.

When such a system is faced with a shortage of vital resources, it tends to sacrifice the periphery to preserve the core. This tendency is still stronger in France, for, unlike in America, Germany, China and to a lesser extend Britain, the core coincides with a specific region.

Faced with a growing dearth of resources, the state has organized the progressive dismantlement of public services in the periphery – mostly in the rural areas, but also in what we call the “suburbs”, urban ghettos where the poorest populations, often of foreign descent, live. This dismantlement take many forms. State run enterprises may be sold off  so that their new corporate or quasi-corporate management can restrict their activities and progressively terminate the protective status of their employees. Offices located in small – or even less small towns – can be closed down. Most importantly, charges may be “delegated” to local authorities, while fundings to those very same local authorities are withdrawn and their ability to levy taxes curtailed.

Those policies are met with resistance, of course, but not with effective resistance. There has been no general strike in France since 1995 and the state has become better and better at defeating mass protests. The last one, in 2010, opposing a very unpopular reform pushed by a highly unpopular government, mobilized several millions people, yet was a total failure. In fact, the staff of the main opposition party, hoped it to be a failure, so that they be spared the trouble of enacting the same kind of reform once back into power.

The effect of the retreat of the state toward the geographical core are less direct. The resistance is therefore more local, and can be defeated piecemeal. The few victorious struggles, because they only have a local importance, don't break the pattern, and their often hard-won success is bound to be temporary.

The Republican ideology, which stills permeates French politics considers indeed the state as the guardian of common good., which means that any locally based resistance to its action is always suspect of parochialism and has to prove, if it wants to be listened to, that it does not only defend the interest of a particular group, but some great principle, which only strengthens the role of the state as the ultimate allocator of resources.

Like the kings of yore, the state cannot willingly do wrong. It can only be ill advised.

Even the political movements which have glimpsed the nature of the Parisian wealth pump, namely the various autonomist, regionalist and separatist movements, which have sprung up in the French periphery, subscribe to this worldview. Those movements have their weakness, structural and ideological, which will probably prevent them from playing a major role, even in local politics, for the foreseeable future outside Corsica, but they could have formed an ideological core around which a real relocalization might have been possible. Nearly all of them, however, insist, that they want a real solidarity between poor and rich provinces. They only want it fairer, which, of course, amounts to acknowledge the legitimacy of the state as the ultimate allocator of resources.

The king cannot do wrong, it can only be ill advised.

The problem is of course deeper, and that is why France is likely to disastrously fail as its resource base shrinks. As long as economic growth was present, the core could pump the resources of the periphery and organize it according to its needs while allowing it to reap some benefit from the system. No matter how exploited, a peripheral region of a central state was still better off than a central region of a peripheral state.

This is still true, but as the balance of power at the world level shifts toward China, France will more and more lose its privileged access to resources. It will, therefore, be forced to organize the impoverishment of its own periphery. In most big countries, such a plolicy would be sure to trigger separatist movements, but as I have said, in France, the supremacy of the state is accepted by nearly everyone, including those who might engage in identity politics. Mainstream, and even not so mainstream parties might diverge about the policies the state should enact but its role as the embodiment of the nation is questioned only by the fringe of the fringe.

The most likely result will be a growing gap between a privileged but shrinking minority, close enough to the core, whether it be geographical or social, to benefit from the advantages it provides, and a majority which will lose all the riches it had accumulated  during the growth years and vent its anger by supporting a populist strongman or another. This is what has happened to the French working class, and it is obvious that the middle class, especially the unprotected middle class is next on the list.

Such an evolution would be deadly for democracy, as sooner or later the disenfranchised crowd would vote some populist into power, or come so close to doing it that force would have to be used “to preserve democracy”.

In both case, it would be a disaster. In both case, it would speed the decline and make it deeper and messier as the inevitable failure of such a regime would leave only ruins in its wake.

The only alternative would be for the state to relinquish its claim to supremacy and share evenly the cost of the descent among all citizens by encouraging a progressive return to domestic economy and organic forms of solidarity.

I don’t know why, but I don’t hold my breath.

False Choices

It is election time in France. Five weeks from now, we will elect our president for the next five years and unless he does something really stupid, the socialist pretender, François Hollande, will win in a landslide – albeit not necessarily with the insane margin polls predict. The most striking feature of this election, however, is not the unpopularity of the incumbent president but the similarity of their worldview.

