The Mind of the Good Ruler: How Empathy Drives Governance

The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II (1797-1870) did something very peculiar for a ruler of a state: he left us a personal diary. It was a collection of handwritten notes that cover all the period of his rule as Grand Duke, up to when he was deposed in 1859. It was published in 1987. It is a fascinating document (unfortunately existing only in Italian, as far as I know) that allows us a rare chance of a glimpse of how the mind of a ruler works -- in this case a good ruler. 

 

Why are our leaders so bad? Maybe it is us who always choose the worst possible persons for the job? But are they bad at the start, or do they go bananas as things go on? It would be nice to be able to understand what goes on inside the head of leaders, but they are people notoriously capable of cheating just about anyone, including themselves. And the main tool of the cheater is to hide what he is thinking. 

Maybe we could know more if we could have the personal diary of some of those powerful figures, but they don't usually keep diaries. That's probably part of their habit of keeping hidden what they really think. But sometimes we do have documents that open a view for us inside the head of these people. I already discussed the case of Benito Mussolini on the basis of the diary kept by his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. 

Mussolini was an almost paradigmatic bad leader and here I would try to contrast his approach to ruling with another figure of leader who, under many respects, was completely opposite: that of the Grand Duke Leopold II, who ruled Tuscany from 1824 to 1859. And he did something that very few rulers did: he left us a diary of his everyday life throughout all the period of his rule as Grand Duke of Tuscany!

It is a fascinating document that gives us an incredibly detailed view on the life of a person who was in charge of a state of nearly 2 million inhabitants. Of course, it is not the only document we have about Leopold's life. The story is complex and a matter of study for professional historians. What I can say, here, is that I did my best to digest the more than 500 pages of the diary and I'll try to pass to you my impression of the Grand Duke life and personality. And I think he was a good man who did his best. 

Of course, it is not that Leopold did everything right as Grand Duke. On the contrary, his rule could be defined as a failure since, eventually, he was deposed and forced to leave his beloved Tuscany. But note that when he left nobody in Tuscany would even remotely imagine to harm him, to say nothing about killing him and hanging him upside down, as it happened with a later ruler, Benito Mussolini. There is a poignant detail in the story: it is said that the Florentines lined up along the road of the carriage that carried the Grand Duke away and saluted him by taking their hats off and calling him "Babbo" ("Daddy"). In the picture, you see him represented as an old gentleman saying goodbye forever to his city and to his people. 

So, you see? People can recognize a good leader when they are blessed with one. And the basic characteristic of a good leader is that he cares for his people. In other words, it is a question of empathy. A good leader likes the people he leads. 

Contrast, again, with Mussolini as he appears in the notes of his son in law. The aging Duce clearly disliked his subjects, considering them little more than cannon fodder. And not just that, he rejoiced when he thought that Italians were dying of cold. So much that he imagined himself as having caused their death by ordering the reforesting of the Appennini mountains and, as a result, generating a colder climate. Not a joke: it is what Ciano reports and we have no reason to think it is not true. (incidentally, that makes Mussolini the first leader to use a "climate weapon," although he used it against his own people. But that's typical of petty dictators).

Compare with Leopold's kind attitude: it appears so often in the diary that you are forced to conclude that it was genuine, not a construct of state propaganda. The Grand Duke was no populist. He was a truly popular leader. He loved to speak to Tuscans, even with peasants, and to hear their opinions. And he was truly happy when they were happy. As an example, (p. 67 of the 1987 Sansoni edition) he reports how he met a 102 year old peasant who told him, "qui ci stava la fame, Pietro Leopoldo, suo nonno, fece tante cose, la cacciò, e non ci venne più" (here, there was hunger. Your grandfather, Pietro Leopoldo, did many things, chase it away, and now it is no more). 

Another example from the Grand Duke's notes. The straw hat industry had generated prosperity among the Tuscan people, so much that peasant girls who were skilled in making straw hats could "marry without the need of a dowry." ("una giovane che sapesse quel lavoro andava senza dote a marito") (p. 77). Leopold clearly likes that, and that's the more remarkable in an age when the straw hat industry was considered as something subversive as it had brought a certain degree of prosperity to the Tuscan peasants. It was the way he saw the world: he was primarily a family man who enjoyed his role of father so much that he extended it beyond his family, all the way to all Tuscans.

But it is not just a question of feelings: you can be well-intentioned, but also a bumbling idiot. But that wasn't the case of the Grand Duke. He was not just caring, but also a competent manager who personally took care of the everyday details of the government's work. Again, compare with the behavior of a bad leader: Benito Mussolini had locked himself inside a personal echo chamber in which he would hear and care about little more than his own grandiloquent proclaim. And he launched Italy into a disastrous war largely because he really had no idea of the real possibility of the Italian military forces. Think instead of Leopold II: it is clear from what he writes that he has a quantitative, even scientific, understanding of what the government is doing, often relying on the advice of scientists and experts.

Just as an example, in a note of 1851, Leopold describes how a combination of bad weather and pestilence caused a poor harvest and a diffuse famine. He says (p 414) that in some villages "le donne tenevan chiuse le finestre ai bambini per ingannarli perché credessero non venuto il giorno ancora e non domandassero pane." ("the women were keeping the windows shut for the children, in order to cheat them and convince them that the day had not come yet so that they would not ask for bread"). But this is not just a feeling, the Grand Duke is actively looking for ways to import grain to Tuscany, and when ships loaded with grain finally come, he rejoices while listing their numbers and the loads carried. As a final note, he praises not himself, but the Tuscan government for having stuck to a policy of free commerce that had encouraged the delivery of food to the population. He was a modest man not only in what he wrote but in everything he did.

There is a lot more to be said about this document, but that would be out of place, here. Let me just explain how it was that such a good and caring ruler eventually failed and was ousted. That was the result of forces that were operating outside Tuscany. The Grand Duke, although caring and effective as a local ruler, never gives us a hint in his notes that he understood the power game that was going on in the world at that time. 

The "Great Game" as it was played in mid 19th century, involved the Empires of the time competing against each other (then as now). Italy was a weak player in the game, being a patchwork of statelets, That was well recognized by the Italian thinkers of the time, who clamored for a unification that would give to Italy a sufficient economic and military force to become a serious player at the world level. But things weren't simple, they never are. The neighboring French and Austrian empires had all the interest in keeping Italy divided, and eventually partitioning it among themselves. Conversely, the British didn't want the rival French and Austrian empires to expand in Italy and pushed for a unified Italy that would keep both at bay. 

Eventually, the British won the game by one of the greatest masterpieces of diplomacy of all time. In an incredible strategic mistake, the French ruler, Napoleon 3rd, was bamboozled into making war against the Austrians to help Piedmont to conquer Italy. That involved much work by the Countess of Castiglione, said to be the most beautiful woman of her times, while at the same time an agent of the Piedmontese government. But that's another story. The French and the Austrians defeated each other and Italy fell into the hands of the King of Piedmont.

