[Mb-civic] As Energy Prices Rise, It's All Downhill for Democracy by Thomas L. Friedman

[michael at intrafi.com]

The New York Times
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May 5, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
As Energy Prices Rise, It's All Downhill for Democracy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In case you haven't noticed, all the oil-rich bad guys seem to be having a
fine and dandy time these days.

Iran, awash in oil money, thumbs its nose at U.N. demands for it to desist
in its nuclear adventures and daily threatens to wipe Israel off the map.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia, awash in oil money, jails his opponents
at home and cozies up to America's opponents, like Iran and Hamas, abroad.
Sudan, awash in oil money, ignores the world's pleas to halt its genocide in
Darfur. Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, awash in oil money, regularly
tells America and his domestic opponents to take a hike.

And Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Angola, Saudi Arabia, Chad and Syria, all flush
with oil or gas, are comfortably retreating from even baby steps of
democratization.

There is a pattern here. Many people assumed that with the fall of the
Berlin Wall, we were going to see an unstoppable wave of free elections and
free markets slowly spread across the globe. For a decade that wave seemed,
indeed, to be real and powerful.

But as the world has moved from an oil price range of $20 to $40 per barrel
to a range of $40 to $70 a barrel, a very negative counterwave has arisen.

What I would call "petro-ist" states ‹ highly dependent on oil or gas for
their G.D.P. and having either weak institutions or outright authoritarian
systems ‹ have started asserting themselves. And they are weakening, for now
at least, the global democratization trend.

Economists have long taught us about the negative effects that an
overabundance of natural resources can have on political and economic reform
in any country: the "resource curse." But when it comes to oil, it seems
that you can take this resource curse argument a step further: there appears
to be a specific correlation between the price of oil and the pace of
freedom.

I call it the "First Law of Petropolitics," and it posits the following: The
price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in
petro-ist states.

According to the First Law of Petropolitics, the higher the price of global
crude oil, the more erosion we see in petro-ist nations in the right to free
speech, a free press, free elections, freedom of assembly, government
transparency, an independent judiciary and the rule of law, and in the
freedom to form independent political parties and nongovernmental
organizations. Such erosion does not occur in healthy democracies with oil.

Conversely, according to the First Law of Petropolitics, the lower the price
of oil, the more the petro-ist countries are forced to move toward a
politics that is more transparent, more sensitive to opposition voices, more
open to a broad set of interactions with the outside world and more focused
on building the legal and educational structures that will maximize the
ability of their citizens, both men and women, to compete, start new
companies and attract investments from abroad. (For an elaboration of this
argument, see the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine,
www.foreignpolicy.com.)

Yes, many factors are involved in shaping the politics of a country. But is
it an accident that when oil was $20 to $40 a barrel, Iran was calling for a
"dialogue of civilizations," and when it hit $70 a barrel, Iran was calling
for the destruction of Israel?

When a barrel was $20 to $40, we had "Putin I." That's when President Bush
looked Mr. Putin in the eye in 2001 and said he'd found "a sense of his
soul." If Mr. Bush tried to get a sense of Mr. Putin's soul today ‹ the soul
of "Putin II," the Putin of $70-a-barrel oil ‹ he would see down there the
huge Russian energy company Gazprom. Mr. Putin's regime has swallowed
Gazprom, along with a variety of once-independent Russian media outlets and
institutions.

While these increasingly bold petro-authoritarians don't represent the sort
of strategic or ideological threat that communism once posed to the West,
their impact on global politics is still quite corrosive. Some of the worst
regimes now have more oil money than ever to do bad things for a long time ‹
and many decent, democratic countries have to kowtow to them to get oil and
gas.

Given the inverse relationship between the price of oil and the pace of
freedom in petro-ist states, any U.S. strategy for promoting democracy in
these countries is doomed to fail unless it includes a credible plan for
finding alternatives to oil and bringing down the global price of crude.

The price of oil should now be a daily preoccupation of the secretary of
state, not just the secretary of energy. Today, you cannot be an effective
democracy-promoting idealist without also being an effective
energy-conscious environmentalist.