French Presidents are chosen in a two-round runoff election, with the candidates falling into four categories. First you have the two or three contenders, who have a realistic chance of being elected. Generally those are the candidate of the Socialist Party and whoever dominates the moderate right at that particular moment. This time it will be François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Then you have the outsiders who most probably won’t make it to the second round, but might under the right circumstances. This time, it will be François Bayrou (center), Jean-Luc-Mélenchon (Left Front) and Marine Le Pen (National Front).

Behind them stand the marginal candidates : Eva Joly (Greens), Jacques Cheminade (the local Larouchie) Nathalie Arthaud (troskyist), Philippe Poutou (another brand of troskyism) and Dominique de Villepin (moderate right, with a serious grudge against Sarkozy).

Finally, there are those who will be denied ballot access because they don’t have at least 500 signed presentations from elected officials. They are too numerous to be listed and their programs are often masterworks of involuntary comedy.

All of them, however, want to restart growth.

Of course, there are differences, often significant ones. The Greens, for instance, want a Green Growth, fueled by renewable energy. The socialists want to lower nuclear share in our energy mix to a mere 50%. The National Front wants a French Growth in French Francs (muslim people need not apply). Nicolas Sarkozy … well, Nicolas Sarkozy badly needs some growth to be reelected, but that does not sound likely.

The idea that sustained growth might be a thing of the past, however, is not something responsible people mention in a polite conversation, even if those people happen to be green.

There are many reasons for that, but one of them is the way the Green movement developed in France. Political ecology first entered French politics during the early seventies, with the candidacy of René Dumont at the 1974 presidential elections, two mere years after the founding of the first ecological magazine La Gueule Ouverte. Nobody talked about the climate then – it was assumed that at some point in the future it would become colder, but that hardly mattered. The subjects du jour were resource depletion, runaway pollution, demographic explosion and of course nuclear warfare.

The Meadows report had just been published, and contrary to what is assumed today, it triggered a huge debate within French society. Ecological themes nearly became mainstream and in 1978 an educational animated TV series called Once Upon a Time... Man was broadcast on the third channel. A whole generation of children watched it, notably the last episode, which described the future of our civilization... and its demise because of pollution and resource wars.

Yet this concern faded during the eighties and when the Greens resurfaced as a cultural and political force, they had gone over to standard upper middle class environmentalism. Ironically, one of the main causes of this devolution was the 1973 oil shock. It convinced the French elites that dependence on foreign oil was a dangerous thing. They quickly found a solution : nuclear.

At the time, it was not as stupid as it sounds now. Chernobyl was still in the distant future and the only alternative was importing gas from the USSR or Algeria. We still produced uranium at that time, and there were in Africa a number of producer countries both friendly and able to control their territory.

Besides, everybody knows that accidents are unfrench and that our borders are radiation-proof.

The Greens, of course, opposed this move, as well as some other movements. It was a huge fight, but outside Brittany, they lost. Only the Breton nuclear plants were canceled when the Socialist Party won the elections in 1981 but the fight itself focused the Green movement on the nuclear industry and away from sustainability.

Meanwhile, France began to experience high unemployment during the late seventies, the result of the first oil crisis, but also of the more or less deliberate choice of favoring high wages and pensions over full employment. The Keynesian policies of the first years of the presidency of François Mitterand did not help either, and France was stuck with an unemployment rate permanently over 8%.

France was, and is still, a welfare state and unemployment benefits can be quite generous – they depend on how much you were paid before you lost your job. They don't last for ever, however, and when they do end, the fall can be quite brutal and people who wonder whether they will still have a home at the end of the year tend to put environment very low on their list of priority.

The Greens having failed to make the connection between resource depletion and economic decline, green politics became restricted to the left wing upper middle class – in French, we call them the “bobos”. Of course, the upper middle class has its own demands and concerns. It wants to keep its privileged position within the society, but wants also to be seen as the progressive good guys. This has resulted in a focus on societal issues and policies which look superficially left wing but actually reinforce the status-quo, such as free immigration (aka brain and manpower pump) or “fair trade”, which in fact locks poor countries in their role of provider of underpriced raw material.

The hedonistic world-view of the bobos, means that they will oppose any policy aiming at reinforcing communities – as the Archdruid has stated, healthy communities come to a price, a price the upper middle class is not in a hurry to pay.

The result has been an ideological disaster mixing tokenism and, since the bobos have a lot to lose from a true relocalization of economy or from a true simplification of the society, an insistence that all our problems can be solved if we invest heavily in the right green technologies and create a lot of green jobs for the self-appointed green elite.

I am afraid those delusions won't survive their, arguably unfortunate, collision with reality.

