Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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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.

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Let’s talk about the elephant in the room first: the writing style. Oh boy, it was a slog. I’ve read plenty of academic papers and verbose essays in my time, but this was something else. The prose was so dense and cumbersome that it felt like wading through a swamp with weights on my feet.Similarly, the emergence of China as a major manufacturing power was so traumatic to the workers of the industrialized world only because the party state ensured that Chinese consumers were unable to spend the money they should have been paid on the goods and services they wanted. China did not practice “export-led growth” but rather wage suppression and financial repression that held down imports. That choice was bad for people in China, but it was also costly for everyone outside China who lost income because they couldn’t sell enough to Chinese customers. It is a dense book. While the absence of superfluous words is welcome, it surely could have been made easier to read. Thompson's prognosis therefore is that the current dependence on oil and gas, and the political struggles related to their extraction and use, will continue into the foreseeable future. The attempts to normalise the use of alternative non fossil fuel energies, and to gain comparative advantage from dominating the development and production of these new forms of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases, is projected to remain a side-play rather than a practical substitute for traditional energy geopolitics. 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? Book Genre: Business, Climate Change, Economics, Environment, Finance, History, International Relations, Nonfiction, Political Science, Politics, Sociology

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That said, this book was my introduction to geopolitics. A very compelling but tough read, frankly quite inaccessible at times, which I think could be remedied by some thorough editing. However, definitely still 4 stars, because I have seldomly read something so informative and (paradoxically) elucidating. This is a vastly abbreviated summary of the highly complicated history of oil and geopolitics presented in the book. Missing here are the Syrian civil war, NATO actions in Libya in the 2010s, China’s rising demand for energy and the effects on international finance, the US shale revolution, Turkey’s increasingly militaristic claiming of oil and gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, amongst other things, but being more recent these might be more familiar to the reader. This isn’t a hopeful book. Thompson, as anyone familiar with her matter-of-fact observations on the Talking Politics podcast will know, has a tendency to look for the grit in oyster rather than the pearl. But her insights here, particularly in relation to energy geopolitics, explain much of the predicament we are now in. As these plates spun, the financial markets appeared detached from the emerging geopolitical and economic risks. Monetary tightening might have ended NICE, but it would have next-to-no short-term effect on credit conditions for financial corporations. The Eurodollar markets had become their own world, detached not, since they offered various opportunities to politicians, from politics, but from the ability of central bankers to manage an economic cycle and disincentivize excessive risk taking. Only on 9 August 2007 did the mechanisms of the entire complex funding system on which banks depended dramatically break down. From that day, the international monetary and financial system ceased to function without systematic support from the American central bank. There could be no better guide than Helen Thompson to the turbulence of the 21st century, with its successive disruptions, from financial crisis to energy transition, from Brexit to emerging geopolitical conflicts. When history seems to have come for us with a vengeance since the turn of the millennium, this magisterial book brings into focus the key structural forces driving, not only recent events, but also the inevitable changes still to come.Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’

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Although this thesis does have some explanatory power for the fall of the Roman Republic that Polybius foresaw, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as a long historical generalization. But I was quite taken with his notion that each form of government is destroyed by its own excess, generated from within itself by its own inherent and particular vice. While we are not accustomed to thinking about democracy in this way, I think we can see this phenomenon quite clearly when we reflect upon the end of various European monarchical regimes—take the ancien régime in France or Czarist Russia. The question then becomes whether we should treat modern democracy as somehow immune to the problem. Now, obviously, many people would argue that it is, following Tocqueville in treating democracy as ultimately irreversible, at least at a certain level of economic development. But I start off as a skeptic on providential claims about democracy.The good parts is that this book is extremely thorough and detailed analysis of these three areas, mostly in a way that is understandable to the non-specialist. Though only for the non-specialist who is interested in quite complex history and detail. I learnt a lot and for that I rate the book highly. Thompson notes the rise of Eurodollar markets to finance energy supplies, and the related breakdown of national control of monetary policies that allowed excessive borrowing to disturb financial markets. But, given that QE began as a Japanese policy in the 1990s to manage deflation, it is reasonable to think that the rise of QE policies in the West generally may be more complicated than simply an effect of speculative financial markets inflated by the energy sector.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson

The Nation spoke with Thompson about her work on the history of energy, Bretton Woods and the 1970s, and today’s crisis of democracy. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. More generally, Thompson’s explanation of both the broader global financial crisis and the euro crisis would have benefited from a deeper understanding of the links between trade and financial imbalances. The normal way to pay for imports is to export more, and the standard reward for exporting more is being able to afford more imports. The unusual feature of recent decades is that this did not always happen, with massive imbalances arising among several major economies. economic recessions in the 2000s generated by uncontrolled deployment of the very large international capital flows derived from oil and gas markets (the 'Great Recession' being a prime exhibit); The focus of the book is on the “disruptions” of the last decade. The antecedents of this period date notably from the 1970s. The “book starts from the premise that several histories are necessary to identify the casual forces at work and a conviction these histories must overlap.” This statement launched the core of the book - the three sections (histories): geopolitics, the economy, and democratic politics. HT: I have never been that comfortable with the term “neoliberalism.” Initially, it was most frequently deployed by those who saw the 1970s and early 1980s as a time of ideological turbulence in which the right’s ideas about the relative merits of markets and the state won, most consequentially in Britain and the United States. Later it risked becoming a catch-all term to describe whatever policies, ideologically driven or not, were pursued by the British and American governments.The energy narrative starts with the rise of oil and its replacement of coal which gradually disadvantaged Europe. The monetary strand starts in 1971-1973 with the dissolution of Bretton woods and the ERM and then Euro. It covers both sides of the Atlantic with alternative threads of discussion flipping between the US and Europe. There's fascinating insight into the tensions between Britain, France and Germany at that time. The second monetary chapter is about US-China relations the build up of easy credit and the cause of the 2007-2008 crash.