2020_basosi.garavini.ea_Counter-shock - Énergies, Temps & Cosmotechniques

Counter-shock: the oil counter-revolution of the 1980s === > [!tldr] Tags > #type/book > [!info] Meta Data >**FirstEditor**:: [[Basosi, Duccio]] **Editor**:: [[Garavini, Giuliano]] **Editor**:: [[Trentin, Massimiliano]] > **Title**:: Counter-shock: the oil counter-revolution of the 1980s > **Year**:: 2020 > **Citekey**:: [[2020_basosi.garavini.ea]] > **itemType**:: book > **Publisher**:: I.B. Tauris > **Location**:: London > **DOI**:: 10.5040/9781350985896 > **ISBN**:: 978-1-78831-333-9 > **ISSN**:: > > [!Cite] > Basosi Duccio, Garavini Giuliano et Trentin Massimiliano (eds.), _Counter-shock: the oil counter-revolution of the 1980s_, First edition., London, I.B. Tauris (coll. « International library of twentieth century history »), 2020, 382 p. > > %%[@2020_basosi.garavini.ea]%% > **URL**:: . > > **Related**:: %%[@2023_welluma]%% ([[2023_welluma_Energizing neoliberalism]]) . > > **Attachment**::[PDF](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/RWH6T9Y7). --- > [!important] Synthesis > **Contribution**:: > > [!Abstract] >> --- # Note. --- # Annotations%% begin annotations %% ### Imported: 2026-09-24 11:04 am Quote > Introduction: Counter-Shock and Counter-Revolution Quote > In real terms, the price of oil had descended in a few months back to the level of 1973: higher than that prevailing in the decades after World War II, but only one-third of the value reached in 1980. Echoing the name that many observers in the oil consuming countries had applied to the price rises of 1973 and 1979 –80, in 1986 the then director of Planning at ENI Franco Bernabè described these events as a , countershock,.1 Quote > the fall in oil prices appears crucial for the understanding of such important processes of the late 1980s and early 1990s as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact;4 the worsening of the , foreign debt crises, of many countries in the , Third World,;5 the downsizing of the role played by the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in world affairs;6 and the relaunch of a world energy regime centred on the massive consumption of oil and other fossil fuels.7 Quote > the counter-shock symbolically marked the start of a new regime in the , oil market,, one in which for the first time prices were the result of the daily interactions between supply and demand. Quote > In turn, the Saudi decision did bring greater sales for itself and for some other members of the organisation, but it also brought large losses in revenues for OPEC as a whole, and the effective renunciation of the once solemnly proclaimed pledge to uphold the capacity to fix the price of oil as a symbol of true sovereignty.14 Quote > The counter-shock and its consequences were not a matter of abstract , market forces, finally triumphing, as if there had always existed an eternal and impersonal , oil market, that only waited for its moment to be freed from beneath the iron heel of some essentially Introduction 3 adversarial category, be it , the state, or , politics,. On the contrary, close analysis of the dynamics that led to and followed the counter-shock indicates that it cannot be understood outside the framework of the international political economy of the 1970s and 1980s, with power relations among states, ideas and ideologies, political movements and powerful private actors all playing definite and discernible roles. Quote > It would be impossible, for example, to explain the stabilisation of world energy demand in the late 1970s without referring to the policies aimed at energy conservation and diversification that consumer countries adopted in the wake of the , oil shocks,; in turn, the oil glut on the supply side derived from decisions that were made either by governments and government-owned companies or, again, within the context of state-led energy policies which authorised and supported the activities of private actors both at home and abroad. Quote > Speaking in 1982, the then British Secretary of State for Energy, Nigel Lawson, declared: Quote > I do not see the Government,s task as being to try to plan the future shape of energy production and consumption. It is not even primarily to balance UK demand and supply for energy. Our task is rather to set a framework which will ensure that the market operates in the energy sector with a minimum of distortion and energy is produced and consumed efficiently.15 Quote > Not only was the choice to abstain from active energy policies presented as a rather deliberate one, but one can say that , there was no alternative, only at the cost of pretending that such concepts as , minimum distortion, and , efficiency, were not inherently political.16 Quote > In order to stress the political economy of the , counter-shock,, we have decided to associate it with the term , counter-revolution, in the title of this collection. Quote > The 1980s marked