Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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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. 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. the destabilizing inflation and related unemployment of the 1970s when Middle Eastern oil producers used their market power to raise prices; A really excellent retelling of the modern political history of Western Europe and the US through the lens of energy. What Thompson does is not so much to introduce new stories, but to frame what you already know in a new and novel way. Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s.

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I will refrain from summarizing the closing section where she ties these together so you’ll read this excellent book yourself. It is a dense book. While the absence of superfluous words is welcome, it surely could have been made easier to read. 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. Thompson warns the reader at the outset that she aims to privilege ‘the schematic over forensic detail’. She does not warn, but I must, that her prose is dotted with words like ‘constitutionalized’ and ‘delegitimating’, and that other words are used in a Red Queen sort of way (‘words mean what I say they mean’): ‘Britain joined most of its fellow EC members in eschewing American support for Israel’, for example. In a search for a comprehensive explanation of the last decade’s disruption, this book starts from the premise that several histories are necessary to identify the causal forces at work and a conviction that these histories must overlap,” Thompson writes in her introduction.

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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. I also think there are limits—bound up with the differing densities of energy sources and the present intermittency of energy supplied by solar and wind—that must be faced around the Net Zero project. I understand the argument for saying that we just need to be optimistic, because optimism is the necessary condition of technological innovation; indeed, I think in some respects that is right. But that optimism should be balanced by realism about energy and a consciousness of what this energy revolution actually entails. Otherwise, the politics of Net Zero will become dangerous because of the time scales: We can’t just pretend a future has arrived that hasn’t. We also need to reflect on what a politics that demands sacrifices in Western countries might look like and what that means in distributional terms, because who consumes how much energy in many ways defines inequality.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century - Goodreads

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. 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. 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.

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But for casual readers or even folks like me who enjoy a good socio-political analysis without the unnecessary linguistic acrobatics? Maybe give it a pass. Or at least, be prepared with a strong coffee and an even stronger will to push through.