States that depend upon oil revenues appear to be less democratic than other states.
Yet oil presents a much larger problem for democracy: faced with the threats of oil
depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged
to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that
may end it. This article explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by
examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil and democracy in the twentieth
century. Following closely the methods by which fossil fuels were produced,
distributed and converted into other forms of socio-technical organization, financial
circulation and political power, the article traces ways in which the concentration and
control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down;
how connections were engineered in the post-war period between the flow of oil and
the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to
depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy
and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the
relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy and
violence were transformed in the 196774 oildollar Middle East crises.
Keywords: democracy; oil; coal; Middle East.
Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of twentieth-century democracy
and its limits. To understand the limits, I propose to explore what made the
emergence of a certain kind of democratic politics possible, the kind I will call
carbon democracy. Before turning to the past, however, let me mention some of
the contemporary limits I have in mind.
In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of those limits was
widely discussed. A distinctive feature of the Middle East, many said, is the
region’s lack of democracy. In several of the scholarly accounts, the lack has