Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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A thought provoking book that does an admirable job of connecting the dots between energy and financial markets, and the political and geopolitical challenges the world has been facing. Geo Politics - much discussion about Europe - the difference between the European Union (a political alignment) - and the Euro Zone countries that have adopted the Euro as the currency. Thompson indicates that this will be an ongoing Economic Problem for this region - citing the difference between the Nationalist viewpoint and the European wide viewpoint on who pays what level of tax to whom. 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. Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ The book covers a great deal of ground. The first section emphasises the role that oil consumption has had on the choices policymakers can make. She offers a particularly interesting history of how the Suez crisis shaped the choices facing european politicians and how this created a dependency on Russian exports which obviously created lasting divisions. Oil remade the geopolitics of the 20th century and I enjoyed her history of the attempts goverments made to control this resource and the subsequent challenges this created - both for energy exporters and importers.

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Her choice of a tripartite structure for the book I did not like. Of the three, I found her approach towards the analysis of democracy to be the weakest when there are clearly better analytical structures than her chosen one. Although, it can simply be that this area has boundaries beyond which one courts the increasingly repressive forces that would endanger the ability to retain a place in mainstream academic discourse should they be crossed. The analysis of the role of energy was first rate, as well as that of the evolution of the monetary system. DSJ: Is it correct to assume that you believe the move to green energy will play the primary role in accelerating a cold war with China? Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ To give credit where credit is due, the book does offer a valuable perspective on the uncertainties and upheavals of the modern age. For readers patient enough to dissect each sentence and dedicated enough to piece together the scattered puzzle of Thompson's thoughts, there might be some golden nuggets to be found.

The second strand is financial, examining the evolution of the world economy from the collapse of the Bretton Woods settlement through the global financial crisis and the subsequent travails of the European economic and monetary union. The third strand is more straightforwardly political. Here, she relates the changing political landscape in Europe, in particular, to developments in the energy market and the impact of the financial and Eurozone crises on political parties. In most EU countries, the centre ground of politics has splintered and new forces on the far left and far right now play a much more significant role than they did two decades ago. The presidential campaign in France provides a perfect illustration. The Socialist Party has more or less disappeared, and the traditional Gaullists have at times been in fourth position, behind Macron, Marine Le Pen and the far-right Eric Zemmour. David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai However, Thompson is a realist: she notes in her concluding comments the emerging competition for advantage and dominance in renewables and new electrification technology, but argues that Net Zero ambitions currently are illusory, given the limited capacity of the technologies to generate substantial and continuous flows of energy from renewables and to electrify widespread industrial infrastructure powered by oil and gas. Thompson seems here to be echoing the substantial reservations about renewables discussed in recent books on climate politics by American environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, fossil fuel energy campaigner Alex Epstein, and others.

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

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.Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman That said, this book was my introduction to geopolitics. A very compelling but tough read, frankly quite inaccessible at times, which I think could be remedied by some thorough editing. However, definitely still 4 stars, because I have seldomly read something so informative and (paradoxically) elucidating.

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The second reason is more powerful still. While on the surface it may seem that lower oil demand will ease competition over resources, new energy technologies require their own specific metal and minerals resources. Though there are overlaps, these are generally distributed differently to oil resources, adding further dynamics to energy geopolitics – China, a large energy importer in recent decades, has many of the minerals of the clean energy transition. “Geopolitically, an energy change will necessarily result in upheaval. If Britain was the power that climbed to dominance during the age of coal and the United States the power that ascended during the age of oil and coal, the spectre haunting Washington is that without a decisive American strategic turn to renewables and electrification, the new energy age that depends on metals and minerals will belong to China. For the EU, there is the hope that green energy will prove an escape from the world of oil and gas that through the twentieth century did so much to weaken the European powers.” By 2005, Germany had reached several turning points. Economically, the re-emergence of a long-term preference for export-led growth and a large trade surplus left the Eurozone structurally divided, with the deficit states stripped of the safeguard of devaluation the ERM had once provided. Democratically, the 2005 German election began the era of grand coalition politics: between 1949 and 2004, a grand coalition had governed in Germany for less than three years; after the 2005 general election, a grand coalition had, by the start of 2021, governed Germany for all but four years. Geopolitically, a reunified Germany was beginning to reshape Europe’s energy geography. In 2005, Gerhard Schroeder’s government signed the agreement with Russia to construct the first Nord Stream pipeline, threatening Ukraine’s future as an energy transit state for Europe and diminishing Turkey’s utility as one. In the same year, Viktor Yushchenko became president of Ukraine and set about trying to achieve EU and NATO membership while Turkey began EU accession talks. 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. Thus she weaves many events in a world encompassing mesh that made me gasp for breath at times. While I do recognize many of the references, the ease with which Thompson ties them all together is not always very clear. She explicitly intended to forego detail in favour of synthetic interpretation. Another author would have written three books instead, choosing to provide more context.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. HT: I am not sure whether it is primary or not. There is a lot already in play, especially given the rise of China’s navy and high-tech manufacturing competition in defense areas. I also think fossil fuel energy questions have long caused tensions in the US-China relationship, especially on the Chinese side. 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. HT: In the way the distinction between optimism and pessimism is usually applied to politics, I am on the pessimistic side. I don’t think we, as humanity, or as the citizens of individual states or the EU, can collectively choose whatever future we wish. I think whatever the big political and indeed ethical problems that the whole structure of international finance creates, it would be impossible to dismantle it without a collapse. That does not mean everything around it is a given—but outside that collapse scenario, I don’t believe it can be radically transformed. We live in the world of quantitative easing now, and for the monetary and financial system to function, central banks have to maintain the confidence of international financial markets.

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DSJ: I’m intrigued by your claim that the humanitarian tragedy in Syria was even more disruptive than the Iraq War. Can you explain your reasoning here, especially as it relates to new interstate rivalries and the challenges facing NATO? 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. Thompson's core contention as noted in her introduction is that 'energy has largely gone unrecognized as an important cause of (recent) geopolitical and economic fault lines.' This is not unexpected. The primacy given to ideological and cultural factors in modern histories seems reasonable. The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic. Deindustrialization, financial crises, mass unemployment, chaos in the Middle East, and rising inequality have shortened life expectancies, undermined social stability, and opened the door to demagogues and authoritarians. And that was before the pandemic killed tens of millions of people and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine displaced millions more and upended global commodity markets.

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The work is ambitious in scope and the author spared no effort digging into details to support her arguments. The result is a set of novel insights on a number of historical events over the past few decades.