Curiously, a few parts of the traditional left may be more aware of the problems ahead.

Less than a month ago, Michel Rocard published a book titled “Mes points sur les i - Propos sur la présidentielle et la crise”, where he explains that growth won't returns and that the European Union is a non-entity in international politics. For those who don't know French politics, Michel Rocard is the closest thing to a an elder statesman we have. During the seventies, he was the main rival of François Mitterand within the Socialist Party and his prime minister from 1988 to 1991. He probably spared France a colonial war in New Caledonia, but he and his followers were progressively marginalized in the following years and he was finally exiled to the European Parliament.

Having become a non-entity in French politics, he can now speak his mind and say what other politicians cannot. That François Hollande prefaced his book shows he is listened to, if not necessarily heeded.

Of course, Michel Rocard speaks from within the ideology of progress. He sees the future as a time of difficulties, not as the long descent it will be. Unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge the limits of our uranium supply, he advocates keeping our nuclear plants “lest we enter degrowth”, and of course, his goal is not to accompany the coming descent, so as to make it less brutal, but to keep the status quo as long as possible.

This half-lucidity will certainly influence my vote next month, especially when I compare it to the Greens' delusions, but it makes the curtailed character of our political choices painfully obvious. It is not that we cannot see the coming crisis – Michel Rocard sees it clearly enough and the Greens, for all their delusions are somewhat aware of it. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of us shy away from its logical consequences, because they contradict our ideology.

In fact, we have, during the last decades, more or less consciously chosen to put our faith in progress before the survival of our civilization, and this choice has made all other political choices, if not irrelevant – a fascistic or communist regime in France would be an unmitigated disaster – at least without long term consequences.

The only horizon is now collapse. The only question is how our communities will adapt to it locally, far from the political rallies and the golden halls of the senate.

Imperial leftovers

You probably don’t know it, but Réunion Island has been racked by riots about the price of gas last week. For those of you who happen not to be specialists of African geography, Réunion Island is a French département, roughly half the size of Rhode Island, located in the Ocean Indian, not far from Madagascar. It is officially a part of France, even if, of course, Frenchmen care about it only when it affects the mainland, such as when a chikungunya epidemic threatened to spill over Southern France.

It is not the only such island. France has kept from its colonial days a collection of smallish islands of dubious economic value, the average Frenchman will never put his foot on. Some are departments, ruled from Paris, others are more or less autonomous, one is ruled by a triad of tribal kings. With the exception of New Caledonia, and of those islets without any human permanent population, all of them are utterly dependent  on subsidies from the mainland for their economic survival.

At the origin, they were sugar islands or strategic havens on the roads to India or China. This made them tremendously important in the  wars which opposed France and Britain for the control of maritime trade roads during the XVIIIth century. After the fall of Napoleon, the advent of industrial society and the digging of the Suez Canal, however, they quickly lost their relevance. Today, they mostly live off tourism and government subsidies, which basically amounts to the same : wealth produced far away dumped on territories without any kind of natural resources.

Their economy stunted by the legacy of slavery and early trade union with a generally far better endowed metropole, those territories never developed a viable industrial sector and cannot compete with their poorer neighbors in the agricultural domain. As a result, their economy has become parasitic.

As everything has to be imported from France, the coast of living is significantly higher than on the mainland, while salary tend to be lower, and unemployment greater, which leads to regular troubles. Thus in 2009, Guadeloupe Island was shaken by a general strike which degenerated into a near-insurection. The government reacted by lowering the price of basics and by granting even more subsidies to economies,  have become embarrassingly dependent of them.

Needless to say, this will only make things more difficult down the road.

Those territories are quite hospitable. A few may be drowned by sea level rise, but most are volcanic in nature, with a rather rugged relief and a fertile soil. They were inhabited before the beginning of the industrial age, and it is likely they will still be relatively densely populated when it will be a mere memory.

On the short term, however, things look far less rosy. In an ideal world, our overseas territories should prepare for independence, export their surplus population to the metropole, disengage from globalization, tourism and cash crops focused agriculture to adopt a relocalized way of life.

As everybody has probably noticed, however, we are not in an ideal world. Even in those territories with a native population, there is no clear majority for independence. It is not difficult to see why. The French overseas departments have allowed themselves to be trapped in a vicious spiral of dependency. The same could be said, by the way, for Netherlands Antilles, which were supposed to transition toward independent after WWII, but never did so, and have been recently dissolved, its constituent parts becoming either "countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands" or mere dutch municipalities ruled from the Hague.

