One man's oil price, is another man's....

The discovery of oil could be regarded in the same breath as the discovery of fire, electricity or nuclear technology, but none of these human revelations has created the division and conflict that the black gold has inflicted on the world. Oil has fed greed the world over, led to countless wars and set in motion a potentially unstoppable environmental catastrophe. Without oil our standards of living might not be as high and access to essentials may not be as instantaneous, but we could have adapted. Oil has enabled transportation to move at what would have seemed galactic pace only a few hundred years ago, but do we need to get across the globe in such a short space of time. Electrical communications may make physical communication - that is actual travel - irrelevant one day. Oil has been responsible for creating the world as it is, but would an alternative world been worse? It's debatable. So oil has achieved short term gratification but long term damage.

In 1973 the West's reliance of oil for the first time was laid bare. Finally the Achilles heal had been exposed. And this was only after a limited one month embargo and a price increase to a mere $11.65 per barrel. But the West managed to tame the Saudis and consequently OPEC through weapons and various other backhanders and oil prices stabilised (although they increased to $30-40 per barrel for much of the 1980s and 1990s), allowing sustained growth. But this Achilles heal is laid bare once more. The Middle East is floating on immense oil revenues, it is an architects paradise and is now providing finance back to its customers just to reiterate its economic clout. So for this part of the world, higher oil prices mean even greater wealth. And to rub it, petrol prices in the Middle East are decreasing.

Oil is a finite resource, so unless the Middle East diversifies (which it is doing through education, finance and science), it will be washed up in a century. Likewise, but more immediately, the West needs to wake up to the reality of a limited resource and shift its economy to non-petroleum reliance. Predictably this has been left too late, so now it will only be achieved the hard way and may well lead to violence, social unrest, etc. Now the West are not the only consumers, India and China, with a combined population closing on the 3 billion mark, are radically altering the market.

Organized Chaos

The tide of globalisation was unstoppable in the 1990s and whilst free trade benefited the Western world with an enhanced communication networks and higher standards of living, the downside - exploitation of the Third world, vast disparities in the distribution of wealth, unchecked and corrupt power to corporates - has been clearly evident. But even worse consequences have emergedv - terrorism and crime. Transnational terrorism has benefited from globalisation rather than being caused by it, but organized crime has evolved and mixed with this new globalised world into a hybrid operating at new unprecedented and dangerous levels. Journalist and historian Misha Glenny investigates this post globalisation criminal underworld in his new book McMafia. Having reported first on the collapse of communism in 1989 and then the Balkan wars 1991-1995, Glenny has witnessed, first hand, the rise of Eastern European thugs, gangsters and wrestlers to the form a new elite mafia.
The mix of rampant capitalism, corruption, unscrupulous morality and plain old brutality underpinned the rise of gangs in Serbia, Russia and Bulgaria in the early 1990s. Glenny identifies the imposing of an arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia in 1991 as a significant moment. The republic was not short of weaponry, but this gave every incentive for smugglers and gangs to create sophisticated plans to circumvent the embargo and get rich in the process. Another factor - following the collapse of communism - was the mass dismissal of intelligence services personnel who had enforced the Iron curtain's will. Individuals trained in surveillance, assassination and deception were perfect recruits for criminal gangs. Another key factor that Glenny explains - is the unbreakable link between politics and organized crime in the region. This was brutally demonstrated by the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjic, who had mixed with organized criminals and relied on their support on his rise to office. His death followed a pledge to crack down on these groups.