Tyler Cowen, prompted by who knows what (the TV adaption of Foundation?), has recently (link 1) drawn attention to an older post by his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok which discusses some economists' modern day attempts to carry out psychohistory. Let's see if we can't do better.
The past may not be a perfect guide to the future, but it's the only one we've got. So, before we turn to the future, let's try to imagine how psychohistory might have worked in the past.
Like any proper science, psychohistory allows decent predictions to be made from parsimonious premises. So let's imagine a psychohistorian in about 1900. We sit him down, give him the map of Europe of the time and ask him what that map will look like in 120 years. (Him? Well, Hari Seldon and Paul Krugman are both men - I don't make the rules, sorry.) What information would a psychohistorian have needed in order to make his predictions?
The layman might ask about the religious divides of Europe: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox - surely that's going to be important? Or he might take a look at the the big empires occupying the continent, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and ask how their royal families are related: after all, if the Kaiser of Germany were to inherit the throne of England then ... Or he might ask where the centres of science and learning are (technology looks like being a big deal in the century to come) or about the spread of ideologies (this Communism business looks like it might be important).
But the psychohistorian does not need any of this. In fact, all he needs to know is the ethnic distribution of populations across the continent. Take all your politicians and politics and theories and revolutions and so on - and forget about them. Here is the history of Europe from 1900 to today in one sentence: multi-ethnic states became mono-ethnic states.
We can go a little more slowly. First, there was World War One. That was triggered by a secessionist's assassination of the heir to a multi-ethnic state, and it resulted in various old multi-ethnic states being dismantled and a number of new ones drawn up along ethnic lines coming into existence. Goodbye to the Empire of All the Russias, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman and German Empires; hello to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and so on. Even the United Kingdom - which won the war! - ended up becoming divided along ethnic lines (i.e., into Ireland and what we would nowadays call rUK). (I have mentioned this before.)
But the new borders were not perfect and needed to be re-drawn. Germany, in particular, was a bit of a problem case. As Germany had lost the war, it also lost the benefit of the doubt in drawing up the new borders, and a lot of Germans were left in the 'wrong' place. No one objected too much to Germany subsequently redrawing the lines to put some more Germans in Germany (see: the Rhineland, Sudetenland, even Austria), but when they tried putting large numbers of Poles inside Germany then they had to be stopped. So, another war and then some more re-drawing of borders.
Fast forward to the end of the century and we get some more border re-drawing, again along ethnic lines. Germany gets reunited after a generation or two of division; Yugoslavia gets split up, more or less messily depending on whether you are lucky enough to be a Slovene; Czechoslovakia splits up peacefully; more of the Russian Empire gets dismantled, with the Baltic states becoming independent, along with Ukraine etc.
Some borders are still open to debate. Lots of ethnic Russians got left on the 'wrong' side of the Russia/Ukraine border, so there has been some fighting there; Armenia and Azerbaijan have just had a short war about their rather convoluted borders; not all of the former Yugoslavia is quite right even now; Scottish and Catalan politics are both dominated by ethnic secessionists; Belgium is sometimes described as a failed state because of its ethnic divisions. And so on.
But of course it's not quite as simple as that: people move. Our perspicacious psychohistorian of c.1900 would have seen that: he would have appreciated that, as well as drawing lines around ethnic groups, a fair number of people had to move to the 'right' side of the borders.
You are probably aware of the Greece-Turkey population exchanges of the 1920s. But there have been numerous other examples of what we have since learned to call 'ethnic cleansing'. As with most bits of twentieth century history, the Germans were heavily involved. Just try turning up nowadays in Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Danzig (Gdansk) or Breslau (Wrocław) and getting by using nothing more than your schoolboy German. Here, for example, is Wikipedia on Karlovy Vary: "According to the 1930 census, the city was home to 23,901 inhabitants – 20,856 were of German ethnicity .... After World War II, in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, the vast majority of the people of the city were forcibly expelled because of their German ethnicity. In accordance with the Beneš decrees, their property was confiscated without compensation." Danzig, to take another example, was 98% German within living memory, but ... not now. Read more here, if you are interested: the tl;dr is that 12-14m ethnic Germans were forced to leave their homes and move to Germany.
The solution to the "German problem" experienced by eastern Europe was therefore a rather severe one. But such is history: the psychohistorian gives you just the facts, ma'am. (Although once you appreciate the scale of German ethnic cleansing that took place, you may become rather more forgiving of the fact that German citizenship has been so heavily based on ethnicity.)
We have seen similar population movements closer to home, albeit less forcible: for example, the Anglo-Irish moved from Ireland to the pages of William Trevor stories without needing to be formally expelled. Gradual and more consensual population shifts no doubt happened elsewhere too.