An independent Republic of Guadeloupe or Réunion, would have to support a French style state apparatus with a third world economy based upon tourism and vanilla or banana growing. This is clearly impossible and locals are understandably in no hurry to try. In fact, another Indian Ocean island, Mayotte,  recently voted to become a full French department, which will enable its inhabitants to benefit from the RSA (the French guaranteed minimal income, roughly 500 $).

The problem, of course, is that, with the age of cheap and abundant energy, France, and presumably The Netherlands and Britain as well, will be less and less able to afford those imperial leftovers at the other side of the world. At some point of the future, they will have to get rid of them, and violence is very likely to be a part of the equation.

French overseas territories are very dependent on oil. Unlike in France proper, most of their electricity is produced by diesel generators. As I have said, nearly everything has to be imported and the tourism sector is highly dependent on the continued availability of a reasonably cheap air transport.

As energy becomes increasingly rare and expensive, the cost of living in the French overseas territories will rise accordingly, while non-state-related revenues will plummet. This will lead to another round of civil unrest, like in Guadeloupe in 2009, in Mayotte in 2011 or in Réunion Island last week. The state will react the way it always does, raising wages, granting subsidies and sending a few rioters to jail. Local economies will be made yet more dependent.

At some point, something nasty is bound to happen, especially in those islands where social hierarchy is still partially based upon skin color. Old simmering feuds dating back from the colonization or from the age of slavery will resurface and being a member of a local minority will probably become very unhealthy. Please note, by the way, that "member of a local minority” does not necessarily means "white". The population of the former sugar islands is often quite mixed, with substantial Indian and Chinese minorities and New Caledonia (arguably a special case) harbors a strong Polynesian (mostly Wallisian) minority, which could be in an awkward situation should the conflict between Kanaks (Melanesian aborigines – roughly 40% of the population) and Caldoches (descendants of French settlers and convicts – roughly 30% of the population) erupt again.

New Caledonia and Polynesia are likely to break away, turning their anger toward France, which is probably the healthy thing to do. Since they have native populations with a reasonably functional culture and some people remembering how one can survive on a small island in the middle of nowhere, they are likely to reach the far side of the Hubert curve in a reasonably good shape. Places like the Marquesas Islands, may even fare better than before the colonization.

The other territories will cling to France like a castaway to his plank... and will be abandoned, either formally, or more probably informally. Like all European countries France will be forced to concentrate the resources it will be left on its core territory, which will increasingly mean Paris and the big provincial cities – this process has already begun, by the way. The administration will grow thin on the ground and local authorities will have to take over, probably in a disorderly fashion since they definitely don’t want to take over, and establish trade and cooperation networks with their neighbors rather than with far away Paris.

There have been a lot of precedents in history, and, to tell the truth, the outcome has not always been good. Sub-Roman Britain fell into warlordism when the Roman left but the Norse colonies in Greenland and the Polynesian settlements in Henderson and Pictairn islands died out, leaving only grassy ruins behind them.

I do hope that such a fate shall not befall our last colonies, as I do hope that the people who will build a sustainable civilization there centuries from now will be the descendant and the cultural successors of those who inhabit them now – they deserve better than the perpetual dependency in which we have entrapped them.

It will nevertheless be a long way down.

Zombies and aliens

Last week-end I watched, with some pleasure, the final episode of Falling Skies. Unlike so many in the Peak Oil movement, I don’t think modern fiction is decadent. It is, if anything, far better than what was produced in the seventies, and not only because of flashier special effects. That wasn’t what I mused about, however, as I watched, with a cup of pu-erh in may hand and a furry monster on my lap, the Second Massachusetts fighting a seemingly hopeless war against an enemy it barely understands – but about a red-jacketed book standing amidst a lot of others just behind me.

It was published in 1976 by a then-young French scholar, Emmanuel Todd, and was titled “La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique” (The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decompositionof the Soviet Sphere). At this time the Soviet Union still looked strong, yet Todd predicted its impending collapse based upon such indicators as life expectancy and infant mortality. He wasn’t the only one to do so, and to tell the truth he wasn’t even the first one. Todd’s originality was his use of proxy indicators such as the depiction of aliens in popular culture.

During the first decades of communist rule, Todd argued, aliens were seen as friendly or, what amounted to the same thing, in need of some revolutionary help from Earth. “Andromeda”, published in 1957 by Ivan Yefremov, is the perfect example of this. It pictures an entirely communist Earth, member of a kind of interstellar radio network, the Great Circle. There is no faster-than-light travel, so the civilizations of the Great Circle almost never meet in person, but from time to time a utopian Earth sends spaceships in a kind of Grand Tour with the occasional fight against non-sentient monsters and the occasional ecological disaster on some distant planet.

