Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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Future global geopolitics may not be as grimly repetitive or dystopianly restrictive as Thompson seems to suggest, if a core dynamic of global progress is the conflict between democratic and authoritarian impulses for governing, of which energy politics is a subset rather than the determinative factor. 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? 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. the destabilizing inflation and related unemployment of the 1970s when Middle Eastern oil producers used their market power to raise prices;

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Of course, these largely benign conditions did not eliminate the disruptive capacity of some of the forces that began to move before the 1980s. The immediate turbulence generated by the Maastricht Treaty and the 1992–93 ERM crises bequeathed systemic problems: at the turn of the millennium, the EU was a multi-currency union that contained a Eurozone larger than Germany had ever intended with an offshore financial centre located in the wider Union. Quite clearly, the EU also had a long-term predicament centered around the relationship between Union-level treaties and national elections. In the United States, the fact that the 1992 presidential election was won on the lowest percentage of the popular vote since 1912 and the prolonged attempt by congressional Republicans to remove Bill Clinton from office by impeachment were early indications of the path the American republic was on towards weak losers’ consent. I always try to give books a fair shake, but sometimes, it’s just not meant to be, and unfortunately, this was one of those times. I started it with enthusiasm (yes, I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to socio-political analyses), but ended up waving the white flag before reaching the end.

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Quite simply, without taking energy seriously there is no persuasive story that can be told about the trajectories of economies from the 1970s through to the 1980s, or their political consequences, including those that led to the euro’s creation,” she writes. Readers of a liberal and optimistic disposition will be grateful for Thompson's detailed analysis of contemporary energy politics, but may finish the book with a more encouraging expectation that the energy resource strategies of autocracies such as Russia and China have less flexibility to progress successfully in the 21st century than the more dynamic democratic societies of North America and Europe (especially if the latter can resolve its governance contradictions). 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.

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Most of us struggle to keep up [with the news], but not Helen Thompson - she doesn't merely grip each strand, but ties them together.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. 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. The tragedy of Europe’s post-2008 experience is that there was no such conflict. Until the war in Ukraine, inflation in Europe had consistently been slower than the central bank’s target, thanks in large part to economic weakness caused by the euro crisis itself. The German government may have been led by scolds who practiced “ pedagogical imperialism,” in the words of Der Spiegel, but ordinary Germans failed to benefit from its austerity. They may have done better than the millions of Spaniards who lost their jobs, but they nevertheless suffered from meager wage growth and degraded public services.

Disorder by Helen Thompson | Waterstones

Echoing the language of many of the technocrats who set policy for much of this period, Thompson seems to believe that elected governments are powerless against vast and impersonal financial markets. But “financial markets” are just people trying to make money—or avoid losing it—while following the leads of regulators, legislators, and central bankers. Downplaying the agency of these political actors leads to unsatisfying explanations and a few outright errors. The book examines the global political economy with an emphasis on how dollar has become even more important in global transactions weakening American monetary power over America's domestic economy while magnifying the importance of its decisions on foreign nations which need prompt help in tough times which is not always forthcoming. I am not an economist so I am not really able to be super critical of her claims but they seemed reasonable and I found her arguments interesting, especially the critical role of eurodollar markets and the difficult strictures the eurozone is in.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. and most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where valuable Russian gas exports to Europe are vulnerable to transmission tariffs imposed by Ukraine on the pipelines that traverse it (and where Russia objects to Ukraine's efforts to deter Russian interference by applying to join the EU and NATO). Nonetheless, the move to green energy is very much a part of the present geopolitical competition between the United States and China. I think there is a fear in Washington that, in the same way the age of oil geopolitically belonged to the United States and to some degree the Soviet Union, the age of green energy will belong to China, not least because of China’s dominance in the metals on which non-carbon energy production depends.

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Very interesting perspectives. Even before finishing it I noticed that my take on some of the daily news has changed by incorporating some of her insights. ''The book is as disturbing as it is thought-provoking'', says Martin Wolf in choosing it as one of this books for summer 2022. 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.

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Why should the world believe grand assertions that democracies are fundamentally challenged by “the problem of political time” in ways that autocracies, presumably, are not? Why should a global switch to green energy intensify “Sino-American rivalry” if it reduces the zero-sum competition for fossil fuel resources? And if “the United States succeeds in breaking its dependency on Chinese manufacturing supply chains” while “China expands its domestic markets to compensate,” why would that necessitate conflict, as opposed to restoring the amicable relations that preceded the dislocations of the 2000s? A final teasing thought may also occur: if the climate change constraint is relaxed over the next two decades because the modeling that underpins it seems to continually overshoot, then current barriers being erected to the ongoing development and use of fossil fuels will be reduced. It is a dense book. While the absence of superfluous words is welcome, it surely could have been made easier to read. 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.