Helen Thompson: Disorder. Europe's Energy Reckoning

welcome everybody to this uh transformative Salon um or Salon I don't know how you pronounce it even said one is maybe more about shooting people this is more about entertaining people uh I'm really thrilled uh to present to you uh Helen Thompson who has arrived this morning from Cambridge By Night Train as I heard traveling given her topic the way how she should be traveling energy consciousness probably because she's dealing with energy she knows you know how to it's important to save energy so let me tell a few words about our speaker today um if that yeah it's the worst so Helen Thompson is a professor of political economy at the department of politics and international studies at Cambridge and her her topics is international political economy she mostly deals with issues of energy finance and geopolitics and she has written a number of books among them all in the western economic crisis from which came out in 2018 uh China and the more and mortgaging of Europe which came out in 2010 and actually I have a copy just a moment the most recent book also the reason for this invitation is basically a disorder hard times in the 21st century and for everyone who hasn't uh read that book I highly recommend it because it's really a tour de force and an eye-opener on many many levels so she deals in that book with the geopolitics of energy with the financial International Financial monetary system and with domestic politics and democracy so no small topics and somehow they are all related in any way um so the talk today I think is building exactly on this book I should also say it it came out basically almost the day maybe a month after right the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine so and given that the book has a chapter that finishes on Ukraine uh I I think one of the issues we will hear is you know how has your thinking evolved since since the war started the way it started and but the book gives you a lead of what or some of the elements of what has led to the war so um I'm very much looking forward to listening to you Helen uh and the floor is yours thank you very much um sorry I hope that I can be heard at the back because this might be good it's a absolute pleasure to be in um Vera whereas the city I like very much last time I was here was the summer before the pandemic which now seems quite a long time ago uh sorry I was delighted to be able the chance to um to come back and I think it's as good a place in as any in in Europe to think about the kind of questions that I've been interested in for the last few years and that as though says the war have kind of shapen really sharpened I should say uh pretty um acutely what I want to do uh today or this evening is to try and give it like a long historical perspective as to to where we are in Europe and to what I call Europe's energy retining um just to give you some sense of of where we're going and where I'm going because I'm going to dwell in the past for a while is good want to end up with really the two energy in a way I would say crises that Europe as a whole face the first about fossil fuel energy and gas in particular in relation to the war and the second about the energy transition and I want to situate that both in the long history of Europe's disorders in the 20s a century but also tie them to the way in which energy in my view has been Central to the project of European Unity um since the beginning at least in its 20th century reforms um anyway and in order I think to to understand this we need to start with two fossil fuel energies and to see something that's very different about them the first is about coal and the second is about oil now what was true about coal was as We Know it led my country uh into the industrial revolution before any other country and it's really impossible I think to understand British Imperial power in the middle of the 19th century without understanding the centrality of coal and Britain's geographical Fortune around coal to Britain's early industrialization I always think it's pretty difficult to understand Germany's economic rise when Germany was unified in 1870 separate from the issue of Germany's geographical Fortune where Cole was concerned but that isn't all that there is to be said about coal and European countries because some European countries I would say most consequentially France were not so geographically um fortunate and it was also the case for Germany that it didn't have the same quite the same advantages that Britain had because when it's it didn't have coal and iron deposits basically right next to the coal and what I mean this is slightly schematized but I hope it will be clear for my why I'm doing this is one way of thinking about this is to see alsas Lorraine uh as a place that had to be fought over from Germany's point of view because of iron deposits and the other side of the Ryan had to be fought over from the French point of view because of coal so if we if we think about the coal story in Europe it's a story that incites if you like interim European conflict Central to conflicts between France and Germany whether that's the franco-prussian war the first world war the rural crisis the Second World War oils are very different story because when the age of oil begins really I'd suggest in the latter part of the 19th century but really accelerates at the beginning of the 20th century as it becomes clear that oil will replace coal in naval ships no European country if we exclude Russia as being a European country except actually Austria has well Austria and Romania sure I should put the Romanians in has oil and the two big oil producers are the United States and Russia and I don't think it's a coincidence at all that those two countries albeit in the form of the Soviet Union in Russia's case go on to dominate geopolitically the 20th um century but from the point of view of the European countries including obviously Britain the most powerful state in the world at the beginning of the 20th century the age of oil looks like it's going to be a disaster and the British and the Germans right from the start I'd say from the 1890s understand that they need Empire now to secure oil or they need if not direct Empire and they need spheres of influence where there is oil and one way of thinking about this again I'm going to make things a bit more simple than they are at times to make the point is the British concentrate on Persia quite successfully in a way oils discovered in Persia present day Iran in 1908 Germany concentrates on the Ottoman empire particularly Mesopotamia The Kaisers wilhelms very keen on cultivating relationship with the Ottomans for that reason um the French at that point don't actually get themselves really into the Middle East but they do have French money go to Russia and at that point the center of the Russian oil industry is in Baku in in present day um azerbai um John so what we see during at the beginning of the of the first world war is growing geopolitical competition between Britain and Germany to control oil resources in the Middle East all the European countries being dependent upon importing oil either from Russia or from the Western hemisphere which means the United States principally but also Mexico and Venezuela what we see in the first world war then is is that those crucial sites of oil in Eurasia meaning in the Middle East and in Baku are fought over in some sense you might say they're the geopolitical prizes of the first World War and the outcome of that is that Britain and France get their position in the Middle East most benefits and Britain but France is also a winner and indeed gets handed um the Deutsche Banks share in the Turkish petroleum company which had the rights to explore for oil in Mesopotamia and then there's a there's a huge fight goes on in the latter part of the first world war about the Baku oil fields and at different times the British the Germans the Ottomans try to get them and they end up back with a Soviets and again in the same way in which Germany loses in the Middle East in the first world war it loses that fight in Baku over um back in and as I say it has Deutsche Bank has to hand over its share in the Turkish petroleum company so one way then to to understand the catastrophes that are going to come in the interval years and through the second world war is to see what a problem Germany has after the the piece of 19 well let's just say that the the the the final Conflict so by the time the present-day Turkey um is um established and what you see in the Vermont period is an attempt to find a technological solution to that problem which is to use the resource that Germany does have coal and turn it via technology into oil so synthetic oil the Germans actually do that remarkably successfully and that begins in the Weimar period but obviously where the Nazis are concerned that is not deemed sufficient and Hitler inbox upon the conquest of I mean I I know the conquest of Eastern Europe and Southern Russia isn't just about Baku it's about Ukraine and the agricultural land there too but part of it is an obsession with um Baku and then that means the annihilation of the populations um living there so there isn't I think any way really of escaping how the dark part of the 20th century in Europe is bound up with the question uh about um oil um what then we might understand the post-war period um as is a way in which Western Europe in general and West Germany in particular try to Grapple with the problem in which conquest and Empire are no longer any part of the solution can no longer be any part of the solution in the British case the British can obviously stay in the Middle East after the second world war initially and not only can they stay there but actually the Americans are actually now quite Keen for the British to stay as the Imperial power in the Middle East because they don't want West European countries either importing oil from the United States or indeed anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere because the Americans are sufficiently worried about their long-term Supply and they want it for themselves essentially neither from at least 1948 49 did they want West European countries importing oil from the Soviets or but albeit it should be said at that point the Soviet oil industry is in quite a dilapidated State um after the second world war so the Americans are saying to Western European countries you need to import oil from the Middle East we are relying on the British to be the guarantor of your energy Security in the Middle East because we don't want to play that role for ourselves in West Germany's