Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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But for casual readers or even folks like me who enjoy a good socio-political analysis without the unnecessary linguistic acrobatics? Maybe give it a pass. Or at least, be prepared with a strong coffee and an even stronger will to push through. A counterfactual history of the last 100 years would, of course, be substantially different if global oil and gas resources were located mainly in, say, Africa and Asia, rather than the US, Russia and the Middle East. But this has not been deemed a sufficient reason for most historians to foreground energy factors at the expense of other material circumstances that shaped evolving events. A really excellent retelling of the modern political history of Western Europe and the US through the lens of energy. What Thompson does is not so much to introduce new stories, but to frame what you already know in a new and novel way. DSJ: I’m intrigued by your discussion of “democratic excess” versus “aristocratic excess.” For instance, you are critical of commentators of the 1970s, such as Samuel Huntington and Daniel Bell, who blamed the crisis of the 1970s on the democratic excesses of overindulgent Western societies. As you point out, such pundits made a direct connection between the great inflation of the 1970s and the majoritarian dynamics of democracies. You show, however, that while the political elites of the center-right and center-left blamed inflation on citizens, they regularly ignored the role that oil and international finance played in contributing to inflation. Moreover, such aristocratic excess, you argue, emboldened an economy that made nation-states and their citizens dependent on the whims of international financial markets. Can you elaborate on the notions of aristocratic excess and democratic excess? Can they, for instance, be mapped onto current concerns about inflation under the Biden administration? Of course, there is much more to say about Trump than this frame of reference yields, not least his crude nativism. But if we consider the history of American democracy, then what look like periods of aristocratic excess, such as the Gilded Age, eventually produce both sharp class politics and ugly nativist politics as part of the same reaction. What made Trump different from the American Populists was that he did not belong to the class whose grievances he was politically using. The rancor was a weapon in a competition for power marked by personal ambition.

Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century PDF - Hive Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century PDF - Hive

Empires have been; now are; and will be made by their access to energy. Thompson mentions Winston Churchill's (then controversial) decision to move the U.K. Navy from Coal-fired to Oil-fired warships - giving the U.K. Navy an advantage over their principal adversary (Germany) - but also inheriting some responsibility about maintaining supplies of Oil within the Middle East (Countries and protection of the Suez Canal; protection of their Empire).

Her analysis of the breakdown in democracy is also idiosyncratic, using the framework of cycles of accumulating “aristocratic or democratic excess” to explain how forms of government become unstable through time. So the first history she explores is a geopolitical one, revolving around energy and beginning with the rise of the US as a great power at the time of the emergence of oil as the chief energy source, replacing coal. The second history is economic and starts with the breakdown of the post WWII Bretton Woods monetary system in the early 70s and the emergence of fiat currencies. The third and final history is about democracies and how the geopolitical and economic changes of the 70s pressured democratic politics. Russia and China's recent renewed efforts to form alliances with oil-rich countries in the Middle East; Then, observing the American presidential election of 2016 from this side of the Atlantic, there seemed to me some parallels with some of the political dynamics around excess in the late Roman Republic. I saw Trump as an insider/outsider member of what might be thought of as the American oligarchic class using others’ class grievances—including about the place of money in democratic politics—to win an electoral contest for power where he was, in part at least, pitting himself against other members of his own class. This—both Trump’s behavior and the political conditions in which he could succeed in these terms—seemed to me the politics of aristocratic excess. But here’s the thing: I don’t mind working hard to grasp a concept, but the reward needs to be worth it. In other words, if I’m going to spend my precious reading time decoding a challenging text, I’d better walk away with some groundbreaking revelations or at least some unique viewpoints. Thompson's book, however, despite its moments of clarity, often regurgitated ideas and themes that have been discussed elsewhere, and in more digestible formats.

Disorder by Helen Thompson | Waterstones Disorder by Helen Thompson | Waterstones

Three threads - Geo Politics around the world; Energy; Power of the Central Banks (U.S. Federal Reserve in particular) - are discussed in great detail with extraordinary insight. The biggest 'take-away' is that we've traditionally looked at each of these three threads - as separate 'silos' to be studied. Thompson makes the point that these three threads are interrelated - and should be thought of as impacting one another. There is a November 2022 interview on the Demand Side podcast where the author explains how the book gestated since 2018 especially its delay due to Covid-19. Thompson describes how she divided the book into geopolitics driven by energy supply particularly oil and gas and finance particularly the dismantlement of Bretton woods and democratic politics which cannot be separated from nation states. The latter is attributed to governments becoming increasingly unaccountable, especially in the European Union, where centralised governance partly motivated by a need to manage dependency on imported energy has reduced the ability of people to influence events in their national elections. The geopolitical story begins with the inherent difficulties the United States faced as an ascendant non-Eurasian power in the early twentieth century, especially in the Middle East, and culminates in the American turn away from China in a world in which the United States is simultaneously a declining military power and a resurgent energy and financial power. The final section is in my opinion the weakest, because it simply isn’t that fresh. For anybody who listened to Thompson on Talking Politics for the last 5 years, you’ll recognise a lot of the points and even events brought up in this section on the problems of democracy in the 21st century. Where this sections brings together the previous threads of oil and finance, however, is where it really shines.For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Disorder by Helen Thompson - FT Business book of the year award

