Offshore Attachments by Chelsea Schields;

Author:Chelsea Schields;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520390829
Publisher: University of California Press

MOBILITY UNDER EMBARGO

The vicissitudes of the global oil economy at once enabled and endangered multiple migration streams to the postwar Netherlands. Between the onset of nationalist insurgency in Indonesia in 1945 and the eventual relinquishing of Dutch New Guinea in 1962, nearly three hundred thousand people had emigrated from the former Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia to the Netherlands. Comprised primarily of individuals of mixed Asian and European ancestry, this stream of postcolonial migration, unlike its later Caribbean counterpart, occurred at a time of rapid postwar economic expansion. Fueled by the abundance of cheap fossil fuels, the Netherlands’ postwar industrial boom also drew thousands of “guest workers” from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Morocco. Even a small number of people from the Netherlands Antilles, primarily male industrial laborers and female health care workers, participated in these recruitment drives.13 Guest workers arrived in the Netherlands to work in labor-intensive sectors such as coal mining and the steel, textile, shipbuilding, and meatpacking industries.14 Growing levels of education among European Dutch citizens caused shortages in low-waged labor, and so foreign guest workers helped to fuel the country’s extraordinary economic rebound after World War II. The newfound prosperity of European Dutch people rested, too, on the highly profitable exploitation of the Slochteren gas fields in Groningen.

Although the Netherlands produced some 58 million cubic meters of natural gas in 1973, a growing percentage of the country and the European continent’s energy needs were met by oil from the Middle East. In 1955, 78 percent of Western Europe’s energy demands were met from within the continent, largely through provision of coal. In 1972, this number decreased to just 35 percent. Dependence on oil imports from the Middle East, meanwhile, rose: this source supplied 13.4 percent of Western Europe’s total energy requirements in 1956 but 45 percent in 1973.15

The Netherlands played a primary role in Europe’s growing petro-dependence. In 1972, about 70 percent of Europe’s oil supply came from the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), a quarter of which was delivered through Rotterdam’s oil terminals. Rotterdam housed five oil refineries, including Shell’s Pernis plant, that together comprised 10 percent of Europe’s refining capacity. Oil refining was itself a thriving industry in the 1960s, employing some twenty thousand people, including foreign guest workers. In 1972, an astonishing 149 million tons of oil passed through Dutch ports.16

The optimism generated by cheap energy began to wane in late 1973. What is widely known as the “energy crisis” of 1973–74 was, in fact, a more complex series of tangentially related events. OPEC states meeting in Kuwait in October 1973 decided, after a month-long negotiation with oil companies, to unilaterally raise the posted price of oil, which was the basis for calculating the tax rate that ensured producing states—not just oil companies—also pocketed the windfall of rising prices.17 At the end of this same meeting, oil ministers from Arab producing states (OAPEC) reconvened to address events unfolding earlier that month, when on October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian troops attempted to regain the lands illegally occupied by Israel since the Six Day War of 1967.

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