case on the coal side initially there is also the problem that actually there's lots of restrictions that are put on Germany's coal production in the rural as a terms of the um piece so Germany kind of West Germany I should say begin as a second the post-world war second world war period with no energy sovereignty I would suggest and that a story of Germany's history through the rest of the 20th century has been about trying to claw that sovereignty back again I would suggest to the point that now some of it has been lost for reasons I've come obviously um come um back to him but I think what's important to see then is what a turning point the suis crisis of 1956 is now you know I'm British I grew up being told endlessly in my I don't think we were taught about at the school to be honest but my University education and British politics they would tell us that the serious crisis was all about British hubris the British Empire finding but people are rule in the British Empire finally realizing that time was up and they were taught the lesson about the realities of the post um Imperial world and I came during the course of writing disorder to realize that this was a was not untrue narrative but there's much much more to be said about the Suez Crisis than that and it's a real turning point I would say in Western Europe's full 20th century uh history because basically what it says what it said was what happened there was when the British and French tried to look after British and French and West German and Italian and a small West European countries too energy Security in the Middle East in the way in which the British had been told they were supposed to the Americans said no no we didn't really want you to do that because we don't want you to do something that looks like your anti-arab nationalism but it's a turning point because the reaction not just in Britain and France but in West Germany in particular is one of absolute Fury I don't know I thought it was a complete kind of an hour there was German Chancellor but it was a complete betrayal of German sorry European region of State what happened over Sue is he went to Paris during the crisis he seems to have been there when Anthony Eden the British prime minister called guy mole the French prime minister and said we're having to stop and he turned to Molly and he said Europe will be your revenge and we can't really I think understand the beginnings of the 20th century Europe sorry the post-1945 European integration project outside the context of the the serious crisis and these energy questions I'm going to come back to that in a moment but I just want to do one detour back into coal before we get on to the aftermath of Suez because if we think of the first three bits of successful European integration European colon Steel Community European atomic energy Community European economic Community I think they've all got something to do with energy the first two obviously but I I want to suggest that the European economic Community does as that does as well so if we go back to the Franco German issue about coal and particularly France's side of the problem we can see I think that actually having a solution to the coal problem of France's ability to import coal reliably reasonably cheaply from Germany was actually a necessary condition of bringing franco-german conflict to an end and that is I would suggest what the fundamental purpose of the European coal and Steel Community was unless the coal problem was solved particularly for France there was not going to be peace between France and Germany let's move then on to um the series quite the aftermath of the the series um crisis I'm going to start with the nuclear power side of it and then move to the European economic community and oil um side um of it now it's certainly the case that a number of European countries were attracted to the idea of atomic energy before the series Crisis it was really President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech that really um convinced pretty much all the West European governments I would suggest initially um that there was an alternative energy future that would completely as they saw it then free them from this foreign energy dependency problem because they very much had internalized this idea that Europe's weakness came from its energy weakness so if you had a form of energy that wasn't fossil fuel energy and which Europe wasn't at a disadvantage and could build its own nuclear reactors then there was the idea that Europe would get its energy autonomy or even sovereignty um back again and at this point I know this is not the way that it turned out but at this point in the middle of the 1950s The Hope was not just that nuclear power could generate all the electricity that any of us might want to use but that it will be possible to replace oil in transportation with nuclear energy too so if you listen to if you go back and read the speeches that are made including the early speeches from officials within the European atomic energy Community once it was created it's it's full of this language of basically Europe getting its freedom by nuclear power and also by doing it supernationally and not just on a um a national basis the problem while those a number of problems obviously nuclear power turned out to involve safety questions and probably even more importantly in practice cost questions that proved extremely difficult um to manage but it's also the case that it didn't solve the resource foreign resource dependency problem because uranium so European countries didn't have uranium the only one initially that had uranium in one of its colonies was Belgium in the Congo and the wartime Belgian government signed that over to the Americans during the course of the of the War so the idea that your time could be either European atomic energy Community could be a vehicle of European freedom from foreign resource dependency really fell down at the start on that um problem uh and in the end by the 1970s the uh the Americans who were selling considerable amount of the uranium in which uranium that was coming to West European countries for nuclear power undercutter they embargo the sale um of it so actually well there isn't there is another incident which we maybe talk about maybe talk about later of the Americans basically trying to restrict European energy policy the uranium enrichment ban in the 70s is actually it is actually the second um of them just as a note because it's got a parallel story in the moment is is that the place where France and West Germany turned after that was the Soviet Union and it's quite significant that during the course of the war um the one energy source that hasn't in any way been subject to sanctions or indeed subject to embargo on the Russia's side is on nuclear is on nuclear power what then about the oil question and um sewers now one of the responses on the oil side was to push ahead with something the Italians have been pushing since before the series Crisis which was the turn to Soviet oil so Khrushchev at that time was interested in reconstructing the Soviet oil industry for export again the Soviets had exported oil from the late 20s through to the mid 1930s in fact for Germany a bit longer than um that so it's not that the Soviet oil trade begins only after the serious crisis it's more a resumption than a beginning but that is the basis uh that turn is the basis of the present tense European Russian energy relationship that met it's the Newman last year um with the um beginning um of the war so there's a line that runs from like sewers I would suggest to the Ukraine um crisis but the other thing or the thing that I particularly want to bring out about oil here is actually in relation to the creation of the European economic community so at that point in 1956 in the Autumn of 1956 the negotiations for what would become the Treaty of Rome were well underway but they were kind of stalled and they were largely stored I would suggest like on the French side was considerable uncertainty in the French government not necessarily amongst French officials but amongst French politicians about whether they really wanted to go down this road and indeed at one point sort of during the serious crisis Molly had kind of like asked if it wasn't possible to have a union with Britain uh it was the things were that sort of Uncertain what was going on um in um Paris but the French were in one sense I would suggest felt even more betrayed by what had happened at series and the British um did not least I would suggest because they were probably betrayed by the British and the Americans not just by the um Americans um they knew full well that there was a country where Oil had been discovered that very year 1956 and that was Algeria and obviously at that point Algeria was still a French colony so from the French point of view post service and the Really aftermath of Suez the idea of having a large unified West European market in which Franco Algerian oil could be sold into was extremely attractive idea is quite notable that while the French did not push to have Algeria as part of France included in in the European corn Steel Community it was included and the Treaty of Rome until algeria's um Independence um and I think you can see if you look at some of the the rhetoric in France around this and indeed the way the various African countries reacted to the Treaty of Rome it was very much to see it as this was the moment in which Europe Western Europe was securing its resource base for the future and that meant a resource base in Africa for a richer European market indeed Molly when he was in the United States um in um in 1957 on the completion of the European economic Community talks told the U.S Senate I'm firmly convinced that you're Africa I mean in the union of Europe and Africa with Africa providing the resource and the energy resource base will be the reality of tomorrow now this one obviously also fell down too because the algerians fought for their independence and they had it in 1962 and although as part of that the goal the French President Charles de Gaulle negotiated a a very good deal for the French energy companies in Algeria by the 19 early 1970s energy nationalism was Rife across the Middle East and across North Africa um and those French energy companies were nationalized and so Algerian oil turned out not to be the answer either to Europe's foreign oil dependency problem I want to turn now to to gas and this is going to get us to where we are in the in the in the present because gas is a different story in this or in in in a number of respects and I think that this is what I've kind of seen more