The shadow of fascism

The presidential election is over, and the result has been exactly what was expected : the "socialist"candidate won over the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, even if by a relatively small margin. All elections, however, have their share of surprises, and this one was no exception, since the far-right leader Marine Le Pen scored nearly 18%, better than her father in 2002 when he shocked the world by reaching the second round. This is by no way an isolated phenomenon. The very same Sunday Hollande was elected, the Greeks sent to their parliament 21 activists from the Golden Dawn, a fringe far-right party, complete with a svatiska-like symbol and roman salutes. Add to that Hungary, whose constitution the right wing government has recently changed in a decidedly authoritarian direction and the 17% scored in the Netherlands by Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, and it becomes obvious Europe has a far right problem.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front is no newcomer in French politics. It was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen to unify the then marginal French far right. The Far right has a long history in France and was at time a significant force. The nationalist leagues nearly seized power in 1934 when a corruption scandal, the Stavisky case, degenerated into riots. They had, of course, their moment in the sun when Hitler’s panzers crashed through the Bulge and allowed them to rule a rump French State from Vichy. The collapse of Nazi Germany dealt them a crushing blow, however, as their leaders were killed in action, shot for treason or forced to run for the Spanish border.

The Algerian war and the confused impotence of the late Fourth Republic gave the far right a new lease of life. It proved short-lived, however, as Charles de Gaulle, who had belonged to the monarchist Action Française but had later joined the moderate right, seized power through a quasi-coup and abandoned Algeria. The far right attempted to topple him during the failed Alger coup of 1971 and, for a time, waged a vicious, but ultimately doomed low intensity terrorist campaign.

When Le Pen made his 1972 bid, the far right had been reduced to a rag-tag collection of fringe groups and intellectuals. While he managed, progressively and with much difficulty, to rally the far right around himself, Le Pen electoral results were dismal. In the 1974 presidential election he won a mere 0,8% of the national vote and failed to gather enough support to stand in the 1981 election.

The breakthrough happened in the 1983 municipal elections, and most importantly in the Dreux by election, in October of the same year, when the National Front won 17% of the vote and forced the moderate right to make a deal with it to stave off defeat. This put the National Front under the spotlights and paved the way for later successes, the most important of which was, of course, the much publicized, 2002 presidential election.

Democratic parties reacted by establishing a kind of cordon sanitaire around the National Front. Most of the time it worked. The moderate right, then dominated by staunchly gaullist Jacques Chirac, did not yield to the temptation and the 1983 deal was never repeated. It has to be said, however, that Le Pen himself did not want to take part to a coalition government. He was fully aware that his party thrived in radical opposition to the establishment and every time an alliance with a mainstream party became remotely possible, he spurted something utterly unfashionable about Jews, the Holocaust or the German army. This proved quite efficient.

Unfortunately, his daughter is more interested in ruling than he was, and knows that her only chance to get into power is by having the moderate right so soundly defeated that a part of it look to her for support, hardly an implausible scenario. The leaders of right are very much aware of the risk and have promised to expel anybody who would dare to strike a deal with the National Front. This may not be enough, however.

The problem is the National Front, like most of its Western European counterparts, is not really fascist. It is xenophobic and authoritarian, and would make France a very unpleasant place if allowed to reach power. Should this happen I am of the opinion that it ought to be overthrown by any mean necessary. Even though the most lunatic ones have been marginalized or even expelled when Marine Le Pen was given the leadership of the party, a significant part of its core membership is fascist, or heavily influenced by fascism. There is also a sizable number of catholic traditionalists and of unreconstructed pieds-noirs and even a few eccentrics, who will talk to you about their Indo-European heritage before walking away toward the nearest forest.

The ideology of the National Front, however, is closer to Cesarism – aka, the man on the white horse – than to bona fide fascism. For instance, Marine Le Pen, even though her policies would undoubtedly be highly oppressive and unpleasant, does not plan to change the constitution in any major way. It is partly due to the fact that this constitution, even though it has accumulated some checks and balances over time, has been drafted by another man on the white horse after what amounted to a military coup, but not only. Cesarism is perfectly compatible with a constitutional regime, as generations of Latin-American strongmen have shown.

Cesarism, in France at least, happens when the political system is faced with what seems to be an unsolvable contradiction. Napoleon the First had to reconciliate an unstable regime born from a radical revolution and a people longing for internal stability. His nephew had to manage the contradiction between a liberal republic and a deeply conservative population; Lastly, De Gaulle, a conservative with a monarchist background, had to solve the contradiction between an impotent parliamentarian regime and the need for decisive action during the shedding of an ever more cumbersome colonial empire.

France was lucky in that its strongmen’s domestic policies have succeeded, often in sharp contrast with the disastrous results of their foreign policies. As Napoleon himself stated : "Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever." Cesarism can however be an abject failure, especially when the contradiction it faces is not wholly political in nature.

