When Joschka Fischer's lucrative new job as the "political communications advisor" to a consortium of European energy companies was leaked to a German business publication this summer, there was one comment that stood out. "Welcome to the club," said Gerhard Schröder, an even more highly paid advocate for the other side in Europe's increasingly politicized energy war.
Schröder's remark was short, snide -- and very much to the point. For eight years, the two men had led Germany together, with Schröder ruling as its center-left chancellor and Fischer as his foreign minister. Their long-running partnership had survived a particularly complicated era in post-Cold War Europe, and publicly Fischer had always been supportive, even telling Der Spiegel that Schröder "will go down in the history books as a great chancellor."
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But since their coalition government collapsed in 2005, Schröder's controversial work has led to an ever-more-public breach between the former allies. Less than one month before leaving the chancellorship, Schröder used his office to guarantee a $1.4 billion loan (later turned down) for a Kremlin-backed natural gas pipeline that would connect Russia to Germany via the Baltic seabed. Then, just days after stepping down, Schröder accepted a senior post with the pipeline consortium run by Russia's state gas monopoly Gazprom. The deal was a huge scandal inside Germany, where Schröder had already been known for years as Genosse der Bosse -- "comrade of the bosses."
The chancellor's move to the Kremlin energy payroll inspired a wave of alarm in Europe over its potentially dangerous dependence on Russia for natural gas. Moscow supplies about a third of the European Union's gas -- Europe's preferred heating source -- and some of its countries are 100 percent dependent on Russia. What's more, Europe's annual gas consumption is set to rise 40 percent by 2030, further stoking those fears about Russia. Several times in recent years, the Kremlin has abruptly cut off gas deliveries after disputes with key transit countries such as Ukraine, leaving millions of Europeans shivering in the winter cold.
Schröder had been reliably pro-Russia while in office, even famously calling the KGB-spy-turned-president Vladimir Putin a "flawless democrat." Although Fischer did not criticize his boss publicly at the time, more recently he has been openly dismissive. Schröder's idea of Putin as a democrat, Fischer told the Wall Street Journal, "was never my position." Asked later by Der Spiegel what he found "most objectionable" about Schröder's tenure, Fischer replied succinctly: "His position on Russia."
This summer, Fischer made the breach with Schröder official: He signed up with a rival consortium -- energy companies from Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Austria that have joined together to build the $11 billion Nabucco natural gas pipeline. Nabucco would bring gas from Middle Eastern and Caspian fields across Turkey's Anatolian plateau, and north into Europe. The pipeline is backed and partly funded by the EU and is strongly supported by the United States. Perhaps most importantly, Nabucco would completely bypass Russia. Such an energy strategy, Fischer has argued, is urgently needed to stop Moscow's "divide-and-conquer politics."
Moscow, not surprisingly, is pulling out all the stops to scuttle the project. It is seducing pliant politicians and resorting to old-fashioned bullying, especially in the states that Nabucco transits. It is acquiring stakes in European energy companies, often through questionable shell companies, that could complicate Nabucco's completion. It is buying up natural gas in Central Asia and the Caspian, even paying up to four times more than in previous years, to deny supplies to Nabucco. And it has proposed a rival pipeline, called South Stream, which would flow from Russia across the Black Sea to Bulgaria and the Balkans and fork, with one spur running west to Italy and the other north to Austria.
In many ways, Schröder and Fischer personify the intense struggle -- some call it a war -- over Europe's energy future. On one side are those countries most worried about their dependence on Moscow, especially the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. On the other are countries such as Italy and Germany and leaders such as Schröder, who see closer ties with Russia as both a mercantilist opportunity and a strategic imperative. When I caught up with Schröder at a conference in Houston earlier this year, he was quick to brush aside concerns about Moscow. "There is no reason to doubt the reliability of Russia as a partner," Schröder said. "We must be a partner of Russia if we want to share in the vast raw material reserves in Siberia. The alternative for Russia would be to share these reserves with China."
This gas war is especially hard-fought because of the physical nature of the prize itself. Unlike oil, which can be put onto tankers and shipped anywhere, gas is generally moved in pipelines that traverse, and are thus tethered to, geography. Because a pipeline cannot be rerouted, producers and consumers sign long-term agreements that bind one to the politics of the other, as well as to the transit states in between. In this way, today's gas war is a zero-sum conflict similar to the scramble for resources that divided Eurasia in the 19th century. And now, as then, commerce is taking a back seat to politics.
That is what I found when I set out this spring to travel the pipeline routes, encountering along the way a rogue's gallery of cynical politicians, murky middlemen, insistent executives, and innumerable technocrats, each eager to shape the decision. But the real question that will determine Nabucco's future -- a question vividly on display in every country the pipeline will touch -- is whether Europe has the stomach to fight as hard for its interests as Russia does for its own.
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