UK politics academic Helen Thompson's 2022 book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is an engrossing attempt to explain the present fractious state of the world as the inevitable result of intense competition for access to energy, in particular oil and gas.
Thompson argues that the international tensions over access to energy resources have been the major causes of economic and political disruptions since the Second World War, and that the much heralded 'green energy transition' is currently too ephemeral to substitute for the many uses and benefits of fossil fuels for at least a decade, and probably considerably longer.
Thompson's attempt is not completely convincing - the world seems too complex for single issue explanations - but Thompson packs enough detail into 280 pages of relatively dense text to remind the general reader that the development and exploitation of energy has been a major factor in shaping events in the modern world since early last century.
Thompson's core contention as noted in her introduction is that 'energy has largely gone unrecognized as an important cause of (recent) geopolitical and economic fault lines.' This is not unexpected. The primacy given to ideological and cultural factors in modern histories seems reasonable.
The collapse of communism in 1989 did not lead to an immediate global embrace of the liberal economic order of the US and Europe. The joint statement issued by China and Russia in February 2022 was an explicit rejection of the Western economic and political model motivated in part by an apparent belief that the West was declining, and the East rising.
A counterfactual history of the last 100 years would, of course, be substantially different if global oil and gas resources were located mainly in, say, Africa and Asia, rather than the US, Russia and the Middle East. But this has not been deemed a sufficient reason for most historians to foreground energy factors at the expense of other material circumstances that shaped evolving events.
Nevertheless, Disorder is a very enlightening counter-balance. Recent events such as Russia's aggression in Ukraine, the emerging global ambitions of China, and the substantial government funding in the US to promote local development of alternative energy suggest the time is right for a modern global history that foregrounds the role of energy.
The world presented in Disorder is one increasingly fractured by competition for oil and gas. It is a plausible and cogent proposition. The substantial financing of the production and consumption of these resources is said to have inflated and destabilised international financial markets, and to have increased popular unrest where governments are more focused on international energy politics than their citizens daily security and welfare.
The latter is attributed to governments becoming increasingly unaccountable, especially in the European Union, where centralised governance partly motivated by a need to manage dependency on imported energy has reduced the ability of people to influence events in their national elections.
Disorder's story is superficially compelling, proffering relatively simple explanations for major developments such as:
1. America's wars in the Middle East motivated by a perceived need to secure stable oil supplies (ironically, the Iraq War initiated in 2003 had the opposite effect);
2. the exceptional dependence of Germany and southern European nations on Russian oil and gas (which allowed Russia to curtail supplies to dampen objections to the Ukraine War, and which is so entrenched that European payments for oil and gas are largely funding the Russian campaign);
3. the destabilizing inflation and related unemployment of the 1970s when Middle Eastern oil producers used their market power to raise prices;
4. 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);
5. the Eurozone debt crises as countries tried to spend their way out of the recessions with borrowed money;
6. the rise of disruptive populism in Europe as citizens reacted negatively to unresponsive governments more focused on international energy financing than local income needs (austerity programs imposed by order of the European Central Bank figure prominently);
7. Russia and China's recent renewed efforts to form alliances with oil-rich countries in the Middle East;
8. the interest in renewable technologies in China and Europe to offset and possibly replace their dependence on fossil fuel imports, and the related substantial government subsidies being provided in the US to alternative energy sources in order to prevent China achieving uncontested dominance in the new forms of energy;
9. and most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where valuable Russian gas exports to Europe are vulnerable to transmission tariffs imposed by Ukraine on the pipelines that traverse it (and where Russia objects to Ukraine's efforts to deter Russian interference by applying to join the EU and NATO).
Disorder is naturally a fossil fuel story, but Thompson is not convinced that the proposed green energy transition is completely feasible. Attempts to address climate change are acknowledged in Disorder as a coda to the oil and gas struggles of the last 120 years.
However, Thompson is a realist: she notes in her concluding comments the emerging competition for advantage and dominance in renewables and new electrification technology, but argues that Net Zero ambitions currently are illusory, given the limited capacity of the technologies to generate substantial and continuous flows of energy from renewables and to electrify widespread industrial infrastructure powered by oil and gas. Thompson seems here to be echoing the substantial reservations about renewables discussed in recent books on climate politics by American environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, fossil fuel energy campaigner Alex Epstein, and others.
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.
Thompson's academic expertise is in the history of oil politics, and it is not surprising therefore that she believes that the determinative role of oil in global politics is greatly under appreciated. She acknowledges that religious and cultural factors are missing from her history of the last 120 years, but is adamant that 'the production, consumption, and transportation of oil and gas is critical for understanding' the period. Her position is intelligible, given that many popular histories of recent times have often preferred ideological factors to explain the international disturbances of the modern period.
Thompson general political position seems to be left of centre, judging by her public record on the popular podcast Talking Politics. Her energy story fits a little too easily into the modern left's tendency to critique energy politics as part of a broader dissatisfaction with capitalism.
