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INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON OIL DEPLETION Uppsala, Sweden, May 23-25, 2002 Organised by Uppsala University and ASPO,the Association for the Study of Peak Oil |
| The Western geopolitics of energy supply: a short-sighted
approach to the global energy shift Susanne Peters, Giessen University, Germany. We are currently in the middle of a third energy shift: from the coal to the fossil fuel era towards a sustainable energy regime. But instead of acknowledging this inevitable fact and prepare for the transition to the post-fossil era with a regime based on alternative energy, the US and EU/European politicians rely on the short-sighted policy approach of defining energy supply crises as a “risk” and “threat” which have to be dealt with by security policy procedures. While this is not a new phenomenon for US foreign policy where energy has traditionally been viewed as a “vital national security interest”, in the European context a geopolitical approach to energy is a further constituent in the build up of the European Union’s identity as a regional power bloc with an independent foreign and security policy. Western geopolitical concern of energy supply is manifest in three spheres which will be discussed in more detail in the paper: short-term energy supply crises, the question of pipeline security, as well as the danger of nationalization of energy investment by Western investors in North Africa and the Middle East. In the concluding section the West’s military power projection towards the Southern shores of the Mediterranean and the Middle East will be discussed, as manifest in recent European endeavors to militarize the Western Mediterranean and NATO’s claim for out-of-area actions in this region. |