clearly over the course of the last year since I finished sources the book I finished the book actually sometime before given how long academic trade Publishers take to publish um I see more clearly this gas story I think than before the war so if you look at gas as an energy exhaust Europe's about four decades late to the show compared to the Americans Americans start using gas and significant quantities in the 1920s Europeans don't start using gas in significant quantities to the 1960s it is a bit being used in industry but at such low scale that even a country like Germany which is as we know not well endowed with hydrocarbons at all Beyond coal could make do on domestic supply of gas but there are three things that really I think change that position in the 1960s and the choices European countries make about gas the first again is Algeria that it wasn't just oil that was found in Algeria but gas too so that becomes an option of one the French are particularly keen on the Dutch find the grinnigan field in the late 1950s and it's clear that that is going to have it has a significant amount of of gas in it later there's North Sea but for Norway and Britain but things had already moved by the point in the North Sea really comes into play and then there's Soviet gas and in the same way in which Khrushchev was interested in well in this case Khrushchev and then pressure now we're interested in pushing um Soviet oil into Western Europe because Soviets wanted export earning higher export earnings and they were interested in gas too and in the late 60s the discoveries in West Siberia made it clear that there was enormous amounts of gas in uh in in the Soviet Union well well beyond what had um previously been the case so really the West European countries get to choose really what to do about this the options and the one as we know that really becomes the most significant really is the Soviet one interestingly it's actually Austria that with Italy pushes hardest on this first the the West Germans are are late to the game actually and so although it is true the brand Willie Brandt after he becomes Chancellor sees that there's a way of tying energy trade with the Soviet Union to us polity but he's also only actually following what the Austrian and the Austrian government and the Italians have um already done and what you can see then through the 70s is that that gas trade with the the Soviet Union becomes ever more important and eventually new pipelines are built that connect Western Europe to that gas that's from coming from Western Siberia and as we know those pipelines still end up running through um Ukraine now what I just want to stress here is and this is where the the first incident the first instance well I suppose you could say the series is the first case of of Americans saying no to what Europeans want to do with energy in the post-war world the first big no the second big no is in the early 60s when uh during the Cuban Missile Crisis and immediately after it the Kennedy administration basically wants European countries to stop selling pipe steel pipes to the Soviet Union in building the oil pipeline that's going to bring oil from the Soviet Union to Western Europe what what becomes the drugs per pipeline and what's interesting here is is that actually the Italians kind of ignore the Americans but the West Germans don't they really don't they have they they Buckle they Buckle under or I don't know and these Buckle Sunday what's interesting about the story in the them gas when we're moving on to so it's 1969 when the first gas agreement the West German Soviet first gas agreement there is no real American pressure at that point indeed Lyndon Johnson is American president pretty much holds his hands up and sort of basically says you can do what you like I mean partly because he's preoccupied uh actually so it's first Nicks Johnson and then Nixon he was a preoccupied with um Vietnam but it's also because at this point the Americans have got ideas themselves that they might need Soviet oil and gas and indeed Lake Nixon is even talking about Fusion projects with the with the with the Soviet um Union so European countries get into the age let's call it of the Soviet gas trade without this American problem really hanging over them even though the agreement that the the the first link sorry the negotiations that that brand pursues in March 1969 or in early 1969 is coming in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia it's hardly a a non-conflictual time in the Cold War in in Europe when this is beginning what changes though in the 80s in the early 80s is that the next of these Soviet Eastern rural Eastern Europe crises the one in Poland where obviously the tanks don't come in from Moscow but martial law is declared in Poland this time the Reagan Administration says that pipeline that you're building with the Soviets from Western Siberia the Trans-Siberian pipeline is a problem and you need to stop it and what's interesting is is that the Europeans win that confrontation is they make a few token gestures to the Americans but essentially Reagan Administration has to back down and the British Mr stature is actually very adamantly on the French and the German side about um this and stands up to Reagan even though the British are not going to benefit from the from the from the um the pipeline um because she's quite willing to see the issue as one really of European energy sovereignty and that Americans don't get to dictate how Europe deals with its energy dependency um problems I would suggest then if we think about the present that the first Nordstrom pipeline so the one that was agreed by Schroeder in 2005 and that was completed and began operation in 2011. that still fits into that story even though it's becoming significantly harder to maintain European Unity because by 2005 European Union as we know has eastern European members not least Poland and Poland was from the beginning extraordinarily unhappy about the Nordstrom pipeline the then polish foreign minister compared it to the Nazi Soviet pact in 2005 but there wasn't much American pressure on that it's becoming at that point it's an internally divisive European issue but it's not really pushing West Germany into a loss of sovereignty over gas what changes as we know is a second Nordstrom pipeline agreed 2015 by Merkel coming in the aftermath of Russia's annexation of Crimea and then Schultz had to say it wasn't going ahead even before The Invasion came so two days and so the two days or three days before The Invasion he says we're going to have a security assessment of this which means it's not going to be which means it's not it's not going to go ahead and part of the reason for that is is because he'd been to Washington and he quite humiliatingly had to stand next to Biden and Biden said if there's a war we will find a way to bring Nordstrom to um and then and given that Germany then entered the war period As We Know with no liquid natural gas ports at all no long-term contracts because it didn't have any means of of importing directly um gas then that was a humiliating end for for for for for for um Germany so I think there's a really clear story to tell which I kind of see a bit better now than I did perhaps about West Germany in this which is the way in which it clawed back its energy sovereignty through the second half of the 20th century into the 21st century and then it's been on um it started really I would suggest have a problem from the annexation of Crimea and that now it's now it's in a it's in a very um difficult position well then about Nets net zero because this is obviously the hope that the energy transition or as I prefer to call it the energy Revolution um is going to change all this um that we as Europeans are going to be free finally from this problem that is in some sense haunted us since the beginning of the 20th um century and I think that there's something to this in a way in this and I I don't think if the energy Revolution is successful it will be quite as difficult as all this has been that if you are using the sun and the wind and you're using electricity for many more purposes then we do now particularly using it in relation to transportation certain things that have been problems um do go away um because the sun and the wind don't belong arbitrarily to different places on Earth I mean obviously I come from an island where the sun doesn't shine that much so Britain's solar prospects are not great but Britain's wind prospects on the other hand are are pretty good they live on you know live on a soggy windy wet windy um Island and I think most parts of Europe have at least got one of them that go in there that that go in there um favor I think the difficulty though is as I'm sure some of you have already thought about is this question about metals because here Europe is not particularly well endowed with Metals it's we still are geographically unfortunate in this respect now I don't actually think from as far as I understand these issues and I'm not not at all a geologist that the metals that are necessary from the energy transition are not quite as arbitrarily distributed under the Earth's surface as oil and gas matter but there are asymmetries and they don't benefit Europe and I think just as importantly though we have a politics and all pretty most European countries that is really probably more sensitive to environmental questions I would suggest and perhaps anywhere else in the world including North America and so so far as there are metals that are necessary for energy transition in Europe I fear that most Europeans I don't necessarily I'm not trying to get on a high horsebacks and exclude them myself um we're not that Keen on the idea of them of mining metals or the environmental damage that that brings with it and we're a bit Keener on the idea that it happens in other parts of the world out of sight and then we import them back and I think that that's going to be pretty difficult because I think that this really reignites in the countries that will be subject to our demand for these Metals the history of Western European imperialism in other parts of the world um these are countries that themselves not only want to do the energy Revolution but they also want much higher energy consumption than they presently have and what we in Europe are kind of telling them is that we want you to do the energy transition we want you to help us do the energy to our energy um transition by selling us metals and allowing our companies to invest in your countries and by the way we're holding on to our fossil fuel energy for as long as necessary to get through the energy