Thus, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the newly established Third Republic had to contend with the consequences of the defeat of 1870. To ensure its survival in face of strong monarchist opposition, the Republic needed the lost provinces of Alsace – Lorraine back, but lacked the military force to reconquer them. It was not a political problem. Germany, once united, had a larger population and resource base than France. Besides, France’s low birth rate made sure the power gap would only increase with time. The only way out for the French Republic was to build an alliance strong enough to match German might – a strategy which ultimately won WWI, but took time.

A significant part of the French public opinion wanted their revenge now, however, and they found their hero in the person of Georges Ernest Boulanger, a general, who, as a war minister, stood up to Bismarck during the Schnaebele incident, nearly causing a war France would certainly have lost. This made him immensely popular and got him, and a lot of his followers elected. He let the occasion pass, however, failed to make his move, and his movement collapsed. Boulanger himself had to flee to Belgium and finally committed suicide on his lover’s grave. Georges Clémenceau rightly said about him : He died as he has lived: a second lieutenant.

Had he lived as a general, however, the results would have been a unmitigated disaster, at least as far as France is concerned.

Whether Marine Le Pen will live and die as a second lieutenant remains to be seen. Her party is still a associated, despite the recent purges, with the nightmarish regimes of the thirties, and that matters a lot down here. Besides, cracking down on a significant and growing minority because it happens to have a different religion, a highly questionable idea in itself, is unlikely to make you popular in many areas.

Even if she gets elected and survive the reaction of those, such as myself, who think that her very participation to a government is a good reason to storm the prefecture and set up a committee of public salvation, she is bound to fail.

The main problem France faces is the growing impotence of politics. France, unlike America, has always relied on the State, and therefore the politicians who control it, to get things done. Yet, after the election of the socialist François Mitterand in 1981 and the great wave of reforms he initiated, the State became ever less able to do anything more than reluctantly go along a progressive but steady decline or implement purely societal reforms such as civil unions.

The result has been a general distrust of politicians, an ever lower turnout during elections and the occasional burst of enthusiasm for anybody looking like he could actually do something, for instance Sarkozy in 2007.

The problem, of course, is that this impotence is neither due to the nature of the regime – French presidents are quite powerful in practice – nor to the incompetence of the political class – the service of the State is a valued occupation in French culture, so our rulers tend to be highly experienced and educated – but to limits to complexity and lack of resource.

Like all countries, France has greatly increased its social complexity thanks to the exploitation of fossil fuels and industrialization. The huge surplus thus created has enabled it to feed what would be an insanely complex society by medieval standards. As Joseph Tainter has shown, increased complexity is our specie’s preferred way of solving problems, and at first it is quite efficient. Since it means creating corps of specialists for every possible task, however, it is costly. Besides, complexity and specialization is subject to the law of decreasing returns : at some point, increasing them becomes far more costly than it is worth and may even become counterproductive. France, whose strength traditionally lay in its efficient administration, has manifestly reached this point. The state budget has been in structural deficit for decades and massive unemployment has been a fact of life since I was born.

Increasing the already insanely high level of complexity of our society,, for instance by investing in the so called knowledge economy will only worsen the situation, as it will create new structures – public or corporate, that's not the matter – feeding off a stagnant, or even shrinking resource pool.

Resource is the other problem. France was never the richest European country and its natural resources have been strip mined during the industrial age. We never had oil, our coal, natural gas and uranium are long gone – a part of it with Algeria, by the way. We have managed to keep and expand our wealth by being a, somewhat troublesome, part of the western imperial system, funneling a large part of the world resources our way and exploiting our own mini-network of client republics, which, of course did not keep our rather embarrassing surplus of bobos from bitching about imperialism.

This strategy is now failing. We have reached the point where global energy supply is stagnating. It will soon begin to decrease in absolute value and has probably already begun to do so if we consider the net value. The result is a fiercer competition for the remaining resources, a competition a middling European state with little projection power is unlikely to win.

Besides, it seems the people we helped win their independence at Yorktown are being replaced, as world hegemon, by those whose most magnificent monument we thoroughly ransacked in an effort to force sell them opium. The chance of them allowing us to continue with our little protection racket in Africa are minute.

And even if they were so inclined... they really need the oil, and the land, and the uranium, and...

The end result is that our capacity to bring about collective change decreases with every passing year – at least the kind of collective change the French people can accept. It is quite possible to simplify the French society, but that means accepting, even embracing, poverty, not something we as a people are likely to do.

Authoritarianism is therefore bound to fail, and become more and more authoritarian with time as, unlike democracy, failure is not something it can accept. Its normal way of dealing with it is not handing power to the other side, but finding somebody to blame. After all, if it is not the Great Leader's fault, and it cannot be, it must be some traitor's, and we all know what to do with traitors.

