Saturday, March 15, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
In 1959, after four years of exploration in northeastern Syria, the Deutsche Erdöl AG (DEA) struck a major oil field in Swedieh -the first major find by a German oil company in the Arab world. Taking the Swedieh field and the infrastructure used to exploit it as a localized space of globalization and Cold War geopolitics, my paper will investigate how this West German pursuit of Syrian oil facilitated more than the acquisition of a primary feedstock. Through extracting oil – predicated on applying western technologies to Syrian landscapes - the DEA encouraged the political and economic integration of Syria into the western global economy in ways that dovetailed with the energy needs of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Meanwhile, supported by federal Entwicklungspolitik(development policy), the DEA contributed to West Germany’s own growth (and postwar rehabilitation and reconstruction) as a technologically advanced western power, capable of exploiting Third World resources while spreading the gospel of open-markets, technocracy, and a modernity based on petroleum. The DEA’s involvement in the Syrian oil industry ended abruptly, however, when the Syrian government stripped the DEA of its concessionary holdings in December 1964. As the DEA and the FRG were learning, the pursuit of foreign oil was unpredictable, and the path to modernity uncertain.