In this game, the Grand Duke Leopold was in a no-win situation. He was from an Austrian family of aristocrats and he could do little but lean on the Austrian side. He tried his best to maintain a certain level of neutrality, but when the Austrians were defeated, he was automatically defeated, too. And he did what he had to do, leave his Tuscany, while maintaining his dignity. I think we can say he remained faithful to his duty as a leader even with this last action.

And that's the story of a good ruler who did his best. How was it that Leopold II was so much better than most of our modern rulers? It is, of course, difficult to extract general rules from a single example, but one thing we can say is that Leopold didn't just become a leader. He was trained as a leader from his early years. He spoke fluently both German and Italian, he studied art, literature, and law, gaining a certain recognition as a literate, author of essays on Italian poetry. He also was very much interested in science, and he studied agricultural technologies. In terms of the intellectual climate of the time, I think he was deeply affected by the "Enlightenment" atmosphere of his age. He may well have read the Book by Antonio Muratori titled "About the Public Happiness" (1749) where the author clearly states that the job of a leader is to ensure the happiness of his subjects. And that's what Leopold seems to have striven to do during all of his life. 

So, shouldn't we train our leaders a little better, instead of choosing them in the haphazard, inefficient, and unreliable rituals we call "elections"? Shouldn't we train them in showing a little more empathy? Probably yes, but a proposal like this one is not likely to go very far, nowadays. 

When was it that we lost the idea that a good leader should be trained as such? Hard to say but, probably, it has to do with the rise of propaganda during the 20th century. Then, leaders learned that the way they appeared was way more important than the way they actually were. Whatever it was, we are stuck where we are. Bad leaders are the last thing we need, but we have plenty, and I don't need to name them.

As a sign of changing times, the good Grand Duke of Tuscany, was the object of a memory removal campaign after he was deposed in 1859. So, there is little left in his city, Florence, that directly reminds us of his presence. One exception is this votive tabernacle on the hills south of Florence. It escaped destruction probably because it doesn't mention the Grand Duke's name, but we know it was him who wanted it erected. On it, we can still read that it was placed there "by a Father and his two daughters in gratitude for having survived a carriage accident." That he didn't sign the dedication was typical of Leopold's personality: he was a modest man who didn't like to show off (just like our modern politicians, right?).

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A comment by

Duen Hsi Yen

The note below was not written for this post, but Dr. Hsi Yen sent it to me as a comment. Indeed, the memories of the Grand Duke of Tuscany transpire a certain aura of Confucianism, a sort of Tuscan version of the Tao Te Ching. And it is also true that the European thought of the 18th century was much influenced by Chinese philosophy. Too bad that there was no Great Wall to defend Tuscany from foreign barbarians!

My father’s beautiful calligraphy, Dr. Ernest Chu Yen. What he taught me about how we care for each other the Confucian way. I’m named after Chu Hsi, 12th century neoConfucian scholar which paved the way for more than 600 years of relative harmony in China before Western powers decided to try to carve up China like they did Africa.

 

 

Translation:

 

When the Great Way prevailed, the world community was equally shared by all. The worthy and able were chosen as office-holders. Mutual confidence was fostered and good neighborliness cultivated. Therefore people did not regard as parents only their own parents, nor did they treat children only their own children. Provision was made for the aged till their death, the adult were given employment, and the young enabled to grow up. Old widows and widowers, the orphaned, the old and childless, as well as the sick and the disabled were all well taken care of. Men had their proper roles and women their homes. While they hated to see wealth lying about on the ground, they did not necessarily keep it for their own use. While they hated not to exert their effort, they did not necessarily devote it to their own ends. Thus evil schemings were repressed, and robbers, thieves and other lawless elements failed to arise, so that outer doors did not have to be shut. This was called the age of Great Harmony (Ta Tung)

Famines as Military Weapons: Is Europe in Danger?

 A Dutch girl photographed at the time of the "hongerwinter", the famine that hit The Netherlands in 1945, during WW2. 

In the West, we tend to think of famines as events of the remote past that will never return, a view typified by Steven Pinker in his 2011 book "The Better Angels of our Nature." This attitude is often accompanied by sneers at Paul Ehrlich who, in 1968, predicted extensive worldwide famines that were soon to occur. Even when famines are discussed as a real possibility, they are seen as affecting only those remote countries where hordes of dark-skinned or slant-eyed people already live in near-starvation conditions. 

We forgot how close in time was an age in which hunger was a fact of life and famines a common occurrence. The last important famine in Europe was in the Netherlands in 1946 -- that was less than a hundred years ago, not in the Middle Ages. Our lack of historical memory is the reason why we are not surprised to see books such as "One Billion Americans" by Matthew Yglesias, where the author happily neglects the problems involved with supplying food and energy to a U.S. population three times larger than it is nowadays. 

The real problem with assessing the possibility of future famines is that they are often man-made, that is actively created by human actions. Starving an enemy is a time-honored strategy that works beautifully. We have a detailed report of how it was put into practice by the Romans at the time of the Siege of Jerusalem of 70 AD, but it is surely much older than that. In recent times, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threatened Iran in 2018 by saying that they must listen to the U.S. 'If They Want Their People to Eat.'  Clearly, the temptation to starve another country into submission never completely disappeared and it may returning.

So, by looking at a not so remote past, we can dimly understand what is in store for us. Famines were a major weapon during world war 2, although historians have often preferred to concentrate their attention on conventional military events. Let's review that not so old story.

 

The Starving of Europe -- Famines as a Weapon during World War 2

There are still people alive in Europe who experienced the food shortages of WWII. Not everywhere there were people dying of starvation, but the food supply was an acute problem all over the European land. And, in some areas, people died in large numbers. Here are some data: 

The total toll listed in this table is about 15 million casualties. These famines were not just the result of overpopulation and the scarcity of supply. People starved because they were the targets of extermination programs carried out by governments.

The main area of Europe where famines struck is the Eastern one. It was also the theater of the largest confrontation of WW2: the German attack on the Soviet Union. Most historians agree that it was one of the greatest strategic mistakes in history and, surely, the Germans understood that they were taking a huge risk. Why did they decide to embark on this idea? One typical answer is that since Adolf Hitler was mad, stupid, and evil, everything he did was mad, stupid, and evil, too. But there may be much more than the madness of the person at the top that generated the disaster. The attack on the Soviet Union may not have been just a military miscalculation, but a desperate attempt to reverse a hopeless situation. Simply put, despite all their flamboyant military victories, the Germans were losing the war because they had no control on their food supply. 

It is a complex subject that had its origins in World War 1. Very early, during the war, the Allies had imposed a naval blockade on the Central Empires with the specific scope of starving the Germans and their allies. The effect was not immediate: at that time, Germany produced about 80% of the food it consumed, and the Germans thought they could survive by increasing the domestic production and relying on imports from Scandinavian countries and from Romania. In practice, the situation worsened gradually with German agriculture being badly affected by the lack of manpower and of fertilizers. 