The problem is that our newly elected president is also bound to fail. Democracy is very good at mobilizing its resources in face of a clear and immediate danger – say, Nazi Germany – but quite bad at facing a long crisis without any clear solution.

There is no solution to the crisis we face, and as long as we expect politics to change things in a constructive way, we are bound to be disappointed. At some point, this disappointment is likely to lead us to vote for an extremist who will get (some) things done. (S)he won't be fascist – fascism as an ideology is discredited – but will use the same dynamics Boulanger did, and may, by the way, come from the left; The leader of the Left Front, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is every bit as dangerous as Le Pen and a Green authoritarianism remains a distinct possibility.

It is what happened in Greece with the Golden Dawn and Alexis Tsipras' Coalition of the Radical Left. Unless we collectively accept the reality and allow our false dreams to die, it can happen here too.

Party politics

The electoral campaign in France is nearing its end and we already know  the outcome. A few months ago, I would have said that the incumbent president's only chance was an islamist spree killer shooting at random in the middle of a schoolyard. The problem is that an islamist spree killer did shoot at random in the middle of a schoolyard and that didn't improve Nicolas Sarkozy's already minute chances of getting reelected.

His forced retirement won't really be a disaster for France. Even if his probable replacement is also likely to fail, he will do so in a much gentler way. Sarkozy wanted to be great and there is no place for greatness in times of decline.

There is more to this election than a rat race for an already empty power, however.

When General De Gaulle decided in 1961 that French presidents would henceforth be elected by the people, and no longer by the parliament, he wanted to reduce the influence of political parties upon the life of the nation and create a direct relationship between the people and its leader.

It has been a failure.

It would be stupid to deny that the personality of a candidate has an influence upon the result of an election, but it has become increasingly difficult to be elected without the support of a major party - another layer of complexity in a society which has accumulated an embarrassing surplus of them.

Political parties are dizzyingly diverse, ranging from the little disciplined American electoral machines to the totalitarian para-bureaucracies of the so-called socialist states. They all emerged during the nineteenth century from parliamentary factions, revolutionary more or less secret societies or even lobbies. In Britain, the two first parties – the Whigs and the Torries – coalesced formally in 1784 around Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger, respectively, even though the ideas they represented date back to to the Glorious Revolution and the advent of the Hanoverian dynasty.

In the United States, the two first organized political parties, the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties emerged around 1792 and more or less reflected their English counterparts, as Thomas Jefferson stated in a letter to John Wise :

Two political Sects have arisen within the U. S. the one believing that the executive is the branch of our government which the most needs support; the other that like the analogous branch in the English Government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution; and therefore in equivocal cases they incline to the legislative powers: the former of these are called federalists, sometimes aristocrats or monocrats, and sometimes tories, after the corresponding sect in the English Government of exactly the same definition: the latter are stiled republicans, whigs, jacobins, anarchists, disorganizers, etc. these terms are in familiar use with most persons.

Those early political parties, both in America and Britain were structured around local and national leaders, rather than around mass of activists and party discipline was lax, to say the least. In both countries electoral franchise was limited to a small percentage of the population and since both countries were reasonably orderly, there was little point in trying to control the crowds.

France, as always, begged to differ. At the time of the French Revolution, it was ruled by a corrupt and bankrupt absolute monarchy headed by the weakest king in a century – a dangerous combination, at best. As a result, France’s transition to democracy was very chaotic, to say the least, and wasn’t completed until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. All French regimes from 1789 to 1871 ended in violence, either insurrection or invasion. Fighting for change at that time meant exactly that : shooting at rather uncooperative troopers from behind a barricade. While France was only intermittently a real dictatorship during this period, opposing the government was still a dangerous business and republican meeting were banned more often than not – which prompted radicals to start a feasting campaign, with very long-winded toasts, a tradition which still survives in some circles to this day.

Of course, when both you and the Police know that the only way you can achieve your goals is by storming the royal or imperial palace, you are more likely to invest in conspiratorial cells and shooting skills than in party building. As for the supporters of whatever semi-authoritarian regime held the power at any given time, they relied upon loose parliamentarian coalitions, old boy networks and the continued influence of local notables.

It was only in 1901, after the definitive victory of the republicans, that the first classical French political party was formally established : the Radical Party, which, by the way, was anything but radical and is now mostly known for its attachment to secularism and its love of feasting.

The left followed its own way toward the establishment of organized parties after the debacle of the Commune (the last Parisian insurrection, crushed in 1871). The first socialist party, the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France was founded in 1878 by the Marxist Jules Guesde but split in the wake of electoral disaster.