As the Soviet Union sank deeper into depression, however, the tone changed. The aliens became hostile and space filled up with enemies. In 1968, the very same author of Andromeda wrote a sequel, “The Bull's Hour”, which depicted a totalitarian hell where the bulk of the population was condemned to live very short lives under the ruthless control of the ruling class of government bureaucrats and the police forces, which in turn were under the direct command of the Council of Four and its Chairman.

“The Bull's Hour” was quickly banned but it was hardly the only example of this change of tone. “Hard to Be a God”, for instance, written in 1964 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pictures an agent of faraway Earth, impotent as the medieval kingdom he supervises falls into the hands of an insane tyrant. The main point of the novel was that even with godlike power, it is impossible to really change the world.

According to Todd, this change in tone, while it certainly made for better literature, reflected a change in the mindset of Soviet society. During its early years, the Soviet Union considered itself a missionary state which was to spread socialism through the whole world. This was no longer the case in the sixties. Even though it was still expanding, the Soviet Empire increasingly viewed itself as a besieged fortress. The Soviet ruling class, as it was becoming more and more aware that it was indeed a ruling class, felt increasingly threatened by the growing prosperity of the West. Its objective changed from imposing Communism on the world to preserving its own position at home. As the stagnation of Soviet society became more and more obvious, this fear of the outside turned into outright paranoia, to the point that in 1983 the Soviet Politburo nearly unleashed Armageddon after having mistaken a NATO exercise for war preparation.

The hostile aliens always threatening Earth were only a reflection of the very real forces which ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and to the end of Communism as a credible alternative.

The West has had its share of alien invaders, from Wells’ Martians to the body-snatchers, and they were numerous during the first decades of the Cold War, when its outcome was still very much in doubt and Communism still a credible ideological threat. After the end of WWII, however, those aliens sought to take over the Earth through subversion rather than brute military force – as any alien able to cross the interstellar space would have done – and most of the time, humanity emerged as the victor.

Things changed during the seventies and the early eighties, with movies such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Cocoon, or the rise of such UFO religions as Raëlism. The aliens became benevolent Space Brothers who would help us leave behind our materialistic past and get to the next stage of Evolution – whatever that might mean. The French incarnation was a delicious animated series called “Il était une Fois l’Espace” in which faces destruction at the hands of a robotic civilization of its own making, only to be saved by more spiritually evolved aliens.

This change was not the result of a growing optimism in the collective Western psyche, however. In fact it was quite the contrary. If the Space Brothers were going to save us, it was because there was something for us to be saved from. The sister series of “Il était une Fois l’Espace” – “Il était une Fois l’Homme” – ended with humanity blowing itself up, leaving only a handful of survivors in space.

By then, concerns about resource depletion, rampant pollution, biodiversity loss, and the like had become quite mainstream, at least in France – more than today in a way. “Il était une Fois l’Homme” was, after all, aimed at kids and aired on national television at lunch time. Appealing to some savior from outer space was apparently the response our collective psyche brought to this growing awareness – a response which obviously had deep connections with our Judeo-Christian past.

It was also a kind of escapism – after all, if the Space Brothers are going to solve all our problems and bring us ready-made enlightenment tomorrow, then there is no point in changing our life now. From this point of view, the benevolent aliens were a part of the multi-pronged cultural complex which smothered the first efforts toward the building of a sustainable society during the Seventies and the Eighties – a symptom of our unwillingness to face the reality we have built for ourselves.

The opportunity to stabilize the course of industrial society is now long gone, and it seems that the aliens have undergone aturn about-face, becoming hostile again, but with a twist.

The invaders from outer space were once nearly always defeated by human ingenuity or courage. This is no longer the case. Today’s aliens are nearly unstoppable and while humanity can score local victories against them, it is always at a great cost. This becomes obvious if we compare the two incarnations of Battlestar Galactica. In the original series, the Cylons have defeated the Colonies because of the betrayal of one of their rulers – which means they would never have succeeded on their own – and they don’t seem to pose a serious threat to colonial fighters, on the run as those may be.

The new series is far darker. The Colonies have been destroyed after a successful infiltration operation and the few survivors are really on the run. They have lost nearly everything and are only one mistake away from losing the rest. They are outgunned and outnumbered and we are reminded in every episode how few they are. There is a general sense of loss and impending doom – people die, and not anonymous red-shirts but people you love.

