The Bridge – Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe
John Szabó
Abstract
Fifty-three years ago a historic meeting took place in the secluded Schloss Hernstein Bergdorf that sits at the feet of the Alps in Lower Austria.Austrian business executives joined by representatives of key West German industrial players hosted a group of Soviet leaders that would go on to establish the 'gas bridge'.They were aware that their endeavour to establish natural gas trade between the East and the West, if successful, could contribute to dampening the animosity of the Cold War.Little did they know that their actions would establish a bridge so robust and elemental to the operation of modern fossil fuel-dependent economies that its dismantling and reconfiguration would pose one of the greatest challenges for their successors in their effort to tackle climate change.Thane Gustafson's The Bridge -Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe provides a timely chronicle of European-Russian natural gas relations.It explicates a history of the fuel that provides nearly a quarter of European energy supply and generates a substantial portion of the Kremlin's revenue; however, the European Union's (EU) energy transition poses a threat to its future.Gustafson is arguably one of the best people to undertake this analysis as he has spent the majority of his career exploring the Soviet and Russian energy sectorwriting classics of the field, such as Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev and Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia.Gustafson complements his strong suit of Soviet and Russian energy politics in The Bridge with the European side of the story, helping readers better understand how the gas bridge is constructed and the difficulties its dismantling may entail.Gustafson takes a chronological approach to describe events in The Bridge, which can broadly be delineated into three epochs: (1) the origins of the Soviet and Russian gas industry, (2) the wave of neoliberal thinking and (3) the slow and reluctant adaptation of the Russians to the new business environment in the European gas market (p.761).The gas bridge was forged between the Eastern and the Western blocs in a historical setting characterised by high levels of mutual distrust.Natural gas brought the two sides together.The Soviet Union was in search of hard currency to finance its imports and technologymostly pipelines and compressor stationsto facilitate domestic natural gas consumption.In turn, it promised the West seemingly unending quantities of natural gas.Simultaneously, European buyers sought to offset dwindling domestic energy production and reduce their reliance on