Alexander Etkind (University of Cambridge)

The Oil Curse, Double Monopoly, and the Future of New Wars

Using post-Soviet Russia as a case study, I will speculate on the political and human consequences of the economic dependency on natural resources. Relying on the distinction made by Douglass North, et al. (2009) between two “social orders” (“the natural state” and “the open access state”) I argue that the “oil curse” has produced not only financial but also cultural, metaphysical and potentially, legal differences between the elite and the main body of the populus (some pro-Kremlin intellectuals in Russia are calling for the restoration of the estate society). I argue that a big part of (neo)liberal theories, principles, and values cannot be credibly applied to these cursed societies. While “blessed” societies rely on human capital and therefore, develop fair taxation, open-access education, and a meritocratic elite, “resource-cursed” societies are doomed to remain “closed” or “natural”. The population and its labor, which is the only source of wealth in “blessed” societies”, become largely superfluous in “cursed” societies. Since wealth and taxation in this society come from mines or wells and are separate from human capital, political economies of trust, education, welfare, and social security do not work here. In Russia, we observe the development of a double monopoly, which captures two key elements of the economy, natural resources and security services, and uses their synergies to develop unlimited control over the nation. This double monopoly realizes Carl Shmitt’s dictum, “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state”, and works like a Mobius strip. Rather than producing wealth, the population becomes a burden of the state and its charity. In this talk, I will discuss the wars that this double monopoly can afford without overstretching its Mobius quality. I will also discuss the sources of social solidarity in a “resources-cursed” society, which by its nature tends to be, I argue, religious and collectivist.

Alexander Etkind is a Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also the head of a large European project, Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, which is financed by the HERA Foundation (2010-2013).  Before coming to Cambridge, he taught at the European University at St. Petersburg and was a visiting scholar or professor at Helsinki, Harvard, Georgetown and New York Universities as well as at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. His books include Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1993; translated into seven languages), Khlyst. Sekty, literatura i revolitsiia (1998) and Non-fiction po-russki pravda (2007). He is a member of the board of  Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and The Russian Review.

 

 
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