One symptom of how bad things were was the situation in Belgium, where the lack of food soon became dramatic, Being occupied by the Germans, Belgium was subjected to the British naval blockade and could not import food. That led the US to step in, supplying food that was supposed to be only for the Belgians. But it is hard to think that the occupying forces wouldn't partake at least some of it. In the book Prolonging the Agony (2018), the authors, Docherty and Macgregor, maintain that the Americans knew very well that the food they were supplying to Belgium was feeding German soldiers, but the US industry was making such good profits from the war that they didn't want it to end too soon. This is mainly speculation, of course, but may have some elements of truth and it is surely an indication of how dramatic things were in Europe at the time. 

As WW1 went on, the blockade became more effective in starving the Germans and the Austrians. The number of casualties caused by the famine in these countries is variously estimated, but the numbers range from more than 700.000 to 400,000 persons dying of starvation in Germany alone. Probably, the Central Empires would have lost the war anyway, but it is also true that starved soldiers don't fight very well. Incidentally, the physical debilitation of Europeans during the last phases of the war was probably one of the reasons for the spreading of the "Spanish flu" that killed over 2 million people more in Europe. 

A result of the terrible experience of WW1 was that the Germans were acutely aware of their vulnerability to food shortages. On the eve of WW2, the situation was about the same as it had been during WW1, with the German agriculture able to provide no more than about 80% of the supply. There followed that an attack on Britain would lead to the same result as it did in 1914, a naval blockade and the consequent starvation of the Germans. That was one of the main reasons for the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, signed in 1939. The agreement is best known for the partitioning of Poland, but it also involved the supply of food and petroleum from Russia to Germany. Details on this part of the deal are reported by Edward Ericson in his "Feeding the German Eagle" (1999). Only by means of this food the Germans could think of engaging in an attack on France. As we know, it was successful and the next step for Germany was subduing Britain. 

As it happens with the best plans of mice and men, things went agley for Germany with their defeat in the Battle of Britain. In 1940, with the British navy still dominating the sea lanes and blocking the shipment of food to continental Europe, the Germans saw in front of them the specter of a new famine. It could be kept at bay only as long as the Soviets were willing to supply Germany with food. But it didn't take an especially trained strategic mind to understand that it was a risky position. What if the Soviets were to decide to ally with the British? 

Once the Germans started seeing themselves stuck in a hopeless situation, it made sense for them to try anything, no matter how desperate it was. That was the origin of der Hungerplan, one of the most evil ideas ever conceived by human minds. The plan was to occupy the grain-producing areas of Western Europe, mainly Ukraine, and divert all the production to Germany. The proposer of the plan knew very well that this would have led to the death by starvation of millions of people. The developer of the plan, Herbert Backe, noted a "surplus population" in Russia of about 20 to 30 million. Evil as evil can be but, about evil plans, something similar to the Backe plan had already been devised by the Italians in 1935, when they had planned to take over Ethiopia to gain "a place in the sun" (the equivalent of the German concept of lebensraum) for their population. Fortunately for the Ethiopians, Ethiopia was too far from Italy to be realistically seen as a source of food for Italians.

In the figure, you see the very face of evil: Herbert Backe (image from Wikipedia). It is remarkable how he looks like a harmless bureaucrat, maybe the way he saw himself. In any case, Backe injected some method in the folly that had overtaken the minds of the people in power in Germany. We tend to focus all our attention on Adolf Hitler, but he was not alone. Evil had been percolating down from the high levels of the German government, touching just about everyone. The "Unternehmen Barbarossa," (Operation Barbarossa) was a logical consequence of a certain way of seeing the strategic situation of Germany in 1941. If the Germans had succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union, then "Festung Europe" (Fortress Europe) was secure with the supply of food they would obtain from Eastern Europe.

In part, the Hungerplan succeeded: the Germans did take control of Ukraine and its grain-producing fields. Starvation did kill a large number of people living in Slavic countries. But the Soviet Union didn't surrender and the amount of food that could be shipped to Germany from Eastern Europe was limited. The result was an even more evil plan (evil does multiply!) involving the extermination of the "useless" people, those who couldn't be put to work at something useful for the war effort. That was the origin of the Jewish holocaust, but the Germans also exterminated large numbers of prisoners of war, of people judged racially inferior, and of their own citizens. The Dutch famine ("hongerwinter") of the latest phases of the war was also a consequence of the Germans concentrating all the food resources inside their own territory.

There was some method in this folly and, indeed, the Germans were successful in avoiding famines in their country. There are reports of food shortages in Germany during WWII, but not of victims of starvation. But that, of course, didn't save Germany from defeat and, afterward, the Germans experienced some of the treatment they had inflicted on their neighbors. Tens of thousands of German prisoners of war died of starvation or of diseases associated with malnutrition in Allied prisoner camps. Then, the "Morgenthau Plan," that the Allies had initially embraced, involved nothing less than the complete destruction of the German industry. As a consequence, Germany wouldn't have been able to import food from abroad and that would have resulted in the death of tens of millions of Germans. Fortunately for the Germans, the plan was soon abandoned and the Germans allowed to rebuild their country. But they had seriously risked being exterminated, just like they had planned to do with their neighbors. 

All that didn't happen during barbarian ages or in remote regions of the world: it happened in civilized Europe less than one century ago. Not so far away in time and space that you could feel safe that it won't happen again.

Europe nowadays: a risk of famines?

If you look at the data for the food import and export nowadays, you would be tempted to say that Europe is self-sufficient, it even has a certain surplus production. But that would be a dangerous delusion: it is just the result of the transformation of agriculture from a rural activity to an industrial one. In the process, the agricultural productivity was greatly increased in terms of production per unit area, but at the cost of making agriculture dependent on fossil fuels, just as many other industrial activities. And if Europe is not self-sufficient in terms of fossil fuels, it cannot be self-sufficient in terms of food supply.

Industrial agriculture can produce at the high yields of our times by means of the widespread availability of fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization, all depending on the availability of fossil fuels. In addition, as I wrote in a previous post, the problem is not so much food production, but food supply. The latter requires processing, refrigeration, packaging, and more -- again, dependent on fossil fuels. All these are elements of a complex system that brings food from the fields to the plates of European citizens. Remove one of them, and the plates go empty. That says nothing about the problems that climate change and soil overexploitation are creating, but let's skip that. The situation is worrisome enough already.

Now you see what the problem is: all the elements of the food supply chain in Europe depend on the availability of energy, mostly in the form of liquid fuels. Remove the fuels and the system collapses, people starve and die. Now, think that Europe is highly dependent on imports for its energy: more than 50% on the average. Note also that the energy that Europe produces internally is mostly coal and nuclear, plus some solar and wind. It is mainly electrical energy, but agriculture, as it is nowadays, is based on fossil fuels. It would be possible to transform the agricultural processes in ways that would power it using electricity, but that would take time and money -- and nobody seems to be willing to invest in such an effort. Finally, consider that an important fraction, more than 30%, of the imported fossil fuels in Europe comes from Russia. Now you see that in many respects history repeats itself: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact comes to mind.

