Transatlantic Histories of Energy during the Cold War: European and American Perspectives

This chapter examines recent scholarship concerning the history of US-European energy relations during the Cold War. Its aim is to relate a series of publications dealing specifically with energy to the wider historiographical debate about the importance of “rethinking American history in the global age." This chapter seeks to establish a dialogue and exchange between studies about energy on the one hand and studies about the history of transatlantic relations, decolonization, and the Cold War, on the other. Access to oil shaped in important ways relations between the US and the USSR, as well as between the two superpowers, single European countries and oil producers. Until the latter started nationalizing their resources in the 1970s, the US controlled over two thirds of the world’s oil wealth, followed by the USSR. Domestic oil supplies and control over foreign oil were crucial in establishing America’s international position during the Cold War, providing the fuel needed for its military apparatus, assuring its industrial growth and allowing it to project its model abroad, by selling cheap gasoline and cars to Europeans. This complex story of how oil shaped the “American Century” intersected in important ways with the redefinition of US-European relations during the Cold War, a topic that scholars have just started to examine. On the one hand, oil was central to the Marshall Plan, allowing western European countries to rebuild their economies, while at the same time assuring their dependence on a resource controlled by the US. On the other hand, oil played a central role in two of the main crises of European colonialism, namely the Anglo-Iranian crisis of 1951-1953 and the Suez crisis of 1956, which led the US to substitute Great Britain and France in maintaining stability in the Mediterranean and assuring access to Middle Eastern oil resources. As this chapter argues, one of the consequences of the Suez crisis was not only to push Western European countries to pursue a more forceful economic and political integration inside the European Economic Community (EEC), but also to increase commercial relations between Western Europe and the USSR. is aspect of the Cold War has only recently been addressed by scholars, who have highlighted the importance these exchanges had in shaping transatlantic debates during the 1960s and, most importantly, in the context of détente. It was especially the 1973 oil shock, however, that transformed the Atlantic Alliance, leading to what some scholars have argued was a crisis in transatlantic relations. The conflict revolved around energy security, and involved a wider set of issues having to do with the future of North-South relations and of the western world as it had emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War. Scholars have begun to investigate the role oil producers had in the oil shock, but much remains to be done to integrate the energy crisis into the international history of the late twentieth century, and to acknowledge the importance the Third World had in shaping the transatlantic world.