transition whilst we'll be telling you that you shouldn't be building new coal Coal Power file coal powered electric power stations fire power stations and I think that one of the unfortunate consequences of the war has been that we in Europe showed and I'm very much including the United Kingdom in this that in the emergency that we went back to Coal I'm not saying anything about Austria because I don't know but in Britain there were three um coal-fired power stations that were due to clothes that are now being kept open in fact in the early part of the war they were also burning Russian coal or at least one of them was burning Russian coal um to um to do that so our ability in Europe to do climate change diplomacy when we showed in the emergency that we will in some sense treat coal as the energy source of Last Resort uh I think is um is um pretty um difficult um I think that this is a few final um thoughts I think one of the problems that we face in Europe is is that our expectations of energy consumption were formed in a geopolitical era that no longer exists in fact it hasn't really existed for some time and I think that we have seen through the course of the war the way in which we have insignificant part dealt with the absence of pipelined Russian gas by depriving poor Asian countries particularly in Pakistan of gas that they actually had on long term contract and it was worth it for the companies with a Qatari or American companies um to break those contracts and pay the penalties and sell that gas more profitably on in European to European countries in spot markets I think it also means that we have both common interests with China and also a rivalry with China is is that our problems look more like China's because of our ongoing foreign fuel sorry foreign fossil fuel energy dependency but we also will be competing with China for some of that Supply particularly gas one of the things that probably made it easier for us to get through last winter was because China had as many economic problems as it did during the course of 2022 so it's gas demand was significantly lower in 22 than it was in um 20 um 21. um if I wanted to finish on a kind of like optimistic note I would say that though that Europe is a place where actually politicians in an away citizens though in a complicated manner have been dealing with really difficult energy questions for a very very very long time and I think although we live with inflated expectations of energy consumption we've actually got in a way a political classes that are quite hardened to the problems of energy now that might produce some unpalatable outcomes like basically what happened with Pakistan during the course of um last year but I think there is a certain energy realism in in Europe and actually although her policy on Russia gas came to a humiliating end I think that Merkel did actually understand these questions really quite well and I think if you look at what she said and Her speech at Davos in January 2020 so just before the pandemic was starting she was gave a really realistic honest assessment of where the energy transition got to in Germany in particular um and she wasn't being on Julie pessimistic or fatalistic but she was being very honest about it and she said you know we're a point where we need to basically think how we live our lives and that we may be turning our backs on the way in which we have lived our lives for a long time and I think the fact that European politician can talk in that kind of language does actually give me some kind of Hope through this story thank you very much indeed for this taking us really back to the last before last century and going all the way to our current predicaments now if Merkel is the sign of hope I have serious thoughts on him and at least I wish she would have taught this when she came to power not after she left power because I think there's of course something but anyway thank you very much um I guess we all need a little bit of digestion so I opened the floor four questions if you need more time I am happy to chip in but I see already a raised hands so please um Professor a political economy at the central European University here in Vienna and I spent many years of my youth actually in an economic research institute in Hungary where our main task was to figure out how to trick the Soviets with economic policy solutions to give more hard Goods oil for local episode Hungarian manufacturing exports and we felt patriotic when we found a solution now your lecture actually confronts me with the literature which I teach now to my students which is the literature about resources so it's precisely literature about countries which need to solve the problems of having oil your lecture is about countries that try to solve their problems of not having oil and then the resources literature basically test the developing countries okay if you happen to have oil the best solution is not to exploit it that's saving for the future but if you exploit National corporations not your state-owned firms because they do it better if you manage and you get revenues don't spend it to your population but rather save it for the future when the oil Market is in bust now your countries or your historical uh over you basically test the countries that don't have resources or oil either can solve the problem true coercion right and political influence or trade unequal trade or something in English so here is my question how do you relate these two English literatures do these situations have anything to do together to speak to each other I'm not an energy specialist right thanks that's a really good question um I think it's well several things come to mind guess what I think that there's something odd in the way in which their resource curse literature is so much bigger than any engagement with the resource dependency literature there isn't a lot um and well you know all there is but it comes it's really written it's really written by historians without much conceptual framework to it in the sense that they wouldn't use the language of his of resource dependency but they they're you know there are obviously historians who would tell the history of significant parts of the 20th century through the oil lens I'm thinking of for instance like Peter franchopan's book uh on the silk um Road where oil is very much to the fore in his 20th century um account but I don't think there's much engagement from political science or indeed within political economy about the resource dependency um problem I mean I think that's to be honest in part because on good part because so much political economy I don't know what you think about this story is it just it's never really at least in the anglophone world it's never really got to grit to geopolitics and so if you don't get to grits with geopolitics I don't think you're going to get to grips with the kind of resource for resource dependency that that I'm um talking um about I think it's also partly because it involves some really hard questions to think about as your opinions that I think a lot of the time we'd rather just like not think too hard about um and that's both in relation to Empire and its relation to Germany's fate through the first half of the the 20th um century and yeah I I was putting this you need a certain kind of like I realize at certain point you need a kind of certain kind of strength of mind to think about some of these questions it's easier not to think about them I I think the really interesting question though in a way about this is like the United States because it's never really put into the quote it's never really put into the category of the resource curse um politics it's seen as an example well it's either ignored or it's basically seen as an example where Oil doesn't have to be a curse but what I came to the conclusion was in writing the Democracy part of my book and I was in the end I could spend less time on this than I originally I sort of had thousands of words that just there wasn't space for and got scrapped uh is how much U.S policy domestic politics in the 20th century is shaped by oil and so the interesting thing there is is like why is that not in Chopper focus in a lot of the literature but also then what do you do when you get to the 70s and then instead of having a resource curse problem so to speak the US has a resource dependency problem you know they're over a very short period of time it moves from being largely domestically self-sufficient where energy is concerned to being the largest oil importer in the world and what is then the destabilizing effect of that on American politics and I tried to engage that a bit with what I wrote about America in the book but as I say it was it it became a bit too difficult to hold the whole narrative together and spending too much time um on that but I think that in terms of political economy that political economy both has to get to has to get to grips better with both of both of the problems and not think that the resource um curse if we're going to use that language is just something that happens to developing countries I don't think that that's right and I particularly don't think it's right in relation to the United States you are there any other yes the mic must be somewhere there exactly um okay can you um I'm Christmas I'm heading the office system here in Vienna beginning with Precinct Corporation so I have one question because on Germany and one on peace um you mentioned that West Germany kind of clawed back its energy sovereignty after the AUST politician until the annexation of Crimea and I'm I was just wondering how you could describe a situation like Germany in that years as energy sovereign and the second question is a bit broader um you describe many of the conflicts related to energy in the first part of the 20th century um but didn't mention any of the conflicts arising um on the transformation towards net zero um and would you put the war in Ukraine right now the Russian aggression against Ukraine in this broader context of the transition towards net zero our decoupling from Russian fossil fuels until 2013 which was announced before the war and so on and so forth thank you very much yep yeah I should have been a bit clearer about this energy sovereignty question what I mean by that is that Germany has a foreign energy dependency problem from the beginning of the age of uh oil and what happens as a result of the the second world war is that it in some sense I would say is stripped of its Authority partly formally and partly informally to decide how to handle that problem that are basically the Americans set parameters and they set legal restrictions