We find the same theme – with some variations – in most recent representations of alien encounters, whether it be Falling Skies, the new incarnation of V, Monsters, Skyline… We also find it in modern zombie movies.

Zombies are no novelty – they became popular in 1968 with The Night of the Living Dead – but until recently they appealed only to a restricted audience. The popularity of the zombie apocalypse theme, both in print and onscreen is a relatively recent thing. Although Romero’s movies may have met with some success, it was still a genre or cult success; while 28 Days Later, Resident Evil or Dead Walking have been worldwide commercial successes – not a guarantee of quality, mind you, but a sure sign they are in sync with at least a part of our collective psyche.

The common theme to most modern alien or zombie stories is very simple: there is something out there, it is stronger than we are, and it wants to destroy us. This is by no way a recent theme – all of Lovecraft’s stories, for instance, are based upon it – however it was hardly dominant. Sure, there were a lot of stories about defeated heroes – the Alamo, for instance – but their defeats were presented as a sacrifice, paving the way for a later victory.

The interest of popular culture in real defeat, invincible foes, and doomed victories may reflect a more realistic view of the world – we know, after all, that most defeats are final. I feel there is more to it, however.

Industrial civilization is in an impossible situation. It has probably reached the point where increases in complexity yield negative returns, which means that continued growth will no longer translate into well-being. Moreover, the level of complexity we have attained is dependent upon a continuous inflow of cheap energy, an inflow which is quite likely to dry up in the near future and has probably already begun to do so. That means that we are likely to experience a rather dramatic, if progressive, decline in social complexity during the coming decades.

Concretely that means that there is no way we can make our lot better in any significant way. We can share the burden more equitably; we can mitigate the effects of the crisis and try to salvage enough of our culture for our descendants to be able to build something worthwhile upon it. We cannot, however, make the whole episode pleasant, even for those few who will come out of it on top. Politicians and the media will vehemently deny this, and will go to great lengths to rationalize their denial; yet in Europe, at least, most people feel that things have somehow taken a wrong turn, that the future will be worse than the present.

Many won’t put this into words because the mainstream discourse doesn’t give them the tools they need to do so, and because the prevailing political culture goes against it. All that does not keep this feeling from growing and spreading, however, but just forces it to express itself through stories and narratives – arguably an age-old solution and one quite apt to stir up emotional responses, but nevertheless one unlikely to have much impact in the cold world of politics where policies are chosen and implemented, at least in the short term. More important, perhaps, its not being expressed in rational ways, at least outside our small circle of radicals, fuels frustration and ultimately an anger which can have very damaging consequences.

We are about as likely to be conquered by Darth Vader as we are to be helped out by the Elohim. There are probably a lot of intelligent species out there, but they are so far away that for all practical purposes we are alone in the universe. The ones who populate our stories are only the shadows of our fears, a not-so-subtle way to silence them and remove them from our daily experience. The problem is that those fears are well founded and that the slow crisis which hides behind them won’t go away when we turn off the television.

Maybe we should face them instead, as the Soviets should have faced them.

The shadows of the bagaudae

Most people hardly noticed, but the recent Spanish elections have been troubled by a series of demonstrations. A relatively high number of demonstrators have gathered in major Spanish cities during the months of May and June, demanding radical but curiously unspecific changes in Spanish politics. There have been similar protests in Portugal and in Greece, all of them about the austerity measures taken in those countries in response to the debt crisis. Of course, the French far left has seen in these protests the premises of the revolution it has been waiting for throughout the last fifty years, but what strikes me most about those protests is their pointlessness and their conservative nature. In that, they may well be representative of the political climate of the early decades of energy descent.

The revolutions of the early industrial area aimed at changing the rules of the game. The change in question could be moderate, as in the American Revolution or the Indian or Irish independence struggle; or it could be radical. The result could be a resounding success or an abject disaster, but the rhetoric was always the same: there was something wrong with the world, and the revolutionists were going to fix it. This rhetoric was so pervasive that even counter-revolutionary movements adopted it, and when Adolf Hitler attempted to seize power in 1923, he yelled "Either the German revolution begins tonight and the morrow will find us in Germany a true nationalist government, or it will find us dead by dawn!" – unfortunately for us he did not find death at dawn, but that’s another story.

The European protests, however, are aimed at conserving the advantages of the welfare state. Protestors don’t even blame their country’s political class for allowing themselves to go so much into debt; they blame them for not having continued to do so, so that they could enjoy a little bit longer the privileges granted to them by the welfare state.

