Business Interests vs. Geopolitics: The Case of the Siberian Pipeline in the 1980s

Hubert Bonin
Additional contact information
Hubert Bonin: IEP Bordeaux - Sciences Po Bordeaux - Institut d'études politiques de Bordeaux

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In the years 1979-1984, Soviet authorities and various coalitions of Western European companies, some of them subsidiaries of US corporations or benefiting from licenses and patents, supported by state authorities, negotiated several agreements to provide credit and equipment for the building of a 3,500-mile-long gas pipeline between Northern Central Siberia and Western Europe. There was a harsh controversy between the US and European states and firms whether to honour such contracts or not amid renewed geopolitical tensions between East and West. Business history was thus intimately mixed with geopolitics and corporate commercial and industrial tactics were challenged by diplomatic ethics. While the rules of capitalism can once more be discussed, the numerous lobbying circuits are reconstituted in this article as a way to determine the potential freedom of action of day-to-day business when confronted with high-level politics.

Keywords: Banks; COMECON; Cold War; Energy; East-West Trade; Energy engineering; European Geopolitics; Project financing; USSR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05048979v1
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Business History, 2007, volume 49 (n°2), pp.235-254

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05048979v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05048979

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().