in many ways the end of the revolutionary prospects that had raised so many hopes and fears during the previous two decades, no matter how contradictory or ephemeral. Quote > finally, the planning for an , energy transition, – which put policies and ideas in charge of steering complex social– economic processes – was shelved and to an extent reversed, when massive use of oil made a powerful comeback as the driver of consumption patterns, and private actors – often simplistically called , the market, – were handed the lead in the process. Quote > Giovanni Favero and Angela Faloppa make use of the literature on the performativity of economic theory in the creation of markets to highlight the political and economic impact of oil pricing in the long term, and to show how the adoption of specific metrics for oil pricing contributed to make the counter-shock the foundational moment of a new , oil regime,. Quote > David Spiro locates the run-up to the counter-shock against the backdrop of the monetary hegemony defended by the US governments during the 1970s, and then deployed in instances like the 1979 , Volcker shock, and the 1985 , Plaza Accord,. Quote > Spiro shows on the one hand how these were actual factors at play in conditioning the , oil market, and, on the other, how US monetary hegemony contributed to make the , free market, a valid explanation for any event once freemarketeers took the reins of US policy during the 1980s. Quote > Catherine Schenk focuses on the interplay between the broad tendency toward financialisation of the world economy after the end of Bretton Woods, and the specific tendency toward financialisation in the , oil 6 Counter-Shock market,, Quote > showing how in the early 1980s a growing set of oil-related financial products – not all of them successful – were launched in London and New York, to become the actual indicators of , oil prices, Quote > Favero and Faloppa and Schenk raise the issue of the power of rating agencies in the post-1986 , oil market, Quote > Francesco Petrini focuses on the role played by the oil majors in the making of the counter-shock Quote > On the one hand, their policies from the late 1970s had indeed contributed to the stabilisation of energy and oil demand in the early 1980s, which in turn were important factors in the making of the counter-shock. On the other, such policies were virtually abandoned in the early 1980s, under the influence of the new inclination, nurtured originally in London and Washington and then elsewhere, for governments not to play an active role in , markets,. Quote > nuclear energy, which was to receive the largest share of the public financial support dedicated to energy diversification in the 1970s and 1980s, and which grew to cover almost one-tenth of the world,s primary energy supply by the late 1980s. Quote > n her chapter, focused on the US environmentalist movement but attentive to a global context in which environmentalism became an influential cultural and political factor, Angela Santese Quote > Duncan Connors and Eshref Trushin show in their chapter that the nuclear path taken by countries such as the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, France and the Soviet Union delivered different results because its outcomes were not , set in Introduction 9 stone, but were rather reliant on a number of dependent and independent factors, Quote > Duccio Basosi reviews the public discourse on renewable energies during the 1970s and 1980s to assess what kind of challenge these represented to the , fossil energy regime, centred on oil. Quote > While renewables were part of a wider global debate on an , energy transition, then perceived as necessary, Basosi concludes that they were never at its heart: coal, nuclear energy, natural gas and nonOPEC oil were – together with energy conservation – by far the most privileged sources for energy diversification purposes. Quote > The Role of the Dollar and the Justificatory Discourse of Neoliberalism Quote > since the US dollar was both the denominator and the means of exchange in oil markets, what role did the dollar play in this counter-shock? Quote > It is my argument that by the time of the countershock, American officials had gone from using neoliberalism in order to justify unilateral uncooperative policies to actually believing in the efficacy of market forces. Quote > So the ideology of neoliberalism meant, in effect, that policymakers justified whatever happened in terms of markets working, even when what happened was the result of state power. Quote > This chapter looks at oil prices less in terms of cause and effect, and more as a representative picture of the changes in social purpose of neoliberalism. Quote > The political economy of oil exposed neoliberalism as a justification for power and, at times, for chaotic swings in fortune. %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2026-09-24T11:04:06.369+02:00 %%