Paparazzi Ethnography

10/29: 8:50 PM. The conference is over. Our path toward understanding, for which we traveled across far-flung places, has once again left us individually standing in the dark. Still, we depart alone, but also stay united. It is our zeal for an idea, a belief in what remains enlightened.

6:56 PM. “Closing ceremony: looking back, moving forward: trajectories for continuing research on the Russian energy sector” — this is the title as it appears in the program to call attention to the end of the three-day conference (with the one exception, that we have decided to not capitalize each letter, as the organizers have done so in the conference program). Recently PhD minted and conference organizer David Dusseault is on stage in the Small Hall auditorium at this very moment, a charismatic political scientist whose nor’easter accent provides a welcomed staccato of punctuation to the boxes and tables that appear in his power point images. We are now very close to applauding ourselves for the past three days of intense, informative and friendly discussion and awaiting who will have the last word…

5 PM. Inside the University of Helsinki’s Main Hall, where the conference is taking place, we find ourselves spending time among statues of the classical world. There they stand, the men and women of the ancients, on the steps between the panel rooms, located across the balcony halls, we come face to face with these early ancestors. The very contrast by standing among these prior cosmopolitans and our discussions of the politics and policies of modern energy systems, reminds us of the contrasts between today’s energy requirements and those of the early world. As Vaclav Smil poses the issue in his 2000 article available in the Annual Review of Energy: the amount of power available to today’s affluent American household was only possible (but without the convenience and convertibility) for an owner of a Roman latifundia of 6000 slaves. Can you imagine.

3:00 PM. Time now for a networking break, as everyone heads out to the caffein bar for more BTUs in order to get through the final half of the day. We should mention here that — as we were leaving the auditorium, and pausing for a photo op to include, in addition to Dr. Cui and Master’s student of diplomacy Scott Milgroom, the very intriguing British ex pat in Moscow Ian Pryde, who is founder and chairman of Eurasia Strategy and Communication — the importance  of empires in decline, which as Ian reminded us, that it was not so long ago, that Britain faced its own loss of national self-esteem after World War II, and that in Russia, in the context of a comment that we had made yesterday about global Russians returning to Moscow, there is today, in cosmopolitan Russia, attempts to recapture that earlier pride through establishment of incubation parks to woo the newly educated Russians arriving home from the West.

And this was, in fact, the very topic of the well presented talk by Dr. Nikita Lomagin of St. Petersburg State University, Russia, who suggested that perception of self in today’s Russia is quite important, and that the willingness to be viewed positively, or rather, the question of how to demonstrate that you are important revolves around energy. The importance of energy security, and more clearly, defining ones strength as a petro-state, was created in Russia through a state programatic developing out of the 1990s that would focus on strengthening position of strategic markets in Europe, diversification of these markets, investments in Russian infrastructure, stimulating local consumption, and access to new technologies in all stages of the production chain. And this, according to Dr. Lomagin, defines energy security in Russia today– security that is as much a part of development and protection of economy as it is promoting and protecting imperial consciousness.

1:30 PM. One point Dr. Sherr made during his key note speech this morning, which we found interesting, was that, in energy as in most other spheres, it is remarkable, that Russia is able to compartmentalize its relationship with China. And moreover, the ideas that dominate Russia’s concern are primarily those dealing with the relationship of Russia to EU and the United States. And with these thoughts in our minds, so it was, that we also found interesting the key note provided by Professor Shoujun Cui of Renmin National University, Beijing, China, who delivered quite a few common sense understandings about pipeline politics in the context of Russian, Chinese, and central Asian pipeline transport systems. Dr. Cui posed the question of whether natural gas pipelines should head West from the Caspian basin, including from Russia, toward Europe which will experience low economic growth rates in the future — (of which two are already proposed and referred to as the Nabucco project from Turkmenistan and South Stream from Russia, but in fact are in zero sum competition westward) or, would it not be best for pipes from, say Turkmenistan, to flow eastward to connect up with the China Central Asia pipeline.

Let us interject, from our own humble perspective, that there must be incredibly confident forecasts for economic growth and demand of natural gas existing in China to continue to build and connect the long distance pipes westward of which Dr. Cui speaks. From our point of view, in the North American context, where the incremental gas demand market in many cases would prefer to destroy demand rather than plop down the multibillion dollar figures necessary for connecting Arctic gas to the pipeline grid structure (and even where announcement to build would destroy the price for natural gas), there must really be something going on in the East Pacific. It may be time to enroll in those Chinese language classes we always find ourselves joking about. Dr. Cui suggested to us, as a partial answer, that the authoritarian government allows for making long-term energy decisions, whereas a U.S. legislator’s horizon is only as far as the next election.

9:45 AM. Key note speaker, James Sherr, Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House (“funded by the foreign office and the Rothschild’s, and set up in the 1930s” according to a conference attendant who wants to remain anonymous), London, began speaking this morning to a largely empty auditorium. Apparently, revelers of the conference last night kept him up at the bars until the wee hours, and could themselves, not make his 8:30 AM talk. Nevertheless, even by his own admission, of having to operate today on two-and-a-half hours sleep, he gave a provocative speech on Russian energy policy internally and abroad over the coming decades. Even Alexey Gromov, Deputy Director-General of the Institute for Energy Strategy in Russia, who has taken the lead in pointing out fundamental misperceptions students of Russian energy policy often make, gave Sherr his enthusiastic approval (photo on the right, Sherr in middle and energy expert, Vladimir Paramonov on left).

If we can distill his lecture, and my apologies to Dr. Sherr in advance, into several dense points: (1) vertical power under Putin is misperceptive –and while there has been a fundamental change since the 1990s in relations between the Russian government and energy sector, moving from a situation in which money effectively bought power and privatized parts of the state, toward a reversal since 2003, where power buys money in the sense that the state simply takes property– in fact, real power is concentrated not solely in Putin himself, but in a small number of persons who derive their profits from the energy sector – while being linked closely to security services of the federation (i.e., no unitary actor in Russia); (2) there is a struggle taking place, within this circle, and which will mean much more than classical policy discussions as they take place in the EU, in the sense that the struggle over policy outcomes—answers to questions such as will the energy market become more flexible, more market driven, liberalized, etc.—will depend upon the protagonists engaged in their own struggle, and for those actors these tribulations will take precedent over the debate of modernization itself; (3) yes, modernization itself, what about modernity in the energy sector? It will be inhibited by specific structural features that are beyond the struggles of individuals—infirmity of property rights, lack of entrepreneurship acting independently from the state, strengths of personalities and weakness of state institutions, weakness of judicial order and rule of law – and these conditions will likely lead and strengthen conservatism (in addition, Russia’s likely recovery from the financial crisis), and even intensify the meaning of these struggles to which Sherr so passionately refers. Finally, when it comes to Europe in any event, Russia is proving to be effective at integrating its commercial aspects of its energy policy with its geopolitics, and this is especially the case in those instances, such as Ukraine, where Russian banks are further integrating that country toward becoming, what Alexey Gromov quipped during the Q and A period, a Russian domestic market.