Oil and American Identity: A Culture of Dependency and US Foreign Policy by Sebastian Herbstreuth

Author:Sebastian Herbstreuth [Herbstreuth, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: International Relations, Trade & Tariffs, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781786739919
Google: 9BOMDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-09-10T11:45:32+00:00

Becoming Foreign: The Middle East and Its Oil

The Middle East has been described by Americans as foreign territory for centuries. The cultural difference of the region also extended to oil produced in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and Iran. However, compared to the long history of representing the Middle East as one of America's primary cultural Others, the foreignness of Middle Eastern oil emerged relatively recently. It is a product of the OPEC Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Arab oil had frequently been represented as American oil prior to this revolutionary sea change in the international oil regime.

The Cultural Appropriation of Foreign Oil

In 1928, two American oil companies, Socony (later Mobil) and Jersey Standard (later Exxon), managed to secure a significant share in the Turkish Petroleum Company in what is today Iraq. It was the first American oil business in the Middle East. Beginning with these first foreign explorations, the reserves of the American oil companies became subject to a process of appropriation. The goal was physical and economic control of petroleum production. But this process also encompassed what might be termed the “cultural appropriation” of foreign oil. This appropriation rested on the claim, put forward by policy makers and the oil industry, that Middle Eastern oil was really American oil, our oil. Not only was this oil in “American hands”, as it was often put, but also the United States had a legal and moral right to it. The cultural appropriation of Middle Eastern oil served to overwrite the simple geographical fact that these reserves were located outside the territory of United States. It brought Middle Eastern oil into the sphere of the domestic. With the increasingly firm entrenchment of American oil companies in the Middle East in the decade after World War II, this notion acquired greater significance. During the energy crisis of 1973–4, the sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit claim that Middle Eastern oil rightfully belonged to the United States contributed significantly to the shock caused by the embargo decision. It was our oil, after all, that was being withheld by the rebellious Arab producers.

There are several distinct elements in this discourse of appropriation. Of primary importance is the fact that the business of developing Middle Eastern oilfields was undertaken by American (and European) companies which, on the basis of concessions, directly owned the oil reserves, determined production quantities and set prices. The role of host governments, in turn, was very limited.81 As Simon Bromley observes, “Despite the formal independence of the relevant states, the regional hegemony of the United States together with the virtually complete dominance of oil capital over the oil concessions meant that Western control over Middle East oil […] was complete.”82 More generally, at the height of the postwar petroleum order during the 1950s, the seven major oil companies, five of which were American, directly controlled about 90 percent of oil reserves and production in the Third World.83 US national oil interests and the private commercial interests of the US majors

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