Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Disorder by Helen Thompson | Waterstones Disorder by Helen Thompson | Waterstones

The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic. Deindustrialization, financial crises, mass unemployment, chaos in the Middle East, and rising inequality have shortened life expectancies, undermined social stability, and opened the door to demagogues and authoritarians. And that was before the pandemic killed tens of millions of people and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine displaced millions more and upended global commodity markets.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.

Century’s Global “Disorder”? | The Nation What Is Fueling Our Century’s Global “Disorder”? | The Nation

It is a dense book. While the absence of superfluous words is welcome, it surely could have been made easier to read. 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. 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 work is ambitious in scope and the author spared no effort digging into details to support her arguments. The result is a set of novel insights on a number of historical events over the past few decades. Russia and China's recent renewed efforts to form alliances with oil-rich countries in the Middle East; The question matters. If specific politicians and technocrats—and the intellectuals who influence them—make mistakes, then there is hope. The world has the potential to learn from their choices and do better in the future—or at least make new, different mistakes. If not, then the most it can aim for is the peace of mind that comes from understanding that there are no alternatives.

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Generally, I think the problem with the neoliberalism thesis is that its proponents largely downplay the material causes of the 1970s crises. The United States was the world’s largest oil consumer, and it could no longer produce enough oil to meet domestic demand. To import oil from abroad and run an oil-driven trade deficit, it needed foreign creditors, and that necessitated a move to opening international financial markets. In adjusting to this economic reality and the new power of OPEC to set prices and control international supply, Richard Nixon introduced substantial controls on the price, production, and distribution of domestically produced energy. It was primarily in reaction to these controls that the deregulation agenda took shape. Meg Jacobs’s book Panic at the Pump is eye-opening on this subject. This is not to suggest that there was no intellectual genealogy to certain economic policy ideas that are called “neoliberal” and were influential from the 1970s, especially in a number of international institutions and the EU. Of course there was, and Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism has done an excellent job of tracing that history. But we cannot understand either why the 1970s were such a historical juncture or the choices Western governments made in the 1980s about economic policy without seriously engaging with the trajectory of the world’s most significant energy source through that time period. Then, observing the American presidential election of 2016 from this side of the Atlantic, there seemed to me some parallels with some of the political dynamics around excess in the late Roman Republic. I saw Trump as an insider/outsider member of what might be thought of as the American oligarchic class using others’ class grievances—including about the place of money in democratic politics—to win an electoral contest for power where he was, in part at least, pitting himself against other members of his own class. This—both Trump’s behavior and the political conditions in which he could succeed in these terms—seemed to me the politics of aristocratic excess.

The Suez crisis also led to the creation of the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), and helped propel France’s turn to nuclear power, after a period in which it had hoped to supply Europe with oil from its Algerian colony, after the discovery of oil there in 1956. This ended with France’s loss of control of Algeria in 1962, though France was able to retain control of its Saharan oil fields in the Évian Accords until they were nationalised in the early 1970s. Britain, for its part, encouraged British Petroleum (the former Anglo-Persian Company) to explore for oil in the Western Hemisphere, but retained oil operations in what was still the British protectorate of Kuwait, and, like the French, sought to develop a domestic nuclear industry – tied, of course, to military nuclear strategy.