initially in relation to coal and obviously the initial idea Roosevelt administration is actually completely to really to abolish Germany's energy sovereignty the Morgantown plan because it's to de-industrialize Germany and I've kind of come to the view that the best way to understand the motivation of that is actually to say we can't have Germany having a foreign energy dependency problem and if that's the case we can't have it be an industrial power because you can't be in industrial power without having energy and that was going that was going to mean um oil and then you have these various episodes where basically the Americans say no you can't do that I I know they're not saying no directly to the West Germans at Syria's but that's how Adenauer experienced um they say no to the drasba pipeline in terms of Germany being able to sell steel pipes they don't say no to then first get you know gas trade with that Brands contracts they do try to then say no to Trans-Siberian also missing out the selling saying no to buying uranium from the United States so when I say sovereignty I mean the authority to decide how to deal on German terms with the German foreign fossil fuel dependency and it's not just from foreign resource dependency problem let's let's um let's call it um thought I think this question of like how we should understand the tumor of the last year in relation to the different energy questions in play is like is really complicated um I'm not of the view that Russia or the Russian leadership is particularly worried about the speed in which the energy transition is going to occur such that Russia is going to end up without markets in the medium term for its um you know for its oil and gas if we just take oil even probably on an optimistic scenario like the world's using about 100 million barrels of oil a day at the moment if we're in 30 years time we're using 60 million that would be pretty good really compared to speed of change like so far and then you ask where that 60 million is going to come from probably 10 million of it will be coming from Russia which is about 10 million of what's coming from Russia at the moment it's it's quite hard to see how Russia isn't in the last group standing where oil production um is um concerned so I I I don't really buy any explanation that says Putin's motivated to act in the way in which he has because he realizes the time of Russian Leverage is quite quickly coming to an end I don't think that that's I I don't think that that's um the case um neither am I really convinced quite convinced by the idea that um Russia really wants the donbass for resource with these reasons for itself um I think that the the real um opportunities in energy terms for Russia for the medium term are in the Arctic and in Shale in Siberia and they're not in in the donbass I think it's reasonable to say that probably the Russians don't want Western I.E American companies operating in Ukraine or in the Black Sea which was the case prior to the annexation of of Crimea I think you can actually make quite a reasonable argument that makes resources not Russia trying to procure resources but Russia trying to shut out American companies in particular from Ukraine and like the oil and gas exploration as a reason as to why Putin decided to Annex Crimea in 2014. I think it's pretty hard to come up with a pipeline explanation for why he made his move against Ukraine after all um there's only two pipelines that is bringing the gas to Europe or the only two sets of pipelines that are still being asked you were one under the Black Sea the two extreme and the other is through Ukraine's um system so even at this point uh Ukraine makes money by transiting Russian gas um to um to Europe so I I don't think that Putin the war is motivated by directly by energy concerns or an energy resource conflict concerns let's call it um that I think it may have been motivated by in part by fears about Russian position in the Black Sea and that that does have an energy dimension um to it but I think fundamentally cusin is never recognized a legitimacy of a independent Ukrainian nation state um that I think that that's not in the end about energy uh the war though quite obviously has profound energy implications but I'm not really convinced it's the cause of it though I do think it's as I say I do think it it's an important part of the the reason for the annexation of Crimea okay any okay then I can trip in for a moment um with another question and that is you you I mean I actually have two questions but the first one is um it described Europe typically as the UK you um Germany France I mean we clearly have a very different consolation now with the enlargement of the European Union and with mentioned it partly with Eastern Europe um becoming part of the European policy mix and of course now we I mean especially since the war we have really deep cleavages between Eastern Europe and parts of Western Europe and I wonder how you see this playing out in terms of broader European policies and especially in terms of the the energy question uh that's going to that phase is the the EU um maybe I I stay with this and yeah okay yeah um I I realize I I I I I did oversimplifying it was because I wanted to um give Ty the origins of European integration to energy and obviously that takes us to six countries initially um well I think that um right from the start I.E really in the 90s actually not just in 2005. that the fact that the European Union was going to enlarge to include States that had a recent experience of Soviet warm whilst a number of European countries including Europe's most important economy had a deep energy trade relationship with Russia that included its corporates having in the end some production rights that that was a fault line through the post Cold War EU for me from from the beginning and you can see it really clearly I think in the models that the European Union gets into around Ukraine the pipelines associate membership of the European Union non-membership of NATO the disruption that Russian Ukraine relations cause to transmission of gas through the pipeline of Transportation of gas through the pipeline in light in 2009 it's all really clear by that point and it's really clear how divisive it is and one of the things and this is where I would switch absolutely into being a Critic of Merkel is that every time and I follow this really quite closely in in real time is in that period between 2015 in 2000 and um 20. Merkel would say things like um it's for Germany or for the European Union to decide um whether Nordstrom 2 goes ahead the Americans should basically like butt out of it and then she'd say things like it's really important also um that gas continues to be transited through Ukraine for Ukraine and security and that could only mean when you start thinking about it that Germany would get its gas through Nordstrom one and two and perhaps a little bit still through yaml Europe which doesn't go through Ukraine and other European countries I.E Southern European countries would get their gas still through Ukraine and I think it was very divisive the fact that the European Commission allowed Nordstrom both the Nordstrom pipelines to go ahead without interference and yet it worked quite actively with the Obama Administration to bring South string pipeline which was under the Black Sea but coming out in Bulgaria just to stop it um indeed when I said this I was doing some talk with some people at the commission and one of them came up to me afterwards in fact I'm not even afterwards I think it was something else he said to me afterwards and he said oh we didn't just work with Obama we told him what to do about it whether that's true or not I'm not sure but if you really wanted to boast that European commission had brought South Stream to um and then so even and this is this that's 2013 so this is before we even get to the annexation of of um of um Crimea and so if we then say what has the war done to this on the one side we can say look it's Vindicated the view in Warsaw over the view in Berlin and Paris has been Vindicated Berlin and Paris were were wrong about this okay sort of and I say sort of because actually um European countries led by France and Spain have actually been importing more liquid natural gas from Russia than they've ever done before at one point during the course of last year France was the biggest importer of liquid natural gas in the world so it's not like this division has gone away because the pipelines and the Nordstrom pipelines you know are um no um more and the Russians essentially uh embargoed pipeline gas coming through yamal and and and Nordstrom um one if you then look at the energy transition it gets like even more complicated because you've got divisions in the energy mix between European countries whichever way that you look and that's true in terms if we're going to use that language of Old Europe and new Europe Germany and France's Energy Mix don't look anything White uh each other's if you go into Eastern Europe countries that you would have put together before the war perhaps Poland and Hungary they've gone completely different ways where the war is concerned we've got energy mixes that don't look like um each other not least in relation to nuclear um Power and as we know it's Orban who's been the one who's basically gone off and negotiated a separate Supply deal with gazprom for uh for Hungry then if you turn to the western part the western coast of Southwestern coast of Europe um Spain Portugal France what to do about really the Algeria question which is back in in a new form now again you've got quite you know serious divisions in the Autumn there were France sorry the Germans and the Portuguese and the Spanish wanted to resurrect with EU money a pipeline that would go through the Pyrenees a gas pipeline that would go through the Pyrenees macron said no then he agreed with Spain that there would be a a Barcelona Marseille underwater pipeline but it would be used for gas and hydrogen and then he pulled the plug on the gas because European commission weren't going to pay him for a private line to provide money for a pipeline that was going to include gas so even when you haven't got divisions of views about Russia then you've got you know really both conflicts of interest because the energy mixes are just radically different and different judgments about how to deal with present tense fossil fuel energy problems in relation to the energy transition be honest thank you my question is about um that sort of that that elephant in the room if you're like well you've alluded to it a couple of times there's um or actually referred