Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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Very interesting perspectives. Even before finishing it I noticed that my take on some of the daily news has changed by incorporating some of her insights. ''The book is as disturbing as it is thought-provoking'', says Martin Wolf in choosing it as one of this books for summer 2022. These are interesting arguments, but they are not persuasive. Britain did much worse than France from 2007 to 2013 and substantially underperformed Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland ever since the global financial crisis. (Switzerland is not in the EU, but it nevertheless allows full freedom of movement for EU nationals.) The United Kingdom may have done better than Spain or Greece, but it did not do well. Besides, the people who voted for Britain to leave the EU lived in the places with the fewest migrants. And although the U.K. government may not have won all of its battles over euro-denominated clearing while it was inside the EU, it clearly has had far less negotiating leverage with the rest of the European Union after it decided to leave. DSJ: I’m intrigued by your discussion of “democratic excess” versus “aristocratic excess.” For instance, you are critical of commentators of the 1970s, such as Samuel Huntington and Daniel Bell, who blamed the crisis of the 1970s on the democratic excesses of overindulgent Western societies. As you point out, such pundits made a direct connection between the great inflation of the 1970s and the majoritarian dynamics of democracies. You show, however, that while the political elites of the center-right and center-left blamed inflation on citizens, they regularly ignored the role that oil and international finance played in contributing to inflation. Moreover, such aristocratic excess, you argue, emboldened an economy that made nation-states and their citizens dependent on the whims of international financial markets. Can you elaborate on the notions of aristocratic excess and democratic excess? Can they, for instance, be mapped onto current concerns about inflation under the Biden administration? DSJ: Is it correct to assume that you believe the move to green energy will play the primary role in accelerating a cold war with China?

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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). Higher oil prices did not have to squeeze growth in either the 1970s or the 2000s. It was only because the exporters chose to hoard their windfalls by purchasing financial assets rather than using their newfound purchasing power to buy more goods and services that the rise in oil prices forced consumers to choose between cutting their spending and going into debt. If oil producers had simply let their living standards rise, workers elsewhere could have responded by making and selling more exports. But here’s the thing: I don’t mind working hard to grasp a concept, but the reward needs to be worth it. In other words, if I’m going to spend my precious reading time decoding a challenging text, I’d better walk away with some groundbreaking revelations or at least some unique viewpoints. Thompson's book, however, despite its moments of clarity, often regurgitated ideas and themes that have been discussed elsewhere, and in more digestible formats. 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. This means that after having read it a few weeks ago, I find it hard to think of a main take-away in this book. Rather than clarifying the ginormous complexity by synthesizing its components in more accessible language, I feel more confused and anchorless than before. Then again, Thompson is not a political activist but an academic. For a book targeting a wider audience, I do believe a different approach could have been a better choice.I read non-fiction because I want to learn something. A clear, concise, and convincing argument should be made. I want to walk away thinking, “yes — that makes sense”. 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. the Eurozone debt crises as countries tried to spend their way out of the recessions with borrowed money;

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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.

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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). Oil could cut both ways, however, and was influential in the collapse of the Soviet Union (as was the Chernobyl disaster, discussed in my review of Serhii Plokhy’s book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. ) The high oil prices of the 1970s incentivised production of oil and gas from the North Sea, as well as additional output in Alaska and Mexico, and this extra production capacity reduced the ability of Opec to control prices. So too did the creation of oil futures contracts on US exchanges, which gave the holders the right to buy oil at an agreed price in the future. Faced with this, Saudi Arabia led Opec in production cuts in an effort to retain control over prices, but as Saudi Arabia’s income began to fall, it reversed course, pumping up production to secure market share, leading to a price crash in 1986. This hugely diminished oil revenues for the Soviet Union, reducing its capacity to finance domestic spending, adding another destabilising factor that led to the dissolution of the Soviet project in 1991. Russia re-emerged to play the Soviet Union’s role in energy supply internationally, particularly to Europe, complicated by the fact that pipelines ran through former countries of the Soviet bloc, such as Ukraine and Poland. That story is of course very much active today. 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.

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The crisis in the Ukraine, which has broken just as her book was published, if anything strengthens her case about the centrality of energy to international power plays - and its likely continuing dominance in the coming decades as the world slowly weans itself off fossil fuels. The next two sections are also interesting, however they do feel a little less novel than the first, where Thompson is so obviously in her element as one of the pre-eminent experts on the politics of oil. Her retelling of the story of the rise of global finance in section two, and particularly the emergence of Eurodollar markets, let’s her to really do a great job in explaining the current issues of the Eurozone in particular.Like others, I became aware of Helen Thompson’s astounding breadth of knowledge and insight about international political economy through her contributions to the long-running podcast ‘Taking Politics’, which has now sadly ended after six years.

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Thompson’s explanation for the 2016 Brexit referendum suffers from similar flaws. That referendum, it must be remembered, was decided in a close vote that was only held because the Tories won an unexpected parliamentary majority the year before. And that election, it should also be recalled, was one in which European issues played almost no part. Instead, the supposed threat of Scottish independence was the decisive issue in key English constituencies. Moreover, according to the 2016 British Social Attitudes survey, only 22 percent of U.K. citizens wanted to leave the EU in 2015. But instead of treating the outcome as a fluke that needs to be explained by contingent circumstances, Thompson believes that it was a fundamental consequence of the United Kingdom’s place outside the euro. Why should the world believe grand assertions that democracies are fundamentally challenged by “the problem of political time” in ways that autocracies, presumably, are not? Why should a global switch to green energy intensify “Sino-American rivalry” if it reduces the zero-sum competition for fossil fuel resources? And if “the United States succeeds in breaking its dependency on Chinese manufacturing supply chains” while “China expands its domestic markets to compensate,” why would that necessitate conflict, as opposed to restoring the amicable relations that preceded the dislocations of the 2000s?A 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. Her analysis of the breakdown in democracy is also idiosyncratic, using the framework of cycles of accumulating “aristocratic or democratic excess” to explain how forms of government become unstable through time. 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.