ABSTRACT
Inter-capitalist competition for control of global oil has produced a geographical space structured by a contradiction between the integration of resource-rich territories into the circuits of global capital and their fragmentation through protectionist measures that regulate the extension of foreign capital into the oil industry. The case of Iran expresses this contradiction on two interrelated, yet opposed, levels. On one level, the contradiction is partly the result of the attempt by the US to exclude the Iranian hydrocarbon industry from the circuits of global capital since the Revolution of 1979, intensifying especially with the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, coming up against the attempt by Western European countries, Japan, Russia, India, and China to integrate the Iranian economy, especially the oil and gas industry, through trade and direct investment. On another, the contradiction emanates from the attempt by Iran to attract foreign investment within limits on the ownership of, and access to, resources and, more importantly, on the duration and profitability of foreign investment – in summary, to combine the dependence on global capital with national economic independence and national sovereignty over natural resources. The development of Iran’s oil and gas industry depends to a large extent on the inflow of foreign capital, financial and productive, for the development of existing oilfields and the exploration of new oil and gas fields to expand Iran’s reserves, OPEC quota, exports, and foreign revenues. Iran thus faces the dilemma of how to regulate the influx of foreign capital without relinquishing control over the most strategic sector of its economy. On the part of the US, the problem is reversed: how to isolate Iranian oil from global capital without jeopardizing the ongoing process of global economic integration that depends on European, and, to a certain extent, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese compliance with the US (and vice versa).