Fortunately, Europe is not at war (so far), but its strategic position in terms of food supply is just as fragile as it was 80 years ago. The coronavirus crisis of 2020 gave us some idea of what can happen. For some days, the disruption caused by the virus caused people to storm supermarkets, often finding just empty shelves there. Fortunately, the food crisis seems to have been short-lived, but it was there and it is still having consequences. If Europe were to face a serious international crisis and its capabilities to import food and fuel were reduced, we would go back to 1945, with food having to be rationed, people going hungry, and probably dying.

From here on, it is not difficult to imagine apocalyptic scenarios. You know that Western European governments seem to feel an irresistible attraction toward attacking Russia (preferably in winter), to the point that they did that several times during the past few centuries. So, it is not inconceivable that they could decide to try again. Apart from the military results of such attacks, by now proverbial, the cost and the resulting economic disruption would probably guarantee a Dutch hongerwinter for all Europe.

An exercise in applied catastrophism can lead us to imagine various scenarios in which hundreds of millions of Europeans starve and die, but these are scarcely useful as planning instruments. We might instead wonder how famines could be avoided. Here, an interesting exercise is to compare the events that started in 1939 with those that took place some 70-80 years before, when Prussia embarked in a series of wars of conquest that culminated with defeating France at the battle of Sedan, in 1870. At that point, the European situation was not unlike that of 1939, with France defeated by Germany. But, after Sedan, the French and the Prussian governments agreed on a peace treaty. The prisoners of war were not exterminated, the leaders of the losing side were not hanged, there was no talk of exterminating or enslaving the untenmeschen -- the inferior races. Nothing like that.

What made 1870 a much smaller disaster than WW2? Probably not a single factor, but there was one fundamental difference: In 1870, the European population was less than half of what it is today and Europe was self-sufficient in terms of food production. The mother of all mistakes for Europeans came later: it was to raise the European population to levels that relied on imports for the food supply. One of the results was an ideological vision that saw the European nations engaged in a cutthroat competition for the lebensraum, the "vital space."  Once they got into this frame of mind, the logical conclusion for every state was to expand their population at the fastest possible speed, exterminating or enslaving everyone who didn't belong to the herrenvolk "master race."  

Today, with the European natality plummeting and the native European population imploding, the idea of conquering a lebensraum for Europeans seems to be a little outdated, to say the least. Nevertheless, the European population is still large and the problem of food supply remains. Maybe it will be possible to keep things under control and steer Europe toward a lower population and a self-sufficient energy supply based on renewables. But the future is coming fast, as it usually does, faster than you would like to see it arriving. And, as usual, the future is full of surprises.

A comment by Ugo Bardi's personal troll, Mr. Kunning-Druger

I see, professor, that the subject of extermination fascinates you. It must be because you belong to that group of fanatical anti-human ideologues who fashioned for themselves the name of "Club of Rome" and who had the extermination of mankind as one of their first stated purposes -- part of their ideological manifesto titled "The Limits to Growth". So, every post you publish, is a nail in the coffin of these obscure forces who work against us. We know who you are, and you'll be treated as you deserve. Did you mention "extermination?" Oh, yeah.....

How Poor Leadership can Create Collapse or Make It Faster: Lessons from European History

The damage that a bad leader can generate is simply fearsome, especially if that leader has a lot of power and he is nearly impossible to remove from his position. If then that leader controls a large military apparatus, even including nuclear weapons, then the disasters that can happen are beyond the imaginable. If you, like me, doubt the competence of our current leaders, there is plenty to be worried about.

The problem seems to be that our system of choosing leaders guarantees to propel to the top all sorts of power-mongering psychopaths. And as the power we manage increases, going from nuclear weapons to the control of the Web, the chances for truly disastrous damage created by an incompetent leader also increase. 

Maybe there should be a science of incompetent leaders that might be a branch of the more general "science of evil." In this post, I propose a brief exploration of this field that starts with the idea that the past is the way to understand the future. So I repropose a theme that I had already examined: that of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) (1808-1873) one of the best examples we have of an incompetent leader who ruined the state he was leading. At that time, fortunately, there were no nuclear weapons available and Luis Napoleon himself was not so aggressive and bloodthirsty as other famously bad leaders. Nevertheless, the damage he generated was considerable and we can learn something from his story.

Napoleon 3rd: how to destroy an empire in the making.  

The armies of Napoleon Bonaparte went through many victories and a few crushing defeats. Leaving aside the question of whether Napoleon was the military genius that we often think he was (but Lev Tolstoy totally disagreed on this), we can say that at least he had a clear vision of what he was trying to do: creating a Europe-wide French empire. In this sense, the invasion of Russia of 1812 was not a strategic blunder. Napoleon had correctly identified a crucial enemy, Russia, to his imperial ambitions. It was more a tactical mistake: he had grossly underestimated the difficulty of the task.

But Napoleon's task was more difficult than just taking an army across the Russian plains in winter. France's imperial ambitions were difficult to put into practice for a simple reason: resources. As you see in the figure, below, France had only modest coal resources and its production never could match that of its more powerful rivals, England and Germany. And, during the 19th century, coal was the crucial resource that created military power: no coal, no empires.

Yet, in the 19th century, France had an advantage in the European power game. Look at the political map of Europe (the figure shows the situation in 1830). You see France as a large and unitary state placed right in the middle of Europe and surrounded by a plethora of statelets in the East and South. At the beginning of the 19th century, France had the largest coal production and the most developed economy in Europe, apart from Britain,. That was the factor that propelled Napoleon's armies in their conquests. And even after the fall of Napoleon 1st, the situation remained the same: France was the most powerful state of central Europe. 

But France had a problem: it didn't control a crucial region: the Ruhr and its coal mines, the richest of Europe. Without that region, France's coal production from the Vosges and Jura couldn't possibly be enough for France to dominate Europe.

The Ruhr region is today part of Germany and it had been occupied by Prussia already in the 18th century. Napoleon annexed the region in 1801 and turned it to the Grand Duchy of Berg whose ruler was his brother in law, Joachim Murat. Napoleon never made a mistake in judging the strategic importance of a territory. And he probably understood that the Ruhr was the center and the focus of the European coal production. Whoever controlled the Ruhr, controlled central Europe. 

At the same time, another empire was going through its death throes for lack of coal. It was the Ottoman empire, said to be the "Old Man of Europe." But the Ottoman empire was not older than the other states it was facing,  it was just desperately starved of coal. It controlled no mines. That was another strategic element of the puzzle that Napoleon had perfectly understood when he had embarked on the invasion of Egypt in 1798.

Now, imagine yourself in the clothes of a successor of Napoleon Bonaparte. You are the absolute ruler of France and you want your country to dominate Europe, what should you do? Basically, you have to continue what Napoleon himself had started: dominate the center and make sure that the Ruhr mines are yours or, at least, not under the control of a rival power. Then, you have a free hand to expand in the Mediterranean. And, indeed, France had started doing exactly that by conquering Algeria in 1830. At that point, the way for France was open to conquer the whole North African Region from the weak Ottoman Empire. It was not to be exactly a piece of basboussa cake, but it would have been possible to turn the Mediterranean into a French lake.