Finally, of course, we have the great ethnic population movement that was the creation and growth of the state of Israel. (For the purposes of this blog post, as for televised song contests, Israel counts as part of Europe.)
It is really is as simple as that. Think, for a moment, of the reunification of Germany and the division of Czechoslovakia. Two peaceful re-drawings of borders. Why, a Martian or a Californian might ask, should there not be two Germanies (after all, there used to be many more than two)? Why should the peoples of Bohemia and Slovakia not want to stay together - Stronger Together! Better In! - to make a bigger and more powerful country? These are not stupid questions. But we know the answers.
Or take our own dear islands. What is the actual difference between Scotland and England? I know that the Scots have a terribly desirable method of buying houses, and some skirts for men, and a different set of exams for teenagers, but ... independence? And yet, I have no difficulty understanding the independence movement (for all that I might disagree with it). Or, how about this very sensible solution to the problems in the island of Ireland: reunification of the United Kingdom under its pre-WW1 borders with devolution (devo-max, if you want) to Dublin? I could explain at great length how this provides something for unionists, something for nationalists, and allows the Irish to participate in a strong, modern, rich, liberal nation with a seat at the UN Security Council, armed forces to defend it and so on. But of course we all know it's a non-starter - and it was a non-starter even when the UK was in the EU - and that's because it would involve creating a multi-ethnic state. (In fact, it is "obviously silly".) Or consider this: why is there no irredentist movement in the UK to reverse the territorial losses of the 1920s? Because no English people were left behind. Contrast what Hungary thinks about the (roughly contemporaneous) Treaty of Trianon.
At the risk of banging on about it, think about the causes for which people are prepared to kill others. I don't mean legal killing, i.e. the sort of thing that comes with payment and a pension (or at least avoiding prison for draft-dodging) - I am not talking about executioners, soldiers or abortionists. I mean the kind of illegal killing carried out by terrorists: the killing of civilians, not in anger or the heat of the moment, but coolly planned and carried out at personal risk. Not many of us are prepared to do that sort of thing, but those who are tend to have ethnic motivations: the great majority of post-war terrorist deaths in Europe have been caused either by the IRA (about 2,000 civilian victims) or by the Basque separatists ETA (about 900 civilians).
But what about all those ideologies that occupy history textbooks and GCSE papers? Our psychohistorian can take a pretty broad brush approach.
The governance of Europe is a question of how to reconcile people of different ethnicities. The creation of mono-ethnic states is the obvious solution, but if you can't do that (perhaps because the ethnic group is not geographically concentrated) or if you don't want to do that then, in broad terms, there are two alternative approaches you can try.
The first approach is what I would call Eradicationism, by which I mean the attempt to eradicate ethnic divisions as a basis for social divisions. Communism is an example of this: do not think of yourselves as Germans or English, the Communist says, think of yourselves instead as workers. Workers of the World Unite! Your enemies are class enemies, not national enemies! Communism is not the only such attempt. We might consider the French refusal to accept any identity or institution intervening between the State and the Individual to be another example.
The second approach is what we might call Accommodationism. This approach starts by recognising that ethnicity differences exist and then tries to propose a way in which people of different ethnicities might live together. Examples of such approaches include the millet system employed by the Ottomans or the various power-sharing arrangements developed in Lebanon, Belgium and Northern Ireland.
Once you look at matters this way, the great ideological debates of the 20th century are pretty simple for the psychohistorian: people thought up various alternatives to mono-ethnic states, but none of them worked for very long. (I am told that Clement Attlee once said he had come to the conclusion that, “race, language, colour, religion and history are stubborn things and do not disappear with the waving of a Marxian wand.” If so, he was right.) With a strong enough combination of sticks and carrots - whether the tactics of the Soviet Union or Marshal Tito, or the subsidies, indulgences and turning the other cheek that England extends to Scotland - you can keep a multi-ethnic state together for a bit, but the long-term prospects are against it.
But that's the past. What of the future? Let's sit our psychohistorian - or his great grandson - down and ask him about the next 120-odd years.
We can leave aside the easy cases, the Ukraines, Scotlands and Catalonias. These are cases of geographically-concentrated ethnic populations, potentially open to the 'draw a new border and move the remainder of the population to the right side of it' solutions already adopted by the likes of Ireland and Germany's neighbours.
No, the tricky cases are going to be geographically dispersed ethnic minority populations. Europe has received a lot of immigrants from ex-colonial possessions. The continuing unrest in Syria, Afghanistan and Libya, combined with climate change affecting the Sahel and other parts of Africa, is only going to increase these numbers.
