Smells Fischy: Europe's Pipeline Hypocrisy

When Putin imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky for wanting to sell parts of his oil business to the West, he was criticised abroad for political interference in the energy market.

What to make then of the EU and US cheerleading for Nabucco, a pipeline with no economic rationale being built solely for the political reason of isolating Russia as a gas supplier?

Certainly, it makes very little business sense: running from Turkey via Southern and Eastern Europe to the West, the pipleine’s capacity would be less than half that of Russia’s alternative South Stream route, which is already supported by key states such as Italy, France and Azerbaijan and ‘could reach 63 bcm annually‘.

“‘Nabucco is turning pipeline economics on its head,’ says Paul Stevens, senior research fellow on energy at Chatham House in London quoted in the Christian Science Monitor. ‘Normally you find gas and build a pipeline. Nabucco is building a pipeline, and then looking for gas.'”

But it does not take long to undertand the real rationale behind the plan. The very same article’s headline reads: ‘Will Nabucco pipeline deal free Europe from Russian gas?’, and makes at least one (mindblowing original) reference to “the Russian bear”. Lest any additional meaning be lost, the name Nabucco itself, we are told, “is named after a Verdi opera whose subject is liberation from bondage”.

But whose bondage from whom? The only supply problems the EU have ever experienced with Russian gas has been during disputes with Ukraine. But South Stream, which bipasses Ukraine and other conflict prone states such as Poland, should guarantee against such shocks in the future.

This conscious and costly policy of isolating Russia, ostensibly to avoid dangerous over-reliance, seems doubly odd given the overwhelming Western reliance on China, which boasts both a more repressive political system and stronger military might, and the Arab world.

Unsurprisingly, most Western media have been reliably backing Nabucco, not least the New York Times.

In a strange article about the two German cheerleaders of Nabucco and South Stream respectively: Joska Fishcer and Gerhadt Schroeder, the Times inevitably sides with Fischer – ‘a man in a white hat riding into town to stare down or be gunned down by a guy in a black one’, blind to the the irony of a former Green Party leader lobbying for a project widely condemned by environmental groups.

Nabucco’s commercial irrelevance, coupled with its heavy reliance on Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania – which comprise a Nato arc all along Russia’s south-western flank – threatens to awaken Russian fears of a return to Cold-War era encirclement.