This is not an uncommon theme in Europe, and there is no shortage of politicians, and not only on the left, to try and capitalize on it. Some people want to repeal the 1973 law which prevents the State from printing its own money. Others want to put the European Central Bank under political control (theirs, of course), so that they may go on a money-printing spree. Others, last but not least, want to drop the Euro altogether, get back to national currencies and, well you guessed it, go on a money-printing spree.

The rationale common to all those proposals is always the same: the privileges we enjoy today are our birthright. We are entitled to their indefinite continuation and anybody pointing out that you cannot sustainably spend more than you earn must be an agent of some sinister elite group bent on world domination – in some variants he must also have a really big nose.

These narratives have historically emerged out of the far right, among the local Larouchites (yes, we have a few of them, and they don’t like me) or in national-revolutionary circles such as Alain Soral’s Egalité & Réconciliation, then have spread to the mainstream left through crossover groups we call “republican” – that is, left-wing social conservatives with a strong nationalist bent.

This is relatively rare in France. Here the far right are not a bunch of mostly harmless lunatics – that’s the far left’s position – it is the remnant of the dark hordes which nearly destroyed the continent seventy years ago. These people are loathed, and while it is acceptable to have been a member of some far-left group in your youth, having been in a far-right group is, well, shameful. The same goes for ideas. The very fact the far right loudly agitates for something – for instance immigration control – disqualifies it.

So the fact that themes originally from the far right have found their way into the reasonably mainstream left is very telling. It shows that our societies have become so entitled that they are ready to listen to anybody with a “solution”, no matter how shady his background, provided he gives them even a faint hope of retaining their privileges.

It also shows how desperate they are.

We face two convergent trends, both of which place our societies on a declining trajectory. The first one, well documented by Tainter, is the diminishing return of investments in social complexity. We have reached the point where any solution involving an increase in social complexity – new laws, new structure, new procedures – is likely to be counterproductive and to yield only marginal gains at a great cost. Only decreasing social complexity could provide our society with some room for maneuver, but that is unthinkable since it would mean curtailing a number of services we have come to consider our birthright.

The second one is, of course, peak energy, which will shrink the economic surplus available to fund said complexity. This means it will be harder and harder for European states to fund the services their citizens are accustomed – and feel entitled – to.

In an ideal world, we would acknowledge this and organize the retreat as best we can while making sure the rich bear most of the burden.

Unfortunately we are not in an ideal world. Partly this is a result of the power structure of modern democracy. Contrary to what one might think, the power does not belong to a small elite clique. It does not really belong to the government. It is shared by a number of interconnected and somewhat overlapping power centers. The MEDEF (the French organization representing business interests) is one of them, but it is hardly the only one and its demands are routinely ignored by the government. The unions, the farmers, and the teachers can have more pull, especially when fighting defensively.

The end result is that budget cuts will initially concern those without any political clout: the unemployed, of course, but also the youth, small businesses or crucial but unpopular or low-key branches of the government – the police or the military, for instance. It is not an evil scheme, by the way; only the result of the politicians’ natural reluctance to engage in unnecessary fights.

The walking disaster that European economies have become is one of the results of this reluctance. Rather than face the structural threats posed to the welfare state model by the limits of complexity, we as a society have decided to play the borrow-and-spend way out, hoping that “growth” would somehow bail us out. We now turn to scapegoating and invoke the revolutionists of old, so that we can retain our privileges a little longer.

This is not an unprecedented attitude. Late Roman historians make frequent reference to an obscure social movement call the bagaudae. The word is Celtic and probably meant “combat group” – it is relatively close to the one we use for pipe bands. We don’t know what they stood for, but they were apparently considered subversive, far more so in fact than the various usurpers who roamed the country at that time. Apparently they were able to control parts of the Empire during extended periods of time, notably Armorica. According to the British historian Ken Dark , they may even have taken power in Britain, which would explain Zosimus’ rather cryptic reference to a revolution in 409 and the sudden disappearance of the local, villa-dwelling and still pagan, aristocracy.

One hypothesis – the one I favor, obviously – is that the bagaudae were, at least in part, people who revolted against the Roman Empire because they wanted to keep the advantages of being Roman citizens. Paradoxically, this could mean seceding from the Empire and setting up one’s own local variant if the official one is not up to the task. This happened during the Third Century crisis with the so-called Gallic and Palmyrene Empire, and at the very end of the Empire with Syagrius’ enclave.