In this absorbing and wide-ranging study Helen Thompson unravels the complex intersections of oil, money, and democracy for understanding the politics of the last century. She provides an indispensable and illuminating guide to our current predicaments.Higher oil prices did not have to squeeze growth in either the 1970s or the 2000s. It was only because the exporters chose to hoard their windfalls by purchasing financial assets rather than using their newfound purchasing power to buy more goods and services that the rise in oil prices forced consumers to choose between cutting their spending and going into debt. If oil producers had simply let their living standards rise, workers elsewhere could have responded by making and selling more exports. Thompson general political position seems to be left of centre, judging by her public record on the popular podcast Talking Politics. Her energy story fits a little too easily into the modern left's tendency to critique energy politics as part of a broader dissatisfaction with capitalism. Thompson's prognosis therefore is that the current dependence on oil and gas, and the political struggles related to their extraction and use, will continue into the foreseeable future. The attempts to normalise the use of alternative non fossil fuel energies, and to gain comparative advantage from dominating the development and production of these new forms of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases, is projected to remain a side-play rather than a practical substitute for traditional energy geopolitics. Oil could cut both ways, however, and was influential in the collapse of the Soviet Union (as was the Chernobyl disaster, discussed in my review of Serhii Plokhy’s book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. ) The high oil prices of the 1970s incentivised production of oil and gas from the North Sea, as well as additional output in Alaska and Mexico, and this extra production capacity reduced the ability of Opec to control prices. So too did the creation of oil futures contracts on US exchanges, which gave the holders the right to buy oil at an agreed price in the future. Faced with this, Saudi Arabia led Opec in production cuts in an effort to retain control over prices, but as Saudi Arabia’s income began to fall, it reversed course, pumping up production to secure market share, leading to a price crash in 1986. This hugely diminished oil revenues for the Soviet Union, reducing its capacity to finance domestic spending, adding another destabilising factor that led to the dissolution of the Soviet project in 1991. Russia re-emerged to play the Soviet Union’s role in energy supply internationally, particularly to Europe, complicated by the fact that pipelines ran through former countries of the Soviet bloc, such as Ukraine and Poland. That story is of course very much active today.

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Most troubling is that Thompson’s desire to emphasize the importance of oil and Eurodollars (a term for dollar-denominated lending that occurs outside the United States) in her narrative pushes her to make repeated factual errors. This isn’t a hopeful book. Thompson, as anyone familiar with her matter-of-fact observations on the Talking Politics podcast will know, has a tendency to look for the grit in oyster rather than the pearl. But her insights here, particularly in relation to energy geopolitics, explain much of the predicament we are now in. Understandably, there is nothing much here about the invasion of Ukraine where gas and oil take centre stage. The conclusion does has some speculation on how the shift to carbon neutral away from fossil fuels will change things.

The crisis in the Ukraine, which has broken just as her book was published, if anything strengthens her case about the centrality of energy to international power plays - and its likely continuing dominance in the coming decades as the world slowly weans itself off fossil fuels. Similarly, the emergence of China as a major manufacturing power was so traumatic to the workers of the industrialized world only because the party state ensured that Chinese consumers were unable to spend the money they should have been paid on the goods and services they wanted. China did not practice “export-led growth” but rather wage suppression and financial repression that held down imports. That choice was bad for people in China, but it was also costly for everyone outside China who lost income because they couldn’t sell enough to Chinese customers. I will refrain from summarizing the closing section where she ties these together so you’ll read this excellent book yourself. Generally, I think the problem with the neoliberalism thesis is that its proponents largely downplay the material causes of the 1970s crises. The United States was the world’s largest oil consumer, and it could no longer produce enough oil to meet domestic demand. To import oil from abroad and run an oil-driven trade deficit, it needed foreign creditors, and that necessitated a move to opening international financial markets. In adjusting to this economic reality and the new power of OPEC to set prices and control international supply, Richard Nixon introduced substantial controls on the price, production, and distribution of domestically produced energy. It was primarily in reaction to these controls that the deregulation agenda took shape. Meg Jacobs’s book Panic at the Pump is eye-opening on this subject. This is not to suggest that there was no intellectual genealogy to certain economic policy ideas that are called “neoliberal” and were influential from the 1970s, especially in a number of international institutions and the EU. Of course there was, and Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism has done an excellent job of tracing that history. But we cannot understand either why the 1970s were such a historical juncture or the choices Western governments made in the 1980s about economic policy without seriously engaging with the trajectory of the world’s most significant energy source through that time period.