In the Middle East and the West, Oil and Democracy Don’t Mix

Two fossil fuels powered the rise of the modern industrial state. But only one—the hard, chunky rock extracted from the ground by legions of coal workers—has been a force for the development of democracy.

So says Timothy Mitchell , chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, who has written a new book titled Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. The work examines the complex relationship between coal, oil and democracy, and it’s being published at a time when a rise in the price of oil is contributing to discontent and demonstrations around the world.

An expert on political theory, political economy and the politics of technology, Mitchell asserts that “it was coal that helped create the possibility of modern democracy, and it was oil that helped create its limits.”

He argues that dependence on coal—a single, concentrated energy source—enabled people to build collective political power around the flow of that material. Workers wielded power because they could, through a general strike, shut down the entire system if their demands were not met. The sheer number of workers needed in the coal industry, and their access to critically important mines, rail yards and processing plants, gave them political power.

By contrast, oil workers are comparatively few, and they do not have to go into the ground themselves to bring up the oil. It goes right into a pipeline, onto a tanker and around the globe.

“Oil is not vulnerable to the same kinds of political pressures,” says Mitchell, who joined Columbia in 2008 after teaching for 25 years at New York University, where he served as director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. “The fluidity—literally—of oil makes it much more difficult for people to build power.”

The “oil curse”—the idea that countries dependent on oil revenues are less likely to have democracy—doesn’t just apply to the oil-rich Middle East. As oil supplanted coal as the fossil fuel of choice, “it weakened democracy not only in oil-dependent countries like those in the Middle East, but also in industrialized countries in the West,” Mitchell says.

From the 1940s through the early ’70s, the leaders of industrialized countries believed unlimited economic growth would continue because of the cheap and apparently limitless supply of oil. Mitchell argues that this notion led to a political framework in which debates about economic inequality had no place. “Politics became organized around increasing the pie rather than addressing relative shares of it,” he says. “Problems of inequality would be solved by growth.”

But such unlimited growth faltered, says Mitchell, as it became more expensive to find enough oil to meet increasing global demand. As of November 22, oil was $98.73 per barrel, compared to an inflation-adjusted $11.85 in 1971.

Although Mitchell’s book was finished before the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Mitchell sees the rising price of oil as a critical component in the recent demonstrations. Higher food prices resulting from higher oil prices were a driving force in those Middle Eastern revolts, he says. In the United States, higher oil prices have driven up the cost of living, compounding the political anger brought on by the 2008 recession.

“The recent occupational movements—from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park—are examples of people attempting to build political power in the most fundamental way—putting themselves in public spaces and refusing to leave,” he said. “Wherever you are in the world, having a vote is not enough. What matters more is the ability to get your political leaders to act based on your collective political demands.”

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