Thompson seems reluctant to entertain possible alternative explanations for the progress of world affairs over the last century. For example, America's substantial advantage over Russia in the production and use of oil at the beginning of the First World War may have been due mainly to the relative stability provided by its liberal and ordered domestic politics, whereas Russia was embroiled in political and civil disruptions arising from its less sophisticated political structures.
Similarly, the development of supranational governance structures in the European Union, which have induced some substantially negative populist and nationalist reactions (and, of course, Brexit) may originate more from a post-modern ideological disdain for the nation state than simply a preference for unitary institutions to manage Europe's energy import dependence that worsened when Middle Eastern oil producers ramped up prices in the 1970s.
Another factor attributed to energy economics in Disorder is the highly significant and increasing use of 'quantitative easing' (large scale purchases of bonds by central banks) as the principal (and risky) instrument used by governments to stimulate recession-prone economies when the traditional monetary policy manipulation of interest rates is negated by persistent low rates.
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.
Nationhood and nationalism is also a key theme in Disorder. Thompson notes that nationhood has deteriorated as international capital markets have increasingly dominated energy investment, with the result that national governments are less motivated to respond to their constituencies.
This is particularly the interpretation she provides for the tensions between the EU institutions and the increasingly restive national populations in Europe. National governments in the Eurozone have ceded control of monetary policy to the ECB, and have less incentive and flexibility to manage their economies. Their populations consequently react negatively when their governments seem not to be accountable for austerity programs and other financial governance matters that affect them.
Albeit that Disorder's focus on energy politics is an informed and detailed counter-argument to more conventional analyses of geopolitical tensions in the modern world, Thompson does, however, seem somewhat coy about possibly her real thoughts on these matters. She notes briefly that the history of energy to date is one of increasing economic growth that is dependent on using more energy, and that the limitations of so-called green energy are likely to require reduced consumption to comply with agreed targets for reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Thompson seems reluctant to criticize the new reduced growth option (which seems to be a rerun of the 1970s' Club of Rome Limits to Growth report advocating reduced economic growth to address a presumed depletion of resources). She notes that reductions will have substantial economic impacts on consumers, especially if the distribution of the reductions is unequal, which would almost certainly cause further political disruptions. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in 2018 over minor increases in fuel taxes quickly evolved into much broader political protest about inequality.
A clue to Thompson's view on these matters may lie in the epigraph page that prefaces Disorder. There are three quotes: one from Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times for These Times, which explores the damaging cultural effects of industrialization, a passage from Dickens's Tale of Two Cities suggesting the guillotine and tumbrils of the French Revolution emanated from darkly subconscious impulses related to Fate and Death, and a quote from the 1643 Religio Medici of Thomas Browne on the transience of human affairs.
These hint at a more philosophical motivation for Disorder: that the energy forces that have enabled the development of the modern world contain within them a destructive Faustian bargain. Disorder provides a detailed summary of a world fracturing, and one which could dissolve into chaos if conflicts between the superpowers continue to be dominated and exacerbated by access to scarce energy resources.
Readers of a liberal and optimistic disposition will be grateful for Thompson's detailed analysis of contemporary energy politics, but may finish the book with a more encouraging expectation that the energy resource strategies of autocracies such as Russia and China have less flexibility to progress successfully in the 21st century than the more dynamic democratic societies of North America and Europe (especially if the latter can resolve its governance contradictions).
Future global geopolitics may not be as grimly repetitive or dystopianly restrictive as Thompson seems to suggest, if a core dynamic of global progress is the conflict between democratic and authoritarian impulses for governing, of which energy politics is a subset rather than the determinative factor.
Engaging and illuminating as Disorder is, a general reader may find the range and intensity of detail almost overwhelming. The chapter notes collected at the end of the book reveal Thompson's extraordinarily broad and close reading of material in her field of study. She claims her 'analytical history is offered as synthetic interpretation and privileges the schematic over forensic detail.'
Celebrity historian Tom Holland's praise for Disorder is quoted on the dust jacket, and notes that 'to read Thompson on the history of the past century is to see it in sudden sharp definition, akin to looking through glass after the window-cleaner has been.'
The general reader may want to differ. We can be grateful for Thompson's insights, but the unrelenting procession of events and detail can at times remind one more of the biblical glass darkly. Only very attentive reading and a careful regard for other more general factors not analyzed in Disorder can reveal the full picture.
A final teasing thought may also occur: if the climate change constraint is relaxed over the next two decades because the modeling that underpins it seems to continually overshoot, then current barriers being erected to the ongoing development and use of fossil fuels will be reduced.
In that somewhat black swan scenario, considerable resources currently tied up in the development of renewable energy technologies will be freed to improve the efficient use of fossil fuel energy, and possibly also to develop better and more practical alternative forms of energy. The very recent rise of complex AI tools might be of considerable assistance in those endeavors. In that case, Thompson's Disorder may prove to be more a rear vision view of the world than a reliable projection of ongoing fracturing.