At this point, we see arriving on the scene Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He managed to be elected president of France in 1848, then he made himself "Emperor" by a coup d'état in 1852, taking the name of "Napoleon III."

The story of Louis Napoleon is long: he ruled France for 22 years, and of the many things he did, not all were wrong. But, in terms of international strategic choices, he was truly a disaster, even worse than our George W. Bush. 

It will suffice to say that Louis Napoleon did exactly the opposite of everything he should have done. Really, if he had been paid by the enemies of France, he couldn't have done more damage than he did. At least, we can consider him as a bad example to ponder. 

Let's start from the beginning. We said that France had started expanding in the Mediterranean already in 1830, conquering Algeria. France could have continued expanding along the North-African coast provided that, 1) Italy was prevented from forming a unified state that would have been a competitor for the same area. 2) France would seek an alliance with Russia to further weaken the Ottoman Empire, and 3) England was kept out of the Mediterranean area as much as possible.

But, as I said, Napoleon III had a knack for doing the opposite of what needed to be done. In 1853, instead of fighting Britain and the Ottomans, he created and led an alliance with them to fight Russia in Crimea. It was a strategic mistake so huge to be truly mind-boggling. France had no strategic interests in the Black Sea and why in the world should the French help the Turks against Russia when the French had a good chance to snatch a huge chunk of the Ottoman possessions in North Africa? 

The Crimean war was a disaster: it was a military victory for the French-led coalition, but it was one of those victories that you would prefer had been defeats. The effort had utterly exhausted the coalition, but far worse was how the Crimean war influenced the events in Italy. Piedmont had sent troops to Crimea in exchange for the promise that France would later help Piedmont to fight Austria. In 1859, Napoleon III felt he had to honor his promise, and he sent troops to Northern Italy to help Piedmont. The result was another victory that one would have preferred having been a defeat. In the wake of the victory, Piedmont conquered the whole Italian Peninsula and unified it in a single state. A complete strategic disaster that saw France help to create a state that in the future would be a competitor and even an enemy. Among other things, in 1911, Italy attacked and conquered Libya, stopping all hopes of France to expand further in North Africa.

Afterward, Napoleon III kept making one mistake after the other, as if he wanted to create a cliff as deep as possible to fall into it faster. He didn't move a finger to stop Prussia from gobbling up its neighbors to create a single, powerful state. He did nothing even when there were good chances for France to fight Prussia in a coalition with other European states. First, there came the Schleswig war in which Prussia was left free to maul the weaker Denmark at the Battle of Dybbøl in 1864. Then, there came the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 where, again, France didn't do anything to counteract Prussia's expansion. Then, there came France's turn to be mauled by the Prussian artillery. The French army was crushed at Sedan in 1870 and Louis Napoleon himself was captured. With that, France was forever consigned to the status of 2nd rank power. It was a rapid ruin for a leader who had outlived his own mistakes and died in exile, in England, in 1873. 

But perhaps we can say also something good about Louis Napoleon. Despite all his blunders, he was not a bloodthirsty psychopath as many leaders are. One of the last images we have of him is after the defeat at Sedan, 1870, after that he had been captured by the Prussians. We see him sitting and amiably (perhaps) chatting with Otto Von Bismarck, minister-president of Prussia. Earlier on Louis Napoleon had ordered his army to surrender to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. At least that was a good thing he did.

Now, what can we learn from this incredible series of mistakes? One is how difficult it is to get rid of a bad leader once he takes upon himself the title of "Emperor." But what caused Louis Napoleon to be so ineffective?

For one thing, Louis Napoleon may have been trying to emulate his illustrious uncle, Napoleon 1st, and the attack on Russia in 1854 was perhaps an attempt to avenge the French defeat in Russia in 1812. But, like many leaders, Louis Napoleon was also a womanizer. So, he could be controlled, in part, by means of his sexual appetites. He may have sent the French army to help Piedmont as the result of the work of his Italian mistress, the Countess of Castiglione who, in turn, had been operating as a secret agent for her cousin, Count Cavour, the leader of the Piedmontese government. Or, it may just be that the task of governing a state is beyond the capabilities of most people, and Louis Napoleon was not an exception to the rule

It is a general pattern, leaders often arise by understanding and exploiting the internal power-games of an organization. But when they reach the top, they may turn out to be completely incompetent at leading the organization. It is typical of politicians, good at being elected but often totally unable to do anything else. And Louis Napoleon was surely a politician more than anything else. 

So, why do we trust a system that can't do anything else than place incompetents at the top? It may be just because we couldn't think of a better system. The alternative, often touted as a good idea in difficult times, is to put a "strong man" at the top, hoping that miraculously he will fix what needs to be fixed. It never works that way.

In the end, it could be that Louis Napoleon's blunders were just part of the inexorable flux of history. Imagine that the two men in the figure above had exchanged their roles, with Otto Von Bismarck a competent French Emperor and Louis Napoleon as an incompetent Prussian leader. Then, maybe, Napoleon 1st's dream could have been realized, with France dominating Europe and the whole Mediterranean Sea. In this case, you would probably be reading this post in French, but would something really have changed in the bloody history of the world during the 20th century? A French European empire would have found itself in direct contrast with the Russian Empire and the British Empire. So, plenty of wars and carnage would still have occurred. Perhaps a competent ruler is not necessarily better than an incompetent one. Whatever the case, history keeps going onward.

 

 

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Notes on the Crimean war

The Crimean war is one of the most misunderstood events of modern history, not so remote to have been so thoroughly forgotten, and yet it was forgotten and its reasons often twisted in such a way to make it turn into something completely different. Just as an example, James Hamblin briefly mentions the Crimean War in his 2020 book "Clean" saying at page 242 that it took place because " the British were fighting back Russian expansion into Crimea" forgetting that Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783, 70 years before the start of the war. And BTW, the US was friendly to the Russians at that time. 

Here are some posts I wrote about the Crimean War

Crimea: From World War 0 to World War III

 

Coal Wars, and Beautiful Women. 

 

The Tipping Points of History: Italy's Unification and the Countess of Castiglione 

 

The Ring of Fire Around Russia

The Second Babel Tower: Symphonic Music and the Collapse of the European Cultural Unity

This is Europe

This is not Europe

This is a reflection on how the breakdown of the Medieval cultural unity in Europe resulted in many different effects, from witch hunts to classical music. It came to me from putting together various elements of various talks heard at the excellent meeting "Colloqui di Martina Franca" held in Apulia in May 2019. H/t Boian Videnoff and Giovanni Semeraro.

