ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that new international challenges facing them, European oil and gas companies’ engagement on the foreign policy dimensions of energy security was reactive and relatively limited during the early and mid-2000s. Oil companies’ influence has always been pivotal to the politics of international energy. It is invariably, indeed, the target of the most trenchant criticisms of Western power. The foreignpolicy dimensions of energy security had not received systematic attention; the private sector recognized that it was in this sense reacting to rather than leading efforts to incorporate energy questions more fully into the Common Foreign and Security Policy. In Europe both government and company representatives characterized the relationship as more ad hoc and lamented the absence of formal mechanisms at the EU and nation-state level to facilitate formal dialogue between diplomats and IOC executives. Divisions between governments were often mirrored by similar differences between different states’ private sector firms.