to it as as this apparent way out of energy dependency during the 1950s the nuclear energy which right now is sort of I mean it seemed to be a thing of the past at least in Germany very much so now it's it's not so sure not so clear anymore if this is the case um although it seems like Germany is actually going through with um with ending its uh its nuclear power program altogether whereas France for instance isn't at all and I'm really wondering like a lot of like your explanations regarding coal gas Etc are driven by by interests I guess and I'm wondering does nuclear energy also fit these paradigms or is there more let's call it ideology at Play Because clearly Germany has a problem like um um an ideological problem with nuclear energy if you like if you want to call a bit and France doesn't does that explain that these different approaches or is there can you sort of make an interest-based argument there as well this is really in question and if you um if you fiddle around with data on our world and data like I do put into different countries and their energy mixes uh into you do anything with nuclear power and the first thing you'll see as soon as you put in more than two countries is France is just a complete outline um so alone in the world France actually uses more nuclear power oh sorry I'll rephrase that alone in the world nuclear power is France's single biggest source of energy bigger than oil um there's no country that's like anywhere close to to where France is and that's in a year when France had a terrible time with nuclear power last year it was 50 output for most of the time because of the the maintenance um problems so although Germany is I would say a bit of an outlier because it's the only Western Country that produced a political party out of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s or one of significance anyway let's put it that way is it's still actually closer to the middle if you see what I mean then what France is um because uh you know countries other other countries that go down the nuclear power grown basically back off it and they don't do it really with the same drama perhaps that Germany has done here but there is nowhere near as commission to nuclear power as they were and indeed even France was under Orland he was making commitments about how France was going to have it really reduced in half its nuclear power so I think the question comparatively is much more why is France such an outline rather than what's really going on in Germany there is the German question needs an answer but it's more like wise fronts just radically different than anybody else and I think it is in this goes to the how I think cost has been Central to the nuclear power problem is the French state did not walk at throwing money you know throwing huge amounts of money at it there was a certain point in which the idea of technological the technological prowess of France was sufficiently invested in nuclear power and perhaps the vanity of the French stain can justify spending these huge amounts of huge amounts of money on it the second thing I would say though is is that each time there's an energy a profound energy crisis so and I'd say if you want to put some markers for Europe it would be 1956 so sewers the 70s the particularly the first oil price um shock and then now there's a whole Resurgence of interest in nuclear power there's a little bit of I think of this it's not so much ideological it's almost a bit slightly utopian oh nuclear's nucleus is going to solve all this for is that when when it gets hard the answer is we'll just go back to nuclear we'll we'll do it with micro reactors this time it won't be it won't be so expensive it can be made safer now I'm I'm not an anti-nuclear power like person I'm no I'm pragmatic about this I I think nuclear power will have some place in the mix I think the microneuclear reactors uh probably are going to be quite um important so I'm not saying it because I'm just being dismissive about nuclear power but it's really striking the language how it becomes as if it hasn't been tried as if it hasn't been done at scale as if it hasn't run into these huge cost problems and still obviously questions about the waste in some sense I think it it's our get out when things get hard is to say let's find a way of doing nuclear power um better which is why I think that even Germany has even if I think if you said three years ago that Germany would have had any kind of debate about nuclear power again most people would have said no you don't really understand German politics it's not like that but as I see I mean there has been some debate in Germany over the last year about whether whether to continue um down this path okay let me come in again um one question so I I struck me that during your talk at one point you said it's not by chance that the US and uh Russia at that time both are energy exporters and therefore they basically have their Empires so to speak um now how how do you think in terms of U.S Chinese rivalry at this current moment because the the one striking difference clearly is that China is energy dependent and uh how and therefore and I think this goes into some other areas of your expertise therefore also much more dependent I guess financially on the US um then then it would be otherwise so how does this I mean if if this is the new cold war no um how does the geopolitics and the energies story plays out in this new Cold War what's your take on that yeah I mean I think that there would two things going on here and they pull in opposite directions the first is as you said sorry that the United States it's not energy independent um it's gas independent but it's it's not oil independent um not least because quite a lot of that Shale that the US produces it can't actually refine and needs to sell and then buy other kinds of crude oil from Canada in um particular but obviously the United States is in a much better position where oil and gas is concerned than China um is particularly where oil is concerned and the Chinese leadership have been you know deeply worried about the old question overtly I would say since 2003 and probably actually Way Way Beyond that China stopped being self-sufficient in oil in 1993. I think you could argue that if you go back to the 70s and then xiaoping's economic reforms the fact that they go hand in hand with population control the one child policy is not a coincidence that thing I think does understand that there's significant resource risk problems for China if China develops at all rapidly without slowing its population growth down so I think the Chinese are have a very strong sense of energy problems and oil problems in particular and obviously it's compounded by the fact that a lot of the oil that they import comes from the Middle East or from Africa and then ends up coming down the Strait of Malacca uh and that the Americans can in the case of a war with Taiwan over time what I should say um blockade and then that would you know a lethal problem for for China under under wartime um conditions and part of the attraction of Russia I think has always been as an energy partner that it gets around that problem oil and gas pipelines are now Russian liquid natural gas that can convey the Arctic route the Northern sea we on the other hand it's clearly the case that people in Washington are pretty terrified of China's energy Revolution advantages and its dominance of Metal Supply um change even Trump who obviously is not the slightest interest in energy transition really um declared a metal and mineral emergency in the latter part of his presidency that Biden is effectively um continued if you look at the inflation reduction act you know some of the language in the text itself is pretty open that it's about breaking China's dominance of the supply chains and replacing them with um I mean by that energy transition Supply chains and replacing them with american-centric um Supply so Supply um chains I would my view is is that the whole us trade and Tech war with China was really began or it was the point in which in Washington that the mindset moved to confrontation with China was actually when China published made in China 2025 in in May of 2015 and that actually Trump's presidency should be seen in that context where the China question is concerned because the one thing where Trump basically articulated what had become the bypasses and position was on China on this trade and Tech wall and actually Byron has driven it harder I would suggest them than than Trump um has so I think that there's a sense in Washington that that geopolitics and energy power go together and so that whoever dominates the age of the energy of Renewables will geopolitically dominate nonetheless I think it's really important to see that actually the world in which we now live is a multi-source energy world it's going to become more of a multi-source energy world and so actually what we're going to live with is the geopolitics of fossil fuel fuels at the same time as the geopolitics of the energy Revolution so we're going to have more geopolitical fault lines than ever before around energy because we're going to be in a multi-source energy world and they don't line up with each other because China moves from having a resource foreign resource dependency problem on the fossil fuel side outside coal to being in the dominant position where metals are concerned and the United States um is the reverse now the one country that actually is in a in principle actually a strong position on all of them is is Russia um but Russia's embarked upon a geopolitical strategy that means that it's basically got to restructure its energy trade at least in part away from Europe to um Asia so in that sense nobody's got that great a hand geopolitically so in political science normally overlapping or not um but not piling on each other and cross-cutting cutting cleavages or fault lines are a good thing but you are saying they are a bad thing they are spelling even more well conflict they could I mean I I I would say there's one sense in which they are Advantage which is I think that China's foreign oil dependency is a serious constraint on how aggressive China can be because this vulnerability in the Strait of Malacca uh is acute um and even if you then move to a position where you say Okay Russia will really reorientate a lot to China become more dependent upon Russia for oil and gas they'll reorientate a lot of trade through the Arctic through the Northern sea route that you know the Northern sea route runs through the bearing straight and then you can just move from like a position where China's vulnerable in the