The Crude Toll

The source: “The First Law of Petropolitics” by Thomas L. Friedman, in ___Foreign Policy___, May–June 2006.

The high price of oil is certainly not pleasant for the average driver, whose ­fill-­up has doubled in price in less than four years. And it is clearly a burden for the American econ­omy. But you might think that it would be a boon to ­oil-­exporting nations as ­once-­cheap oil bobs around the $70-a-barrel ­mark.

However, you would be thinking completely backward under the First Law of Petropolitics, posited by author and _New York Times_ columnist Thomas L. Friedman. His First Law holds that the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in ­oil-­rich “petrolist” states. “The higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded,” he ­writes.

A petrolist state is a country whose economy rests on oil and has weak national institutions or an outright authoritarian government. Among the examples are Azerbai­jan, Iran, Kazakh­stan, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vene­zuela. Friedman tests his theory by comparing oil prices to citizen ­freedoms.

Take Venezuela. When oil was in the $10-to-$20-a-barrel range, the country’s oil industry was reopened to foreign investment and a coup failed. But as the price rose to $50, freedom shrank, according to an analysis by the research organization Freedom ­House.

Or Nigeria. When oil was hovering around $23 a barrel, there was a boom in independent newspapers. As oil rose toward $30, local elections were postponed ­indefinitely.

To explain the phenomenon, Friedman draws on work by UCLA political scientist Michael L. Ross. The oil bonanza relieves govern­ments of the necessity of taxation that otherwise breeds popular demands for representation. It gives rulers plenty of cash for patronage, police, internal security, and other dangerous indulgences. It reduces pressure on citizens to attain higher levels of education or to specialize in needed ­occu­pations—­pursuits that can produce a more articulate, economically independent public that can keep the heat on an authoritarian ­govern­ment.

The tide of democracy and free markets that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall is now running into a countercurrent of ­petro-­authoritar­ianism, Friedman writes. This gives some of the worst regimes in the world extra cash with which to cause ­mischief.

And all of these negative impacts could poison global politics. Cutting oil consumption, he says, should not be the goal only of high-minded environmentalists. It is a national security ­imperative.