Timothy Mitchell Challenges Conventional Wisdom Which Suggests

¶ … Timothy Mitchell challenges conventional wisdom which suggests that oil-producing countries tend to be less democratic, specifically by referring to the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Mitchell discusses the role of oil by placing it within a larger context of fossil fuels and their effect on political mobilization, and argues that the existence of large reserves of fossil fuel may limit democracy but also made certain kinds of democratic processes possible. He calls the latter carbon democracy.

Mitchell argues that viewing the impact of oil as necessarily anti-democratic is narrow-minded. The role of oil should be analyzed in a larger context, he says. For instance, those who argue that a dependency on oil and the ability of the ruling elite in the Middle Eastern countries make them less democratic only look at the political processes of using oil for the benefit of the rulers. But we need also to look at the processes of exploration, extraction, storing, and distribution of oil and how those processes affect democratic politics. Mitchell also notes that the leading industrialized countries of the world also heavily depend on oil. So, the anti-democratic nature of a country cannot be attributed to just the existence of oil in a given country.

Mitchell proposes to look at the history of coal and its impact on mass politics as a context for understanding the impact of oil and carbon democracy in general. This seems to be a particularly important point. As he notes, the introduction of coal to Europe two hundred years ago totally changed the economy and politics of European countries. Coal provided a greater concentration of renewable energy which would be much harder to get from the traditional source of energy: the sun. Coal helped them to industrialize and also speeded up the process of urbanization because the availability of coal removed the need for having large "adjacent pastures and wood" (402). At the same time, coal changed agrarian politics in Europe and encouraged them to expand agricultural production to distant lands, which led to colonization and enslavement of Africans and indigenous populations. So, the introduction of coal and political processes it triggered led to both "the age of democratization" and "the age of empire." In other words, coal had both a limiting and promoting potential for democratic politics.

Mitchell discusses another important way fossil fuel can be democratizing. He argues that the introduction of coal to Europe and the United States triggered unprecedented worker mobilization. Coal-miners established worker unions and challenged the rules of industrial government. Working in the mines also allowed workers to have an autonomy that they used to demand greater worker rights and freedom. The frequent strikes coal miners organized changed economic and political structures of European and North American countries. In a similar manner, Mitchell points out, oil exploration can be democratizing. The history of oil exploration in different parts of the world -- the United States, Venezuela, Russian Azerbaijan, Iran, etc. -- led to strikes and worker organizations that made a tremendous impact on political processes. However, the impact of oil in this regard was weaker because, as compared to coal mining and transportation, oil exploration and transportation required lesser work, thus limiting the power of worker unions who could withdraw their labor at any moment to use as a bargaining power.