Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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Most egregiously, the slowdown in China’s growth rate that began in 2011 had nothing to do with “the ongoing risks around dollar shortage problems in Eurodollar markets.” Instead, it was a deliberate policy choice by Chinese officials who wanted to curtail the unnecessary and environmentally destructive construction projects that were launched in response to the global financial crisis. Thompson writes Chinese leaders were worried “that China’s dollar debt vulnerability had trapped the country in a lower growth paradigm.” Yet she cites a People’s Daily article from 2016 that warned against another yuan-denominated borrowing surge and welcomed slower growth because “China has to make a choice between quantity and quality.”

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century - Goodreads Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century - Goodreads

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The geopolitical story begins with the inherent difficulties the United States faced as an ascendant non-Eurasian power in the early twentieth century, especially in the Middle East, and culminates in the American turn away from China in a world in which the United States is simultaneously a declining military power and a resurgent energy and financial power. HT: I am not sure whether it is primary or not. There is a lot already in play, especially given the rise of China’s navy and high-tech manufacturing competition in defense areas. I also think fossil fuel energy questions have long caused tensions in the US-China relationship, especially on the Chinese side. 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.DSJ: I’m intrigued by your claim that the humanitarian tragedy in Syria was even more disruptive than the Iraq War. Can you explain your reasoning here, especially as it relates to new interstate rivalries and the challenges facing NATO? There were some commendable parts, don't get me wrong. The deep dives into specific global events and their intertwined complexities showcased Thompson's in-depth research and understanding. I just wish these insights weren’t buried under layers of heavy language and disjointed narratives. Of course, these largely benign conditions did not eliminate the disruptive capacity of some of the forces that began to move before the 1980s. The immediate turbulence generated by the Maastricht Treaty and the 1992–93 ERM crises bequeathed systemic problems: at the turn of the millennium, the EU was a multi-currency union that contained a Eurozone larger than Germany had ever intended with an offshore financial centre located in the wider Union. Quite clearly, the EU also had a long-term predicament centered around the relationship between Union-level treaties and national elections. In the United States, the fact that the 1992 presidential election was won on the lowest percentage of the popular vote since 1912 and the prolonged attempt by congressional Republicans to remove Bill Clinton from office by impeachment were early indications of the path the American republic was on towards weak losers’ consent. The book does not offer solutions to these threats, focussing instead on defining the problems, in the hope that, seeing the problems clearly, others will be able to take up the challenge of finding ways that are acceptable to the public of muddling through energy transitions. “To mitigate against the possibly destructive nature of the politics to come, collective understanding needs to catch up with what the conjunction of physical realities about energy and the realities of climate change entails. Careening between the ideas of technologically driven salvation and an inescapable Götterdämmerung is a hopeless response … governments will have to decide on what concurrent risks must be taken in relation to different time scales. Those decisions will invite geopolitical conflict, including over the territory where critical resources are located. In Western democracies, politicians will need to make palatable the likely sacrifices demanded of citizens, without entrenching further aristocratic excess … 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.” This will indeed be pivotal and difficult, but a worse possibility confronts us – that of putting the energy question to the side while we are forced to deal with war, food shortages, forced migration, cultural disputes, and cost of living pressures.

Disorder: hard times in the 21st century | International

This is a vastly abbreviated summary of the highly complicated history of oil and geopolitics presented in the book. Missing here are the Syrian civil war, NATO actions in Libya in the 2010s, China’s rising demand for energy and the effects on international finance, the US shale revolution, Turkey’s increasingly militaristic claiming of oil and gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, amongst other things, but being more recent these might be more familiar to the reader. 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. I first discovered Helen Thompson in the now defunct podcast 'Talking Politics' hosted by David Runciman. Runciman and Thompson conversed at an exceptionally high intellectual level, I found.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.

Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century PDF - Hive Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century PDF - Hive

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 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.