The study of the patterns of world conflicts leads to fascinating results, showing the statistical patterns that make wars a sort of natural phenomenon, beyond human control. But there is something in the data that defies statistical analysis. Look at this figure, showing fatalities normalized to the world's population: (data from Martelloni, Di Patti and Bardi, 2019)

Note how there seem to exist two sections in this graph: one is relatively quiet, from 1400 to ca. 1600, the other is stormy: a series of terrible wars starting with the 30-years war that remained the largest in history, in relative terms, until it was surpassed by the 2nd world war. And not only the age of wars started in the mid-17th century, it was also the start of a wave of violence against women: tens of thousands of them, typically poor and illiterate, were tortured and burned alive under the accusation of witchcraft. The data are strongly euro-centered, so there was some kind of a radical change in Europe around mid-1600s. But what was it? And why did it happen?

It is a long story that can be seen in many ways and that shows many facets. In this post, I thought I could focus on how the great transition of the mid 17th century was reflected in a specific area of European culture: music. When Europe lost Latin as a shared communication tool, it was a new Babel Tower: Europeans couldn't understand each other any longer except within the boundaries of their national states. Not surprisingly, people who don't understand each other tend to resort to war to sort out conflicts. But Europeans also tried to replace Latin with some non-verbal tools: one was music. It is a long story that needs to be told from the beginning.

Did you ever realize how strange is the existence of symphonic (or "classical") music? Purely instrumental music is very rare in history and in geographical regions other than Western Europe and its cultural offspring. In most cases, music is purely vocal and instruments are only an optional tool to accompany and enhance the human voice. Instrumental music is even considered sinful in itself by many Islamic scholars.

That's indeed the rule for what we know about the history of European Music. During the Middle Ages, the main genre was Gregorian music: purely vocal. Note how a Gregorian chant is focused on words: listeners are supposed to understand what's being said. Then, the Renaissance came and it was the age of polyphony where the harmony takes precedence -- it is beautiful, but words overlap and the sense of the text is soon lost.

The trend toward polyphony continued in the 1700s when instrumental music became more and more common. It became the norm during the 1800s with the golden age of classical music: Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and many others. Symphonic music continued to be popular well in the 1900s, think of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" (1924). But, in time, it faded away. Today, orchestral symphonies are still written and performed, but they are not anymore a popular form of art. We seem to have gone back to a kind of music that focuses on voice and words: the rap. (for a nice version of a rap relevant to the title of this blog and also sung by a physicist, see this link)

What generated this cycle? Mainly, it was the Babel of languages that Europe had become that pushed Europeans to try to develop new forms of communication. Music is a language, not the same kind of language that uses words, it is a tool used mainly to convey emotions rather than facts and data. It can be used to create social bonds or to intimidate an adversary (in the latter case, it is termed AVID - audio-visual intimidating display).

Actually, as argued by Joseph Jordania, music may be the origin of language and polyphonic music is much older than the monophonic kind we are used to, nowadays. Gradually, with the development of word-based languages, monophonic music became prevalent. But, in some peculiar conditions, when the word-based communication breaks down, the Babel Tower effect takes place: to understand each other we must revert to different tools. Polyphonic music, classical symphonies, the haka, they are all forms of emotion-based forms of communication. They are not necessarily inferior to the word-based kind, they bypass words to reach directly the heart of people. And there is no doubt that the haka was conceived as a way to reduce violence as much as possible. But music can't convey the same richness of meaning that words can provide.

So, Beethoven's third symphony is commonly termed the "Heroic." It is hard to pin down what exactly that means, but most people would agree that there is something heroic in that music. There is no Moon in Beethoven's "moonlight sonata" but somehow the music seems to evoke the moonlight. And Beethoven's fifth symphony is the one perhaps closest to the Maori's haka, even though there is much more in Beethoven's fifth than pure intimidation (that's true also for the haka, which is a sophisticated art form in itself -- not polyphonic, though! H/t Elena Piani) (*).

The evolution of Western European culture makes a lot of sense on the basis of these considerations. The Middle Ages were a period of cultural unity in Western Europe. Latin was gradually lost with the Renaissance and this generated new forms of music-based communication. In time, these forms were made unnecessary by the triumph of English as worldwide lingua franca. It may be the reason for the relative lull in the frequency and the intensity of wars during the past 50 years or so, as noted by Steven Pinker in his "The Better Angels of Our Nature:" (2011). It is also the reason for the age of the Rap, in which we are living.

Today, the evolution continues. Maybe English itself will be made obsolete by tools such as Google translate. Maybe we'll use only emojis :-). Maybe we'll develop new methods of communication which, today, we can't even imagine. But there remains a basic fascination in singing together, especially for polyphonic music. It is an art that has been mostly abandoned, today, except in some special religious contexts. But it won't die so easily and if you ever had a chance to sing in a polyphonic choir you understand what I mean. It is music that bypasses your brain to touch your heart. An example, below, the Benedictus as performed by singers of the Taizé Community.

This post was generated by a meeting in Martina Franca that I attended last week. I heard first a talk by the AI scientist Giovanni Semeraro. It made me think of how words are the fundamental unit of communication in languages, but also made me wonder if it were possible to communicate without words. Then, it was the turn of Boian Videnoff's talk on complexity in music and - bang! - a hit of serendipity. European wars, symphonic music, polyphonic music, and Gregorian chants, everything clicked together -- there was a meaning in the gradual evolution of different musical genres! A final point: why did Europe lose Latin? I think there are reasons, but that's a discussion for another post. 

Upon rethinking the matter over, I think the haka IS polyphonic. It is an integrated mix of words, gestures, facial expressions, and dance. A stunningly sophisticated art form. 

 

Europe, Europe! The Dream Doesn't Die.

This video exemplifies the problems the European Union has in managing its own image. It was produced in 2012 and then recalled after being widely labeled as "racist." In some senses, it was, but it was also one of the very few attempts the Union made to present itself in ways that go beyond the dull image of a bunch of bureaucrats acting in the name of the global financial powers. Without the ability to project a positive image of itself, the Union may be doomed. But it is also true that in the recent European elections the separatist parties didn't gain as much as they had hoped to. Good dreams never die, they bide their time. And, who knows? One day, the dream of a truly United Europe might come true. 

There was a time, long ago, when the term "Europe" was a vague definition for the lands north of the Mediterranean Sea, a vast regions of fog and swamps, inhabited by hairy Barbarians. In time, the Roman Empire came to dominate the area we call today "Western Europe" but nobody would even dream to call him or herself "European." For more than a millennium, the inhabitants of this region would proudly call themselves "Romans," even though they might never have seen the city of Rome in their lives.

After that Rome fell, in the 5th century CE, the European population declined and, by 650 CE, it is estimated that it had shrunk to some 18 million people. Europe was an immense forest punctuated by castles and villages here and there, and, occasionally, by the ruins of great cities. It was the start of what we call the "dark ages," that weren't dark at all.

It was at that time that Europe arose. Not that Europe was anything like a recognized entity -- people would call themselves "Christians," but never, ever "Europeans."  But Europe had become a recognizable cultural entity. It was the result of two powerful communication tools that Europeans had inherited from the Roman Empire: the Latin language and the codices that replaced the old rolls.

