Disorder review – the 21st Century issues making the world spin
Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson (Oxford University Press), £15.45.
For the author and publisher of Helen Thompson’s magnificent new book, this must be the best and worst of times. Disorder is a brilliant extended essay on the troubles of the era in terms of energy, global finance, governance and democracy.
It was published on 22 February, the day Putin gave his final marching order for his legions to advance on Ukraine. So much of this tortuously fascinating book gives the background to the global crisis now upon us, specifically in energy and governance.
This will now be spun, distorted and amplified by the Ukraine war, now the focal point of what is sure to be a protracted and global trauma — no continent, maybe not even Antarctica and the cone of South America will escape its effect. A new edition and extra chapters are sure to follow; they are not only desirable but a necessity.
Helen Thompson is a professor of political economy at Cambridge. She is known for her pithy discourse in seminars and webinars, and the Talking Politics podcast she shares with her Cambridge team colleague David Runciman.
Her thesis is that we are heading for a major crunch, largely triggered by the demand for energy, most notably for the moment in gas. This plays to the crisis in finance, global and national, which in turn plays to the story of societal fragility, in which bad politics is both symptom and catalyst. “Covid has exposed weaknesses in our society which are difficult to mend,” she tells me in a conversation a week before publication, “and we cannot get back to where we were before.”
The theme is in the subtitle; “Disorder – Hard Times in the 21st Century.” The first, and in a way the most fascinating part of the story, is in energy.
We begin in the latter third of the 19th century when oil was being discovered in Persia at roughly the same time that Chancellor Bismarck was banging on about the Balkans not being worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier in the wake of the Congress of Berlin of 1878. Both are signs of empire, and imperial destinies, old and new.
Thompson argues that energy exploration and exploitation have dictated global rivalries and alliances to a greater extent than most give credit. It is why Britain sits outside the main European bloc — to this day — because of its peculiar relations with Persia, Arabia and the Gulf, amongst other things.
The author demonstrates in a number of intriguing aspects why the UK is such a poor fit with the various schemes western Europe has pushed for its unity and security, especially the European Economic Community and then the European Union.
Oil and railroads provided the fortunes on which the Union of the USA was cemented and prospered after the civil war and the opening of the West. Energy today, the fragilities of supply, demand, marketing and transportation bedevil international dealings and relations, and it is due to get worse, with or without Ukraine. The two biggest powers have a near-paranoid doctrine.
Under Jimmy Carter, the US went for American energy independence — a chimera then in the 1970s and today. China, with its voracious appetite now for gas in all forms is fixated on the so-called “Malacca Straits Dilemma”, the dependence on so much energy and other essential material coming up through the Indonesia straits — busiest shipping chokepoint in the world. It drives much of Beijing’s fears for vulnerability in the South and East China Seas, the realistic aspect of the desire to take Taiwan.
If Russia stops piping and shipping gas to Europe, China will pick up the supplies. The demand for domestic gas is voracious — it is a new customer clientele equivalent to the total domestic consumption of France every two years.
But Russia will not be able to live by oil and gas alone — and I suspect there are those in the Kremlin that know this. Moscow now is in hoc to Beijing. In 1986, Russia was the largest exporter of oil and gas on the world market. Prices plummeted.
Mikail Gorbachev knew the game was up, and immediately ordered the withdrawal of Russian forces from their disastrous near-occupation venture in Afghanistan — which even so took three years to complete. The dissolution of the Soviet regime ensued.
The surging demand and contorted politics of the supply of natural gas now dominate our politics — whether we know it or not. “The most vulnerable in Europe is Italy, and this is getting surprisingly little attention,” Helen Thompson tells me in a phone call following the Ukraine invasion. Germany has been caught out badly with the involvement in Gazprom and the promotion of Nord Stream 2 —now confined to history more or less.
Germany lacks port facilities to handle Liquid Nitrogen Gas (LNG), mainly from the US. “They will have to rely on the Dutch to handle this — and the Dutch have now become critical,” she says. The Dutch are also pushing for more fracking. Pressure will build in the US for expanding fracking, especially if the Iran nuclear deal, JCPOA, goes sour — it is currently on a knife-edge in talks in Vienna.
Italy is vulnerable because of its reliance on Russian gas through pipelines across Ukraine. Italy, too, is deeply involved in Russian banking. The long energy entanglements go back to the buccaneering efforts by Enrico Mattei to build the ENI enterprise. If the Russian gas is turned off, Italy can only make up half the shortfall by imports from Azerbaijan, Algeria and the new Eastern Mediterranean seabed fields.