One reason I have taken so much time above labouring the difficulties that various really very similar ethnic groups have had in sharing a country - as similar as the likes of the English and the Irish or the Czechs and the Slovaks - is so that we appreciate what our psychohistorian is thinking: ethnic differences matter. There's little to be gained by pretending otherwise.
So: what will happen?
I suppose one possibility is that the current geographical dispersion will be replaced by geographical concentration. If the Danes could set up a Danelaw in northern England, why can't Indians set up a Desilaw?
I can't quite see how this would take place - I am not a psychohistorian - but the likely consequences are easy to predict: the only English king to be called "the Great" is the one who stopped the Viking advance, and it's hard to imagine that a latter day reconquista (to switch historical parallels - but note the similarities here) would not at least be attempted by whichever European country it was that lost territory. I can't see 'draw a new border and move the remainder' working in such circumstances.
But the alternative - continued geographical dispersion - is not encouraging either. The examples of geographically dispersed ethnic minority populations in Europe that spring to mind are the Jewish and Roma peoples, and no one looks at the European history of these peoples with undiluted pride. Perhaps something similar awaits our new immigrant communities. Perhaps many of them end up doing the equivalent of making aliyah - assuming that there are countries which will welcome them 'home'.
Can we do better than these rather grim possibilities?
There are two new current alternative approaches to ethnic division doing the rounds, one Eradicationist and one Accommodationist.
The Eradicationist one is political Islam. Instead of the Communist idea that all workers are brothers (and sisters) and the bourgeois are the enemy, political Islam treats all believers as brothers (and sisters) and the unbeliever as the enemy. It has had some success in attracting converts in Europe, including in persuading people to kill, which, as I mentioned above, normally requires ethnic motivation.
In theory Europe could convert to Islam and rise above its ethnic differences that way. But I have two reasons for doubting that this would work. First, Islam has not notably succeeded in uniting any countries in which it has gained wide acceptance: Arabs, Kurds and Turks seem well able to recognise each other as different for all their confessional similarities. Second, Islam is pretty similar to Christianity, and the fact that Europe espoused Christianity for many centuries did not prevent it dividing along ethnic lines.
Let's turn then to the latest Accommodationist dogma, namely wokeness. This is an American import and this is perhaps a good moment to ask our psychohistorian to zoom out from Europe and try to explain America.
The first point to note - a really important point - is that America shows just how arbitrary these ethnic differences are. America certainly has ethnic differences - but they are very different from European ones. Think again of the vast European population movements of the post-war era, the millions of Germans expelled from places like Poland: if you were in America, all these people, whether expellers or expellees, were in the same ethnic group called "White" people.
So what? The fact that it's all made up - all a 'social construct', if you prefer that terminology - doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. American history is just as clear as European history that ethnic differences do matter: the Americans fought a hugely destructive war about how to deal with an ethnic minority population. But it might give us some grounds for hope, for reasons I will come to below.
The second interesting thing about American ethnic politics is that it has always been a politics of geographically dispersed ethnic minorities. (Where North America has geographically concentrated ethnic minorities, e.g. in Quebec, it has developed conventional secessionist politics of the kind found in Europe.) Our psychohistorian would happily describe America as consistently Accommodationist: ethnic differences are and have long been recognised in law and policy, and the French individualist approach has never been adopted. I accept that the rhetoric of the 1960s civil rights movement was Eradicationist (see: the "I Have a Dream" speech), but (a) that was avowedly seeking to change the political culture and (b) it is commonly accepted that that kind of thinking never caught on much and is certainly not in fashion now.
What kinds of Accommodationism has the US adopted? I have some sympathy for the woke view that it has traditionally been white supremacist Accommodationism. Different races were recognised in law with Black people (and other ethnic minorities) getting the short end of that stick: slavery, the Three-Fifths clause, Jim Crow, Chinese Exclusion Act, Asiatic Barred Zone Act, Mexican repatriation (see more of that kind of thing here), anti-miscegenation laws and so on - it's hard not to see some kinship between these policies and those in other countries in which some ethnic groups have been favoured over others.
(Please recall that our psychohistorian is not in the blame game. He is just an impartial observer of human nature, and of the striking similarities between the treatment of geographically dispersed ethnic minorities in the US and Europe.)
So back to wokeness. Whereas the Lebanese solution to ethnic diversity in the US might be along of the lines of a pact in which the Presidency would rotate among the races, perhaps always with a contrasting Vice-President, while the Supreme Court would always have (say) a Hispanic Chief Justice and the Speaker would always be Black, the woke solution is simply to invert the pyramid of existing ethnicities.