Latin was the language of the Roman Legions. Then, when the legions were gone, it became the sacred language of Christianity and, at the same time, the language of commerce and of politics. Few Europeans could speak Latin, most were limited to their vernacular languages, but if rulers and merchants wanted to speak other they had to use Latin. And the Western European intellectuals couldn't even imagine to express themselves in any other language.

The other tool that created the European cultural unity was the codex. A remarkable invention: it was what we call today "book," a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials, bound together. The existence of books looks obvious to us, but, at the time, it was a major revolution. It allowed to store and access information in a much more efficient and rapid way than with the old rolls.

With Latin and codices, the Middle Ages became a sophisticated cultural entity that kept alive the classical literature and added much more to it. One of its features was the return of women as authors. They had been silent during Roman times, but now we hear again their voices: Hildegard Von Bingen, Marguerite Porete, Heloise, and many others. The Middle Ages were not "dark" -- they were, by all means, bookish.

By the 9th century, King Charlemagne attempted to make Europe not just a cultural entity, but a political one with his Holy Roman Empire. It was only partially successful, but with the start of the 2nd millennium, Europe had become powerful enough that it could expand out of its borders: it was the time of the crusades. There was no central European government at the time, but Europeans acted together as if there were one. The crusades saw the birth of entities that prefigured modern multinational companies: the Templar Knights were at the same time a monastic order, a military force, and a bank.

The crusades were only partially successful. The European economy peaked with the beginning of the 14th century and then collapsed with the Great Plague of mid 14th century, when Europe lost perhaps 30% of its population. Then, there came the time of the great rebound and this time Europeans engaged in the great overseas adventure that in a few centuries would lead them to dominate most of the world.

But something had gone wrong in the meantime. The process of European integration that had started in the Middle Ages ground to a halt with the "Renaissance." During the 17th century, the 30-years war saw Europeans fighting each other in what was perhaps the most destructive war ever waged in human history up to that moment. Europeans even waged a war against women: the Renaissance was the time of the great witch hunts that saw innumerable innocent women burned alive at the stake.

Over the centuries that followed, Europe never knew a moment of quiet and it disintegrated into a constellation of nation states. Enclosed within rigid and impermeable borders, these creatures were proud, touchy, and aggressive. With the 20th century, they started behaving like drunken gunmen engaged in a tavern brawl. The result was the disaster of the two world wars.

It was only in the second half of the 20th centuries that Europeans seemed to recover some of their mental sanity and started wondering what they had been doing. Was there a way to avoid new internecine wars? That was the origin of the idea of the European Community, later renamed the European Union. A movement of ideas of people genuinely convinced that Europe was a good thing that would prevent new wars. It was the first time in history when the people living in Europe would start seeing themselves as "European Citizens."

In some ways, the European Union was a success, but today it shows the problems that were not solved when it was created. States can be kept together only in two ways: by military force or by cultural bonds. Europe had known both ways in its history: during the Roman Empire, it had been turned into a single political entity by the mighty Roman Legions. Later on, it had been bound together by the common ties of the Christian culture and religion. Within some limits, the United Europe of the second half of the 20th century was the result of the might of the American legions. But legions are expensive commodities and if the American ones leave (and they will), what will keep the European states together?

Here, we see how the European Union was built on weak foundations. The European nation states had consistently refused to cede even an inch of what they saw as their divine right: that of using their national language and only that language in all occasions. The result is that Babel was reincarnated in the city of Brussels, where every statement, every document, every speech, needs to be issued in multiple versions in different languages.

National languages are much more important than colored flags, they are the essence of the concept of nation states. The failure of the founders of the European Union has been that of not pushing a European Language that would have united Europe. Perhaps it would have been possible to resurrect Latin or, more e simply, to adopt English, the de-facto international language of our times. But, instead, the founders thought that it was easier to pay the salary of a legion of interpreters who collected in Brussels like vultures on a fresh kill.

The result was a Europe of the banks rather than a Europe of Europeans. It was never loved, but accepted as long as it seemed to be able to keep the economy going. But, with the economic downturn, feelings changed. Most people tend to reason on the basis of the simplest and most schematic inferences. If the economy was going better before the European Union came, there follows that if we get rid of those ugly bureaucrats (and of the interpreters) in Brussels, things will go back to the good times and everything will be well in the best of worlds. One result was the Brexit disaster and it is a minor miracle and also a good illustration of the power of the European dream that the recent elections saw the separatists win only in some marginal regions of the Union. Overall, most Europeans still see themselves as Europeans.

But for how long can the European Union survive in its current form? Will it collapse and then bounce back? Will it become just a minor peninsula of the great Eurasian co-prosperity zone? Maybe a remote terminal station for the new silk road? And, with its mineral resources badly depleted by millennia of exploitation, can Europeans survive at all in a future where they are threatened by climate change and ecosystem collapse?

We cannot say. The only certainty is that good dreams never really die -- they bide their time. And the dream of a united Europe is not dead. It will come back, one day.

MEDEAS begins

The European project "MEDEAS" is starting. The acronym has little to do with the mythological figure of Medea but stands for "Modeling the Energy Development under Environmental And Socioeconomic constraints" and it is an ambitious attempt at creating a new model that will define the future of the energy system in Europe, taking into account the physical constraints involved.  This is not a new idea, it goes back to 1972, at the time of the "Limits to Growth" study. What is new is that the concepts developed at that time are re-emerging after a period of neglect and are now sponsored and financed by the European Union. A remarkable vindication of the ideas of the group of pioneers who carried out the early 1972 study and that turned out to be prophetic, beyond perhaps the expectation of even those who had developed the model. 

As one of the partners of the MEDEAS project, I'll see to cover the development of the project in the "Cassandra's Legacy" blog. As a start, let me propose to you a post by Antonio Turiel, also involved in the project, from his blog "The Oil Crash"

The MEDEAS project begins

by Antonio Turiel




Dear readers,

Today and tomorrow (Feb 18 and 19 2016) the institute of sciences of the Seas of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - CSIC hosted the kick-off meeting of the MEDEAS project.

MEDEAS (acronym of Modeling the Energy Development under Environmental And Socioeconomic constraints" is a European project financed in the framework of the "Horizon 2020" program to finance European research. This project is coordinated by my institution, and in practice by my colleague, Jordi Solé.

From the institute of Marine Sciences, we have in this project Antonio García-Olivares, Joaquim Ballabrera, Emilio García and yours truly.

Two more Spanish institutes also participate in this project: CIRCE (with Alicia Valero among others) and the University of Valladolid (with Luis Javier Miguel as head, but there are also well known people, such as Margarita Mediavilla and Carlos de Castro).

The other partners ar the Consorzio Interuniversitario Italiano di Scienza e Tecnología dei Materiali, INSTM (Ugo Bardi), The Centre for Renewable Energy Sources and Saving, The University of Masaryk, The Anglia Ruskin university, the Sdruzhenie Chernomorski Izsledovatelski Energien Tsentar, the International Institute for Applied system analysis (IIASA), the Friends of the Earth (Czech Republic), the Austrian Energy Agency and Blue4You. 

