OPEC: Beyond Political Battering and Economic Romanticism

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that, far from being a cartel (or monopoly), Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is the mutation of an intimidated, insignificant, and idiosyncratic entity—in the semicolonial/semicartelized atmosphere of 1960—that turned into the organic body of global oil, following the collapse of colonial oil order in the embodiment of the International Petroleum Cartel (IPC) in the post-1974 period. The outgrowth of OPEC is the tale of two different settings. The former was semicolonial and controlled; the latter is postcolonial and competitive. These two settings are like night and day, with no chance of commensurability, either in theory or in practice, by any stretch of imagination. OPEC of the 1960s was a thorn in the side of the IPC, not so much for the fact that it may have shown a bit of resistance—not at all. This was due to the fact that OPEC was a paradox, a manifestation of an in-house diagnostic tool, that gently measured the magnitude of cracks and splinters that were already multiplying in the foundation of the Achnacarry. As we have demonstrated throughout this book, these cracks and splinters were the result of the whole host of factors and conditions that brought the Achnacarry down.