It was a commonplace in the 1970s that after several decades of unprecedented stability Western democracies had entered a crisis. Shortly before his resignation in May 1974, the West German chancellor Willy Brandt expressed his fear that western Europe’s democracies had only 20 or 30 years left before they would slide through chaos into dictatorships. The pessimism of that decade, especially about the fate of democracy, lingers today.
But the 1970s are frequently misunderstood. Energy-driven inflation did cause Western democracies great difficulties during that decade. But the crises of the 1970s originated in a set of deep geopolitical changes, not the nature of democratic politics itself. In the mid 20th century, Western states and companies could largely control the international chains of production and transportation for oil. From the 1970s, by contrast, Western democracies had to function in a world where for the first time no European country had an imperial presence in the Middle East and the United States had no capacity to export oil to Europe, even in an emergency. In this new geopolitical environment, the Middle Eastern states controlled the price and much of the supply of the primary energy source on which Western material life depended.
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