The socialist movement remained divided into a collection of often rival groups until its reunification around Jean Jaures in 1905 in the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, out of which both the French Communist Party and François Hollande's Socialist Party latter emerged.

The left, had no network of notables to rely upon, however. Its roots lay in the Parisian tradition of insurrections, the nascent unions and the work of radical intellectuals such as Marx, Proudhon or Bakunin. Its goal was not to rule the country through parliamentary work but to take over it by organizing the people and uniting it around a common ideology.

This called for a very specific kind of organization, more reminiscent of a government than of a gentlemen's club, with a top down chain of command and a strict party discipline. Policies were defined in regular conventions rather than in local caucuses and elected officials were considered mandatees of the organization rather than notables with their own relatively independent power base.

Where, in the Republican movement, policies were debated in local clubs and masonic lodges – a major force in early twentieth century France – formation (read indoctrination ) was a key element in socialist strategy.

And of course, it still had something of a conspiratorial mindset, an attitude which will flourish in Lenin's Bolshevik Party.

This model was soon hijacked by the other radical force in French society : the revolutionary right which was beginning to replace the old reactionary and aristocratic right, which had until then led the fight against the heritage of the French Revolution. Born from the unholy alliance of German Romanticism and of a few heretical sections of the French left, this new current birthed Italian fascism and its German monster child : National-Socialism.

For totalitarian movements in Berlin, Roma or Moscow, mass parties, as developed by the left, were very convenient and provided the blueprint for the fanatical political armies which roamed Europe during the thirties and the forties. This pattern continued long after the war in Communist parties all over Europe. Quite often, their strategies where decided in Moscow and local activist's only prerogatives were to implement them, to that point that a minister could say that the Communist Party was not on the left, but on the east.

There was, however, another factor at work. The flow of cheap and abundant energy that flooded our society after the industrial revolution triggered a fantastic wave of growth and complexification in all organizations, and political parties were no exception. As more resources were available in the society at large, political parties could divert more and more of them to feed their internal bureaucracy.

At first the rational was to get things done, or better done, by hiring professionals often recruited among activists, and it is not absurd. Even my own, tiny and ineffectual party, has developed a mini-bureaucracy paid for by state subsidies (the French state grants money to political parties in function of their electoral results), elected officials' wages' or even public money, as elected officials may have assistant which will be used for party business.

The result is that sooner or later, the necessity to feed the bureaucracy will supersede any other concern and the bureaucracy itself will become a major player in internal politics. Of course, the bottom up elaboration of policies through local clubs and debates could not survive this evolution and was replaced by the interplay of ideological factions and think tanks.

Now the decisions about what is to be debated in electoral campaigns are made by professional politicians and small coteries of party bureaucrats under the influence of lobbies of often dubious representativity. The only thing the population can do is getting interested, or not.

This is one of the reasons why peak oil, and more generally resource issues, played no role in the French presidential campaign, despite Jean-Marc Jeancovici's courageous but ultimately futile appeal. Neither party leaders nor their entourage of bureaucrats and advisers were interested in raising them, for the same reason they were uninterested in talking seriously about the debt. They would have had to promise the Moon – and we already have a Larouchie for that – or speaking hard truths to a population, which, they believe, is not ready to hear them.

Unfortunately, it is not going to change. Peak energy and the subsequent resource shrinkage will reduce the amount of wealth available, but, if there is something history teaches us, it is that those in power will use their not inconsiderable influence to minimize the impact of a crisis upon their own income.

Political parties, their leaders and their bureaucrats are not the only powerful organizations in French society, but they control most of the political debate, which means they will do everything to ensure the survival of their apparatus and will most probably succeed despite the growing distrust of the population. And yes, that is also true for our own bureaucracy, a bureaucracy I belong to, by the way, even I happen to be on the wrong side of a factional divide.

This is, by the way, not a conspiracy, even if there are a lot of cynics in the political world. Politicians are great at self-delusion and sincerely think that the party bureaucracy is indispensable to the furthering of goals they sincerely think are good for the country. As for party bureaucrats, they are often as dependent upon their job as your average corporate ladder-climber. Most of them are trapped in a career they chose by idealism long before divorce and mortgages raised their ugly heads.

What that means, also, is that even those who talk about participatory democracy are very unlikely to implement it, because it would mean renouncing their power and accepting the shrinkage of their own income – I don't know of any group in history, which has done that.

Of course, at some point, when peak energy will make the situation intolerable for common people and the political establishment's promises as hollow as a dentist's, this will disastrously backfire and bring a strongman or another into power. We may even have a lamppost day or two.

What we are unlikely to have, however, is what we need : a return to a community based democracy with a continuous dialogue between the mandators and a mandatee, who will answer only to them, not to party bureaucrats such as myself.

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.