“How democracies can be sustained as the likely contests over climate change and energy consumption destabilise them will become the central political question of the coming decade.”
Professor Helen Thompson, ’Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century’
Like others, I became aware of Professor 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 on air.
In 2019, Thompson took a year off from her role as a professor of political economy at Cambridge University in the UK to write ‘Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century’. The resulting book reflects not only on the turbulent years covered by that podcast – including 2016’s twin earthquakes of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump – but traces those events way back to a series of long-standing fault-lines, particularly related to energy and, forward to a looming fight for resources at the end of the carbon age.
“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.
So the first history she explores is a geopolitical one, revolving around energy and beginning with the rise of the US as a great power at the time of the emergence of oil as the chief energy source, replacing coal. The second history is economic and starts with the breakdown of the post WWII Bretton Woods monetary system in the early 70s and the emergence of fiat currencies. The third and final history is about democracies and how the geopolitical and economic changes of the 70s pressured democratic politics.
This is a densely told history. Thompson as a historian focuses mostly on the particulars and resists the temptation to force events into a grand narrative. She is surprisingly, at least to my untutored view, dismissive of the widely promulgated idea that the ideological ascendancy of neoliberalism since the 70s explains the disorder we face today and instead puts energy politics front and centre.
“Quite simply, without taking energy seriously there is no persuasive story that can be told about the trajectories of economies from the 1970s through to the 1980s, or their political consequences, including those. That led to the euro’s creation,” she writes.
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.
For instance, the rise of the populists and nationalists in recent years can be seen in this way as a rebalancing back from the “aristocratic excess” of the 1980s and 1980s when technocratic economists and bond markets held sway over democratic governments.
This isn’t a hopeful book. Thompson, as anyone familiar with her matter-of-fact observations on the Talking Politics podcast will know, has a tendency to look for the grit in oyster rather than the pearl. But her insights here, particularly in relation to energy geopolitics, explain much of the predicament we are now in.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which occurred just as her book was published, if anything strengthens her case about the centrality of energy to international power plays – and its likely continued dominance as the world slowly weans itself off fossil fuels.
Alongside the US-based British historian Adam Tooze, Thompson is perhaps the most clear-eyed analyst of international political economy today and certainly one that anyone interested in the disorder we now face should read.
Highly recommended.
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