An interview with Emmanuel Todd by Maciej Nowicki

Todd considers EU as an ailing power and Russia´s rebirth as a result of past quarter of century of maltreatment. The decreasing demographic growth is not playing in the cards of states seeking territorial expansion.

Quotes:

• “The Union is collapsing. And the games with Ukraine and bringing Yanukovych down remind me of the supernova phenomenon. The star shines with an extremely bright light, but a moment later falls apart. Today’s EU is such a supernova.”

•  “In short, on the eastern border a power is reborn, which again becomes attractive to its periphery…”

• “A society from which young people with degrees are fleeing does not have too much chance of success.”

• “Russians are nationalists. Nationalism is idiotic but as they have been maltreated for the last 20 years, it does not surprise me at all that they want to go on a rampage now.”

Emmanuel Todd – French demographer, political scientist, sociologist, historian. An employee of the Paris Institute of Demographic Studies (INED – Institut national d’études démographiques). Author of much publicized books, including The Final Fall (orig. La Chute final. Essais sur la decomposition de la sphère Soviétique, 1976 ), which announced the end of the USSR, and After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (orig. Après l’empire. Essai sur la Decomposition du système américain, 2002).

Read the interview with Emmanuel Todd by Maciek Nowicki here.