Malacca to the position where it's vulnerable in the in the burning straight to an American Naval blockade so I'm not sure the Chinese can really get around this this problem okay are there any other questions comments from the audience Philip I see you you don't have to no this is you know okay so I listened to a political scientist who was giving a historical talk so thanks for that yeah from a historian I really enjoyed it um but then I wondered a little bit you got the question in that direction already about the model the way of thinking because okay States leaders certain dates March 69 um interest conflict maybe a solution um and um I was just wondering is that um hmm is that how we can explain the world or something as complex as an energy transition so on the one hand it was very convincing because it was so logical and the logic had its beauty um but then you know I wonder about the ideology uh craziness um maybe individual actors um maybe even female ones I don't know there was that that was America um but anyway the economy uh you know the the big companies corporations that were somewhere but they were always dominated by the states so um I was just wondering about the model and the second question is um you know when you write about the rise of neoliberal uh policies and of course Britain played a key role and I'm always wondering um I mean Britain also changed from being basically a bankrupt IMF creditor right emergency credit to Britain oh it sounds like Argentine didn't it um to the coming a country which where the leader risk a major conflict was the main energy source back then called but then there's also did did North Sea oil in the you know the balance of payment and all that that make possible the curse of neoliberalism yeah first so on the on the first question I'm going to take the easy part of it first um when I I try to explain like long periods of like time relatively quickly then I tend to skip out the corporate part of the story partly because it just makes it more complicated and I found that a certain being reasonably schematic about it is a way of allowing people to see what's going on and that if you try and make it too complicated then actually if people haven't sort of encountered thinking about energy geopolitically before they tend to get lost so I but for instance it's really important to understand that one of the reasons why the world changes in the 1970s is because at the beginning of the decade there are seven oil companies that basically control most of the world's oil production outside the Soviet Union and by the end of the decade then state-owned energy companies control most of the world's oil production and obviously that now includes like the Soviet Union so that really I would say the end of European the age at the end of European End of the Age of European Empire really ends at that point when these International oil companies that are basically dominated since the late 19th century into the right um the 20th um Century are nationalized or their assets are nationalized and that we live in a world and we still live in this world of energy nationalism and that's a really important part of why we live in the post-imperial world because we live in the world of energy nationalism amongst all right and amongst all gas um producers and I think that on the Nordstrom story for instance and why Merkel went ahead with the second North stream you can't really separate that out from the influence of BASF you know the German chemical um company so I I don't want to I I don't want to write corporations out of the of the um story ah the harder question to answer is this question of like how strong a materialist account of history that I that I either want to offer or that I sign up to um if I were a hardcore energy materialist I would have only written the first two parts of disorder so the bit the first part is about geopolitics centered on energy the second part is about the economy since the 19 World economy since the 1970s energy and finance and then the third part is about democracies and although I try and say something about this oil and American democracy question energies in it like a much much less so I don't think that the world we live in is reducible to energy questions or indeed to materialists questions indeed I think an important part of democracy historically has been the the way in which democracies have legitimated political Authority by appeals to the idea of the nation and I think it's quite difficult to see how the European Union for the long term functions as a site of political Authority without developing some kind of common European identity and that I don't think that's reducible to meeting material um aspirations so and if you want if you took me further away I actually wanted to write a fourth part of this book which was in the original plan and I was going to try to deal with religious cultural questions and their relationship to territorial formation in Europe including of the kind of question of the religious aspect to the Russia Ukraine conflict all right now the divisions within Orthodoxy so it that turned out to be far too ambitious idea to think I could do in one book but I'm saying that because I take those questions like seriously and I think anyone who's a hardcore materialist wouldn't engage with religious questions analytically as much as I am willing to do or indeed that they they also actually interest me having said all that that's a lot of caveats I still don't think you can understand geopolitics of the 20th century onwards without putting energy at the center of it and I think it does explain a lot and once you see that it's everything else is a little bit surface and I I know the reasons for hesitating about saying that and I know that there's a risk of like uh of knocking out individuals like how to school judgment and there is a way at which I think that um we have to kind of grapple analytically with different leaders levels of energy Consciousness or energy awareness let's call it like that and in a strange way I kind of think that sort of engaging with the really hard question about Hitler and the Nazis gets at that because on the one hand Hitler is like obsessed with energy questions I mean he literally knew about you know like oil wells in random fields in Texas you know we you know minute shine of detail and in one sense you'd say then okay you can explain his obsession with conquering you know Baku uh stemming from that but at the same time I was just Hitler was so obsessed with it all that actually I would suggest like actually destroyed his ability to make any kind of rational judgment about the geopolitical world in which Germany didn't have power because the very fact that Germany had such a problem should have if he was really energy aware he should have made what he was proposing doing seem as catastrophically appalling and stupid as it turned out to be so I you've still got to have something in about this one trying to get you still got to have something in about what are people what are leaders doing with the energy awareness that they that that they have um and I think that's where it gets really that's that's where it gets really hard because actually you've got to try to some sense to try and get inside people's minds and they're not all this is not necessarily if you go as a historian and you look at the archival evidence you can see loads of things where they're clearly thinking about oil um but trying to understand the degree to which it informed their judgment to the exclusion of other considerations that's a lot harder space now Thatcher I think is actually interesting in the whole British story is interesting in this in this respect because I think that um there are two things that were true about Thatcher and energy and enjoy both of them related to then the neoliberalism question the first of them was a sense that British conservative politicians has had for a long time that there wasn't just the problem of foreign oil dependency that Britain faced but there was a problem of domestic political difficulty that came from the need for coal that coal had elevated the miners into a really the most significant Trade union movement so the most significant Trade union in the country and they were at the center of the British trade Union um movement and that that had elevated the working class in Britain into more political influence than they could possibly have had without Britain's need for coal not just for economic reasons but when the time when Britain still had a coal you know like fueled Navy um which is you know some of those Naval boats right up to the first world war and the Winston Churchill you know was it was then at the Admiral team he was very aware of the relationship between strikes and South Wales and the ability of the British navies to project power in Singapore because the South Welsh miners were the ones who were producing the cold that the Navy was um using and I think that Thatcher did in taking the miners on one in a way to end up political dependency problem if we can call it that like seeing that if you if you had less coal then the trade unions were going to be less significant and the advantage of oil although it was foreign oil dependency was that you could use essentially indented Indian labor in Persia for the labor force for extracting your energy and not strawberry self-welsh miners who go on a strike and get you know one one wage increases so and I think that there is evidence that Thatcher had some awareness of those issues on the oil question then obviously Britain's fortune is at the point in which it becomes impossible to carry on as an imperial power in the Middle East they have to leave Retreat from Eastern serious as it's um called announced in 1968 implemented like in 1971 at just that time fortuitously there's oil in the North Sea discovered the problem this time is something different politically is that it's largely in Scottish Waters in the North Sea and not in English Waters in the North Sea and initial immediately the Scottish nationalists start to use the oil as a um a rallying Hall 1974 a lecture general election or the two general elections in 1974 Scottish nationalists get there breakthrough and I think one of the then when thatch is talking about Market she's very keen on markets for like nausea or she doesn't want a state run company she doesn't set up a sovereign wealth fund for the oil revenues like the Norwegians like do because I think that she does get there's no president she kind of gets that if you just make it Market Market Market that you try and diffuse this is it Scottish oil or UK um or