The whole Covid recovery programme masterminded by the emergency prime minister Mario Draghi is now at risk — with a possible fiscal black hole of at least €225 billion — this on top of a debt of more than 150 per cent of GDP. “Italy is the country to watch, but we should also watch Turkey, which is badly exposed in the Ukraine crisis, not to mention Iran and India,” Thompson adds.
The Biden administration had been hoping to strike an agreement with Tehran, lift sanctions and buy Iranian oil. If this doesn’t happen, Biden is in the hands of the fracking lobby.
This all has an effect on the attempts at maintaining global fiscal stability — the main aim of the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of the Second World War which entrenched the dollar as the lead reserve currency.
That stability is pretty shot by now, the Thompson thesis suggests. This, in turn, affects governance, politics and the future of liberal democracy in the current climate.
The prospects do not look good. The discussion of global economic outlooks and stability — the superbly informed insight of a true political economist — and the future of democracy and polity take up the last sections of the book, and they are both meaty and original.
Most intriguing is Thompson’s discussion of the evolution of the European Economic Community and European Union. They were always a poor fit for Britain, whose constitutional, social and even imperial evolution always made it an outlier.
Europhile prime ministers, principally Edward Heath, John Major and Tony Blair, struggled to make it fit. But in no way could the governance at the higher echelons of the organisation be called democratic or voluntarist.
From the European Central Bank to the Council of Ministers, there is much more of a whiff of the Chancellery of Otto Von Bismarck or the Conseil d’Etat of Napoleon Bonaparte than the constitutional sallies and thrusts of King Pym, Edmund Burke or Charles James Fox and their legacies.
Intriguingly, the author maps how once in the EEC in 1973, successive UK prime ministers weaselled their way around avoiding a referendum — which they were pretty unsure to win, from Callaghan through Major and Blair, until Cameron was afforded little option. Only Harold Wilson actually did the deed with a referendum in 1975 but pulled it off with characteristic sleight of hand and finesse.
The book is a wonderful primer and agenda-setter for the place we are now in. It is full of squibs and challenges on the very essence of the national and global crisis today. For instance, she shares my scepticism about political parties: “they exist more in form and function now; and in Italy, they tend just to eat up their parties” – with a strong espresso macchiato on the side, I hope.
Rather less attention is given to the roles and dysfunction of organisations like NATO and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. I would hope that more pages are given to them in the second edition as they are at the heart of the Ukraine imbroglio. The fighting in Ukraine and the prospect of even more in Europe beyond is in no small part down to their failure, and that of the EU.
The issue is best summarised in a signed editorial for the New York Times by Ivan Krastev headlined; “We are all living in Vladimir Putin’s world now.” We have just enjoyed, if that’s the right word, thirty years of phoney peace in Europe, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Post-1989 and the Cold War, OSCE, NATO and EU were to ensure peace, but now we are once again faced with war in Europe, this time not along the middle kingdom of the sons of Charlemagne in Lotharingia and the Rhineland, but the marches of eastern Europe, once contested by the Teutonic Knights and the hearth troops of Alexander Nevsky.
The alliances have failed to give peace and reassurance and neglected to encourage and support Russia out of its terrible troubles at the end of the 20th century. Treaties were signed and honoured in an on-off mode in the letter but not in spirit — take the Budapest accords and memorandum of 1994 when Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons with a guarantee of neutrality.
This was compounded by the folly of the NATO summit at Bucharest in April, 2008 when Georgia and Ukraine were allowed to apply to join the NATO club. France and Germany immediately, and rightly, objected to what they saw as a needless provocation. Three months later Russia attacked Georgia across Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
“Russia could never have accepted a fully independent country sitting right on its border between Russia and Germany,” Thompson observes gloomily when we meet just before the war starts. Under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the founding document of the OSCE, in which the US, UK and Russia are among 56 members, international borders should not be altered by forces and aggression, and countries and minorities should have their sovereignty and rights for self-determination upheld. Yet how can these be upheld or enforced, OSCE? There seems less answer than ever now.
Ivan Krastev says that we are now in the cycle of Putin’s belligerent posturings. In making Russia great again, he is not so much a revisionist as a revanchist — a fighter bent on revenge and the recovery of a territory lost by betrayal, real or imaginary.
We are now faced with a formidable alliance of China and Russia as junior partners forged by the latest events. Europe is mired in theological disputes about governance and ideology. It is now very much cut off — and if we believe our democratic values are worth defending we had better get real about how we do this.
To paraphrase Francis Fukuyama, three decades ago, history isn’t ending, but about to begin a new and deadly phase.