So back to wokeness. Whereas the Lebanese solution to ethnic diversity in the US might be along of the lines of a pact in which the Presidency would rotate among the races, perhaps always with a contrasting Vice-President, while the Supreme Court would always have (say) a Hispanic Chief Justice and the Speaker would always be Black, the woke solution is simply to invert the pyramid of existing ethnicities.
It has a delightful simplicity, and, in the American context, a kind of basic and appealing fairness. Can it translate to Europe?
I'm afraid not. The problem is that inverting an existing and entrenched racial hierarchy might make sense in the context of historical inequities, but it does not make sense in the context of the newer European multi-ethnic societies. The dispersed ethnic minorities in Europe that we are talking about are immigrants, which is to say that some of them are doing rather well. It makes little sense to think about inverting a racial pyramid to put, say, Nigerians or Indians at the top of British society when they are already there or thereabouts. Equally, the historical dimension is lacking. Sure, you can argue that the Brits treated Nigerians or Indians badly. But what about Somalis or Filipinos? There is simply not the consistent history of oppression in these cases that makes the case for reparations so plausible in the American context. And that's just Britain. What did Germany do to the Turks, or Sweden to the Syrians, that would warrant overturning "white supremacy" in these countries?
Is there then no hope? No: there is always hope. I am no psychohistorian but I see two avenues for such hope. Bizarrely, Brexit comes into both of them.
First, the UK. As I noted above in the context of the US, all these ethnic identities are fundamentally just made up nonsense - and that means that we can make up some new ones. I've been flippant about Scotland above, but it's worth noting that Great Britain - and then the UK - was a deliberately forged multi-ethnic state (see Linda Colley etc), one that worked pretty well and, indeed, is still going. And never forget Wales, a different place with its own religious, choral and culinary traditions - and even a completely different language - yet, somehow, united to England.
I think - I hope - that we are already seeing a new kind of British identity built out of the various ethnicities that we have. Notice the many and various attempts to recall the history of Black or Muslim people within the UK. One charming example I saw recently, lauded by Jacob Rees-Mogg no less, was the story of John Ystumllyn, a gardener and the first well-recorded Black person in north Wales - and now someone who has a rose named after him. Great stuff! And then there are the various more or less open attempts in effect to "retcon" (as the kids say) history: e.g. getting a Black woman to play Anne Boleyn. Well, what do you think happened to persuade the Scots and the English that they shared in a common island history? As I say, it worked at least once before and, looking at the ethnicities of the members of the current - Conservative - Cabinet, I would say that there is a fair chance that it will happen again.
But let's be clear: the new ethnicity that Britain is building relies on Brexit. Just as happened before, the constructed new identity will be clearest in what it is not. The union of Scottish and English identity meant being not-French: not Catholic, not whatever political structure the French were favouring from time to time, not poncey, not elegant, not European; but instead empirical, Protestant, global, down-to-earth and so on. The new identity will look like that too: not French. That's a sadness for those of us who think we have much to learn from the French. But that, I think the psychohistorian would tell us, is the best hope for Britain.
But what of the rest of Europe? Here again I think Brexit is a bonus. The chancelleries of Europe spent a great deal of time and effort drawing lines on maps and moving people around in order to separate the likes of Germans from Poles. And then they went to a great deal of trouble mixing them up again in the EU, with freedom of movement and all the rest of it. Why?
As I have said a couple of times before, the EU really is a much more ambitious and radical idea than the UK ever wanted, believed in or bought into (as William Waldegrave observes). It envisages creating a continent whose inhabitants, each one at least potentially part of a comfortable and prosperous diaspora, share a complex and overlapping set of regional, ethnic, national and continent-wide loyalties. One currency, but 1,000 identities, we might say if we were looking for a slogan. And the hope is that this novel mélange will be the end-of-history Hegelian synthesis of Eradicationism and Accommodationism.
The UK never wanted that. I'm not sure who does, but given what has happened to the continent since 1900, it strikes me that it is well worth a try. It is a well-intentioned and noble ambition, and a better final solution to the German problem than the one seen in Karlovy Vary.
Will it work? I don't know. But its chances of success are surely improved by the departure of the UK, with all its foot-dragging, obstructionism and irritatingly twentieth century ways. There might once have been some benefit in the UK keeping the EU from going too far too fast, but by 2016 those in charge of Europe clearly felt that those days were over. I'm prepared to believe that they were right.
I left our psychohistorians some way back. As I say, I am not one of them and indeed I am very much of Yogi Berra's mind when it comes to predicting the future. I see grounds for hope, but then I am a hopeful kind of person. If you aren't then you may feel that there are worrying times ahead. I only wish I knew what the psychohistorians of today are thinking.
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