you keep the state they keep the British State out of North Sea oil because if you let the north if you get the British State engage with North seal then it becomes a question that the Scottish nationalists can use a bit to a bit to effectively and what I do think more generally about neoliberalism in the 70s is that I think that the the places where it happens or you know Britain and the US are dominating both of them uh want Market principles in domestic energy industry So Reagan is obsessed with deregulating the Federal Energy state in the U.S the fact the very first executive order he issues is to end the remaining Federal controls on the U.S energy industry so when they say they want markets they do but I think the thing that they want the most in is about energy for different reasons in in Britain and the US and if you take someone like Milton Friedman as a neoliberal thinker he was obsessed with the energy with it with the with a Federal Regulation of the oil industry in the United States and they wanted it dismantled and that's really interesting because that's the one story we never read when we talk about neoliberalism and it also means it explains why West Germany is different as well because West doesn't have a domestic and an energy industry has to be much more cautious much more emphasis on energy security can't think markets is going to solve the problem for it and that might also go a long way explaining France yeah yeah no this is I was just thinking when you were answering to Philip's question uh so when I read so about you know what's beyond materialism when I read your book um the the whole story on energy was really an eye-opener for me and I think for many people who read that book Because as we just established you don't I'm a political Economist you don't really tend to think for whatever strange reason about energy which is really applying a big blind spot a big elephant in the room but then when I came then I read the the other two parts and I I kind of felt the the connection or the big picture I lost the big picture basically and I was wondering now when I listen to your response to to Philip thinking of Susan strange who has this structural power international forms of structural power and she basically says there if I remember where there are four power structures she doesn't have energy either unless I mistake but she has production she has knowledge she has Finance and transport I think or no money or no Finance production knowledge and there is a fortune so is it do you think in terms of her concept of structural power which is basically these can these don't necessarily have to be aligned and it can be a different mix of politics and markets and I don't know what but you get uh you get different types of structures in each area and different conflicts than also not only resulting from the fault lines within these areas but also between the areas the way to think about it yeah I see what you mean I mean I think that the reason um I I think the way that I thought about it was or in a way not you know still do think about it is that the Industrial Revolution like I think creates the condition well I've got to go back one step further if there is something that can be called modernity in the industrial revolution created it and the Industrial Revolution is actually an energy Revolution and that changed human beings a whole relationship to Nature I'm not always keen on the idea of the anthropocene but you could fit that into this and it meant that we were basically you know committed to endless extraction of resources out of the earth and that actually isn't going to stop with the energy transition and that we as a consequence of that constantly need technological innovation in order to keep going uh because we are taking non-renewable resources and we have to make them do more uh and the way that we do have been doing that since the Industrial Revolution is applying ever better technology to those energy resources and I think that that is so fundamental to the way in which we live in the modern world that that is in some sense primary I then think Within because of the way that the world economy developed since the 1970s that Finance is the next most important thing um not least because actually Finance is the way uh that and creation of so much more debt and ending with any metallic based currency is the way that Western countries found out of the problems of the 1970s around energy but the reason why I kind of like always like hesitate and then say but this doesn't explain everything and I'm going to write a third part of this book that's going to be about democracies is because I think that the underlying political problem which is like how do you have order and how do you not have disorder that I think does go through from the pre-modern if I'm making modernity start with Industrial Revolution I think that that's kind of there all the time if you see what I mean like how do you how do you how does political Authority manage sufficiently to legitimate itself that it's not constantly collapsing not constantly prone to crisis and I don't think that problem in its basic structural political form is really any different in the post-industrial Revolution world than it was in the pre-industrial revolution world so I I think that there's like I don't think that was fundamentally changed by the Industrial Revolution but I think the conditions of our material lives were fundamentally Changed by the Industrial Revolution but that makes it a bit awkward because uh you've you I'm kind of trying to operate both with a kind of like analytical framework that's very much like these are modern conditions that we must understand fundamentally via energy terms and then saying actually there are older political problems that are continuous like through that and that they now work out under those material conditions but they're structurally still sort of like that they were before and I realize that that's a I realize it's an awkward juxtaposition and I realize it causes some narrative issues in the book but that's the way that I think about the world and so I can be persuaded that that's wrong if you see what I mean but that that's that that's my starting place that there is that there is something that modernity creates that's new and then there are these principal problems um that are um enduring and then we have to try to understand each and their own terms and then try and put them together you had to follow since now um and they are both very broad but the first one is if you talk about energy in this very historical long degree perspective isn't it actually necessary to start before fossil fuel and also take into account um the basically the first type of exploitation and it is uh humankind namely slavery I mean I'm thinking of histories now like our French power in Blackness that show very clearly that the early uh pre-industrial basis of colonialism and so on started with the slavery the exploitation of human of human Force so that is that is the first question wouldn't it necessary to even include this in year-long history um the second question is or it's more yeah a conceptual question um when I read your book and I was really fascinated about it um it reminded me a little bit about this very slick economic model that Danny Roderick had developed about trilemma of um globalization and I would just like to know what you what you think about that but this analogy yeah I'll start with that one yeah I I actually I'm pretty sympathetic to um to roderick's analysis uh of the of the globalization um trilemma um I read quite a lot of him over the um years he's coming at it in a different way for me in this sense well he's less concerned about energy but he's an economist and I'm not but I I I I think certainly in my understanding of the relationship between democracy and the world economy uh um particularly the relationship between monetary autonomy questions Democratic politics questions and capital flows questions I think I'm pretty much on the same page um that that he is I mean in terms of long history I mean if I was going to write a history of energy in human history absolutely would make slavery Central to the pre-industrial part of that the reason I didn't engage with it here is because my starting place in writing disorder was always I wanted to try and explain the political disruptions of the 2010s and I wanted to go back in each case as far as I thought I needed to go back to make sense you know of that um the reason why I was so keen on the let's start at the beginning of the age of oil was both because I think there's a European problem that arises from that moment that doesn't change uh in terms of the structure of the problem not obviously the approaches to answering it but also because I knew that I could like maneuver myself from look America and Russia are competing to sell oil to European countries at the turn of the 19th 20th century and now in the 2010s they're competing to sell gas to European um countries but I don't think I mean I've not spent as much time thinking about this as I want to yeah and I probably will at some point is I don't think it's a coincidence I don't think it can really be a coincidence that largely the age of slavery ends and the age of fossil fuel energy begins um and that until that point the fossil fuels basically human societies human civilizations generally have slavery uh on the certain kind of human energy is coerced into doing certain economic activities and that one then it becomes possible to do those economic activities or do economic activities on a whole other scale by using fossil fuel energy then slavery comes to an end now again I know again you say that and then you kind of like open to well don't you think that people have my own religious beliefs about slavery and abusive and I think yes they did absolutely and and and and I I I I I haven't got uh I haven't got enough actually history put straight historical knowledge to like say okay that this is how that transition or whatever you want to call it happened but do I a big picture level think that go together then I think they do um absolutely fascinating I think we have laws coming to our end um so unless there is an urgent question Maybe we should just give you also the opportunity to enjoy this evening and relax and mostly thank you very very much for being here and for giving us this analysis and you know trying to address all these important questions thank you very much Ellen

Channel: RECET Vienna

Views: 1,064

Keywords:

Id: hUTG7K_0UeA

Length: 114min 36sec (6876 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023