Harvard University [File photo]

French antropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd explains, in his last book Where are we?, right-wing populist movements in Europe and United States, in light of new educational stratification in Western countries. It's persuasive and inspiring theory helps us understand contemporary ideological and political dynamics in Europe and abroad.

After the Second World War, in 1945, United States and Europe, explains Todd, had more or less homogenous populations, in terms of educational levels. But, already in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, that homogenity was undermined with an increasing number of the population obtaining tertiary education. That process was followed with economical and technological transition in the West from modern industrial to post-industrial economic structures.

In that post industrial and post-modern constelation, Western societies are divided into three groups: people with primary education (10 percent), people with secondary education (45-70 percent) and people with tertiary education (30-45 percent). That is a rough demarcation.

Precisely, in the period spanning from 2000 to 2016, the highly educated population (24-64 year-olds) in the United States enlarged from 36 percent up to 46 percent. In United Kingdom, in the same period, that group had increased from 25 percent up to 46 percent of the total population, and in France from 21 percent up to 35 percent. The most progressive countries in that sense are Canada with 56 percent highly educated citizens, and Germany with only 28 percent in 2016. 

New educational stratifaction produce new economical and financial stratification. For example, in the U.S. people without a high school diploma  have the lowest median earning of 23,500 dollars per year (food cooker, dishwasher, shampoer at hair salon, etc.).

Those with high school diplomas and an associate degree earn about 33,000-44,000 dollars. That includs physical therapists, police officers or loan officers; dental hygienists, diagnostic medical sonographers and others.

Americans with bachelor's (aerospace engineers, computer and information system managers and financial analysts) have median salaries of 55,000; and those with masters degree (marriage and family therapists, physician's assistants, many CEO's) have median salaries of 65,000 dollars per year.

Those with professional degrees (doctors such as general internists, lawyers and pharmacists) have the highest median earnings of 86,000 dollars per year. And those with doctoral degree (physicists, computer and information research scientists, college professors, etc.) earn a median salary of 80,000 per year.

Educational development is a source of rising inequality over the last decades. The Keynesian world, which was dominated by secondary education, in the years after the Second World War, had a stronger foundation for egalitarian policies. Today, with a 40-50 percent highly educated workforce, the situation is totally different and the main characteristic of contemporary ideological conscious is the view that is natural for the more educated to have bigger earnings, even in communitarian cultures like France.

Educational stratification was – according to the author of  Where we are? – the basis for populist movements, like Trump or Brexit, which were impossible in the U.S. or U.K. in the morn of the new millenium, when the procent of the highly educated was 10-20 percent smaller than it was in 2016.

It would be a blunder to say that an increasing rate of highly educated population is a "bad" thing, in terms that it produces room for financial inequality. (Not only because you can't stop that process.) Before you think something like that, you must remember that educational and scientific development saved a myriad of lives and lifted them of poverty.

But, in educational and economically divided societies of the West there are lot of people, without high education and well payed jobs, who hold a contemptous attitude toward science, acedemic discourse and a scientific way of thinking, which they identify with the privileged "liberal elite." We saw a lot of that in Trump's and Brexit's campaign: things like denying and minimizing climate change, politically incorrect statements on women, immigrants, muslims or African countries, and other things contrary to the academic politeness and scientific discourse of Hillary Clinton. 

That is kind of aggressive defensive mechanism employed by part of the population, which is financially weak, more exposed to unemployment, and is getting smaller. In their eyes "knowledge, " "science, " "reason, " "logic, " "political correctness" and those kind of things are symbols of their lack of power; those phrases are smybols of the power of highly educated with whom they can't compete in the market. Their last harborage are elections and populist movements, as an instrument through which they can impose their will, and fight against certainties. 

Like the phenomena which occured in the process of modernization and industrialization (mass literacy; decline of the fertility rate) which always resulted with some kind of "transitional violence, " this process of new educational restructuring is traumatic for some social groups, and that friction is producing unstabilty. But the populist movement, like Trump and Brexit, are temporary phenomema. Every year, in the U.S., France and U.K., the percentage of the highly educated population will increase by 1 percent, and in 8 to 10 years both countries will have an educated majority of 55-60 percent like nowdays in Canada or Russia (sic!), and that would remove ideological polarisation and guarentee certain level of political unity.

In conditions of (creating) new educational stratifaction in the Western countries, China has a very good position, with its poor percentage of highly educated people, which is bellow 20 percent. As a communitarian culture, China functions well with that educational homogeneity, as it shows Chinese economic indicators. The low percentage of highly educated people in China compensates with its demographical mass.  By 2020, China aims for 20 percent of its citizens (195 million people) to have higher education degrees, and when that happens, China will have a population of tertiary graduates that is roughly equal in size to the entire projected population of 25-64 year-olds in the United States in 2020.

Germany, as a central European power, has only 28 percent of highly educated in its population which is, as we witness, often enough for technological superiority. But, what will in a social and political sense happen, when it reaches 40 or 45 percent like the U.S. and Britain? In Austria, the percent of highly educated is arround 32 percent and that populist parties are already (partly) in power, having capacities now to implement their disturbing xenophobic policies. But Austria is still secondary; most important will be to see how Germany will react to its 40 percent moment, because even now there is strong populist movements headed by Alternative für Deutschland, whose success in the last German elections in 2016 was ominous.

Countries with inegalitarian traditions, like Germany or Japan (with already 51 percent) – in Emmanuel Todd's interpretation – bear much with challenges of new educational stratification (and economic inequality) than communitarian cultures like those in France, CEE countries or Russia. In other words, when global, inevitable and only semi-controlled process divides a society, it is much easier for people with inegalitarian mentalities to face it and adjust, than for people with egalitarian and communitarian tradition and mentality. Because of that, Germany's economy works very well nowdays, in contrast to communitarian France, but economic prosperity unfortunately isn't enough for maintaining political stability. 

Haris Imamović (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a political analyst, media consultant and a literary critic. He is an editor of magazine SIC (https://sic.ba/) based in Sarajevo.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

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