The objective of MEDEAS, as shown by its acronym, is to create the tools necessary to support the planning of policies that would favor the transition of the European Energy system toward a new system, based on renewable energy. On this task, the principal objective of MEDEAS is to produce a socio-economc model, the "MEDEAS model", that will be flexible enough to be modifiable in such a way to be able to study different scenarios and pathways toward the transition. The MEDEAS model will be programmed in a free code, (Python) so that it will be easy to use by different social and economic users. It will be based on the WoLiM model, developed by the System Dynamics Group at the University of Valladolid. The MEDEAS model will be a system dynamics model which will introduce new variables, additional to the ones habitually considered, so that it will be possible to adapt the model to create a more detailed analysis model for what is needed to implement a pathway or another, mostly as a function of specific socio-economic aspects, such as the evolution of the unemployment or of income inequality; parameters not always taken into account by the models.

MEDEAS implies a remarkable effort of coordination between the compilation of the necessary data that will be used to define and verify the sensitivity of the model, and the creation of the model itself (to be also compared with some already existing models) and the verification of the different scenarios. MEDEAS is an ambitious attempt to create a new model that might go much beyond the presently available models, in particular being sufficiently flexible to accept very different scenarios, and that will be able to carry out a detailed analysis both at the European scale, as well as that of single countries

Given my role in the project, and its interest for the questions discussed here, during the coming 4 years, I will be informing the readers about the development of the actions of MEDEAS. MEDEAS needs time in order to propose answers in a world where the questions about the future are multiplying. Stay tuned: we hope in good news from MEDEAS.

ATB

Antonio Turiel

Peak? What Peak? Europe's energy consumption back to 1990 levels

 

Image from "Eurostat" - h/t Luis de Souza

Bringing the message about resource depletion to the European Parliament

With 24 languages deemed as "official," the European Union shares some characteristics with the ancient Babel Tower (above, the parliament building in Strasbourg). The Babel of languages is one of the problems associated with trying to pass messages to politicians, but not the most important one. Rather, the main problem seems to be a decisional mechanism which favors groupthink.  Here are some notes of a recent experience of mine at a hearing on energy security of the European Parliament in Brussels.

As I walk to the hearing on energy security in Europe, I am struck first of all by the size of the hall. The "Alcide De Gasperi" room in the palace of the European Parliament in Brussels was clearly built for impressing people, in addition to its function as a meeting room. One of its most remarkable features is the long row of windows of the interpreters' rooms. Since there are 24 official languages of the European Union, there have to be some 50 interpreters working in there. Then, I also notice how the screens for projecting one's slides are small and located high up, near the ceiling. This is not a place where you are supposed to support your statements with data and graphs. It is a place built for political debate.

As people collect in the hall, I can see that the atmosphere is rather formal, with several members of the European Parliament sitting in the audience. Most people are dressed in suits and many wear ties. On the podium, there are six invited speakers. And there we go; I immediately sense the mood of the conference: this is not a scientific meeting. None of the speakers seem to be an expert about fossil fuels, intended as markets, production, resources, reserves, and the like. Rather, they seem to be mainly concerned with strategic and political issues. The line that emerges from the presentations and from the reactions of the audience is clear: it is a highly confrontational attitude (to put it mildly) toward Russia, accused to be engaging in an economic war against Western Europe. The gist of what I hear is that the European Union must unite in defense; we must follow the example of the United States and get rid of our silly regulations and of the local resistance against drilling and nuclear plants. Europe can exploit its shale gas and oil resources (and also nuclear energy) and attain energy independence, as the United States did. It is "drill, drill, drill" all over.

This line, in various shades, is the position of four speakers out of six. The bias in favor of fossil fuels is shown also by the fact that the lady charged with defending renewables is given the last time slot of the hearing. The fossil oriented attitude seems to be shared by the majority of the audience. Not that it is not challenged by some of the MEPs in the room. One of them (I know him well, he has been a long time ASPO supporter) stands up and tells to one of the speakers: "it is not true that the United States has attained energy independence. You have to stop getting your data from newspapers!". He is right, (you can look at the data yourself). But it is an isolated reaction, and the overall debate remains based on the idea that the US has become energy independent or that, at least, it will soon become independent.

When it is my turn to speak, I tell a different story. I try to explain that the ultimate origin of the energy security problems in Europe is due to depletion, and that drilling more is not the solution. I keep the message as simple as possible; tailored for people who are not specialists in oil and gas. I show the price trends, I tell them something about energy return, and I make the point that renewable energy is not subjected to depletion. I sense that my talk is well received: the people in the audience listen to what I say, and they look up at my slides (but those screens are too high and too small, dammit!). I also get several questions and comments - mostly favorable ones. After the hearing is over, several people stop me to discuss further about what I said. As a talk, it was a reasonably successful one.

But, on the whole, I think I had a very modest impact, if any. As I noticed many times, it is extremely difficult to pass to decision makers messages which are perceived as out of the ordinary, as the message on resource depletion is. The problem has many facets and it has to do, mainly, with the way politicians think. According to my experience, politicians - especially high level ones - are very smart people. The problem is that they are swamped with information; just as most of us. So, in the great mass of data arriving, how do you decide what is the truth? If you are a scientist - or you are scientifically trained - you have ways to evaluate the data and filter out the bad ones. But politicians are not scientists, they are not scientifically trained, so they use a different method. They maintain a healthy dose of skepticism about everything they hear; they don't pay too much attention on data, and they tend to side with the interpretation that they perceive as the most compatible with the general opinion of the group they belong to.

There are reasons for this "groupthink" syndrome that, probably, affects politicians more than most of us. It is because then main tool in the political struggle, today, is the demonization of adversaries. So, a politician is very careful to avoid to be singled out from the crowd of colleagues and subjected to the standard demonizing treatment. For a politician, there is safety in crowds; a traditional strategy well known also by sheep and fish. In practice, you may see a politician as having a built in opinion detector in his head. He/she will sense the position of the majority and try to avoid straying too far away from it. In general, the way for a politician to obtain power is to occupy the center; to be seen as a moderate. That this is the way to success has been known for a long time; even rigorously modeled (in economics, it is known as the "Hotelling's law"). Scientists are sometimes contrarians, politicians almost never are. 

So, I think I can figure out the reaction of most of the MEPs to the hearing on energy security in Brussels. It was something like, "Well, that Italian guy who spoke about resource depletion might have a point about what the real problem is. I couldn't his slides so well, so high up near the ceiling, but he seemed to have some good data. But, on the other hand, the other speakers saw the problem differently. If most people in the parliament think that Russia is waging an economic war against us and that drilling more is a good idea, then there has to be something in it. For sure, I shouldn't take the risk of siding with a minority option."



Ugo Bardi teaches at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted, how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet" (Chelsea Green 2014)