The bagaudae were probably less conventional than Zenobia and her followers, and did not have the same kind of elite support, but the basic rationale was the same: if the people back in Rome can’t do their job, let’s do it in their stead.

The results were, how to state it, disappointing. Nearly everywhere the bagaudae and their Roman dreams were stomped down by brutal tribal warlords; as for the places where they apparently triumphed, well, their leaders eventually turned into brutal tribal warlords who stomped down whatever ideals they had at the beginning – that or they hired bearded foreigners with a funny accent and a weird religion.

It wasn’t just another case of revolutions failing and of power corrupting. Trying to retain some civilized order in a small region in the middle of an imperial collapse is not, per se, an unattainable goal. Countless Chinese kinglets reached it at the end of the Han and Tang dynasties. They succeeded, however, mostly because they were facing a maintenance crisis, a slight imbalance between the maintenance costs of the society and its sustainable resource base.

What the Western Roman Empire faced was a catabolic collapse; that is, an imbalance between maintenance costs and the sustainable resource base so huge that some kind of stability can be attained again only after most of the society’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Any attempt to stabilize before the bottom is reached is doomed to fail because the destruction of infrastructure only temporarily frees resources but permanently harms your ability to exploit your environment.

The Roman Empire was essentially bankrupted by military and administrative costs, but when the army and the administration began to unravel, its ability to extract resources from its neighbors and citizens significantly decreased, which in turn made it quite difficult to fund a working army and administration.

And, of course, it made it virtually impossible to keep a Roman-like level of civilization, because Roman civilization itself was a part of the problem.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are in a similar situation.

European countries have been able to build their impressive welfare states because fossil fuels have enabled their economies to produce huge surpluses – and also because somebody else has been paying for their defense.

The problem is that fossil fuels will dwindle away, and so will the huge economic surplus built on them. There is no way we can keep the kind of public services we have now with ever-diminishing resources. We probably can’t even keep them with stagnating resources.

What this means is that there is no way the Spanish or Greek protestors can get what they demand so loudly: that is, a continuation of the welfare state. What they could get is an equal sharing of the price of decades of overspending, but that is very unlikely to happen. What we’ll probably get will be a lot of angry speech about how shadowy “elites” conspire to deprive the people of its birthright to bring about some kind of New World Order – and a lot of people on the far right as well as on the far left trying to take advantage of it.

Of course, the elites are hardly blameless, but their faults are the same as ours: shortsightedness, ideological blindness, faux radicalism, conformism…The protestors, and those who want to use them to get at the top, are every bit as guilty of these, often more. More important, by considering their opponents as the devil incarnate, they pave they way for authoritarianism.

We have seen a lot of that in Europe in the last two centuries, and it always ends the same way: with a very substantial body count and a self-appointed liberator who does his best to prove that no matter how bad things are, it is always possible to make them worse.

Moreover, in a time of decline, the kind of entitled populism which could emerge from the European protests is likely to make the descent far messier and steeper than it needs to be. In the same way as the bagaudae made it more difficult for the Empire to extract the few resources it had left, the protestors and the political regimes which might emerge from their actions will make it more difficult to free the resources necessary to adapt to energy descent. In the European tradition, they are likely to add new layers of complexity and control – a candidate to the French presidential election is even proposing a planned degrowth, complete with a French version of the Gosplan. Of course those would divert still more resources toward unproductive uses – mostly to the bureaucracy but the security apparatus is also a popular choice – and away from the maintenance of vital infrastructures. Under-maintained infrastructure tends to degrade fairly quickly, and in a technological society that means that our ability to extract resources from the environment  will be diminished - the Roman syndrome at its best.

Note that not all plebeian revolts are harmful. Those born in times of expansion may lead to reasonably progressive regimes – especially when they fight a foreign occupation, which diverts them from class war. Some of those born in times of decline did the right thing; that is, destroy the civilization itself and return to a simpler way of life. The people of Teotihuacan apparently burned down the temples and the palaces of whoever ruled them, then went back to the fields. Closer to home, the large Neolithic proto-state which dominated southern Brittany was apparently toppled by a similar revolt, since the victors took great care to destroy its ceremonial center of Gavrinis but did not build anything afterward.

This won’t happen in Europe because, whatever we think of ourselves, we are not plebeian. At the global level, we are the equivalent of the pampered pre-1789 French aristocracy: a disempowered upper class, whose main preoccupation is to defend our doomed privileges.

Maybe we should hire bearded foreigners with a funny accent and a weird religion instead.