REVIEWS 789 two leaderships neo-authoritarianand neo-mercantilist- seems a consistent and significantfeature. There is a lot of empirical and analytical merit in this text, therefore, and students and scholars will gain from studying its arguments,but it does not yet provide the holy grail a theory of RussianChinese relations. Centre for Contenmporay ChinaStudies DAVID KERR University ofDurham Karagiannis,Emmanuel. Energy andSecuraiin theCaucasus. RoutledgeCurzon, London and New York, 2002. Xiv + 233 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography . Index. ?70.??. Two-FIFTHSof the EU's natural gas imports originate from Russia. Former German ChancellorSchroederis now a paid advisorto Gazprom, a spectacular example of 'capture'by the Russian oil industryin the recruitmentof key politicalallies.In Ukraine, a painfullesson in the rulesof the marketeconomy has had to be learned. The previously subsidizedprice charged for Russian gas was suddenly hiked to levels determined by market-led criteria. The huffing and puffing of European leaders about this attempted 'energy blackmail ' by Russia in order to influence electoral outcomes in Ukraine cannot hide the fact that the price increaseswere much in line with the strictureson free-market principles that the Russians had previously endured from the international financial community. For European leaders, the disastrous political outcome of the election is less important than the knock-on 'energy supply shock'. This has provoked the firstfumbling steps towardsa common European energy policy. The words 'energy security' and 'reliability'have suddenly entered the lexicon of European policy imperatives.Few today can doubt that the geo-politics of hydrocarbon supply dominates national, regional and global agendas. Today, the price of the international'marker'for oil, Brent Crude, exceeds $70 a barrel. When George W. Bush proclaimed that, henceforth, the US would intensifyinvestment in developing non-hydrocarbonenergy sourcesin order to break the dependency of the US economy on unstable supplies of Middle Easternoil, his wordswere greetedwith a belly-roarof approvalfrom the Republican faithful,but hardlyas new convertsto a greenervision of the future. With Iraq sliding into sectarian chaos, the 'folly' of Middle East oildependency and the attempt to achieve 'energy security'by 'regime change' has now returned to haunt the US administration.But such concerns and attendant imprudent military adventures are not unique to the US. Where there is oil, there is blood, a truismthat few today would contest. This book, written before the US-led invasion of Iraq, adds an important piece to this bloody jigsaw puzzle. It addressesthe 'pipeline politics' of the strategicallykey Caucasusregion, an area contiguouswith both Iraqand Iran, in which 'the great game' of oil politics has been played with peculiar and at times brutal intensity. Here, strugglesfor greater ethnic and political selfdetermination have been fuelled by conflicts over transit revenues and 790 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 competing pipeline routingswhich bring Caspian oil from Azerbaijanto the West. Karagiannis's book charts the impact of oil politics on struggles in Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and Turkish Kurdistan. These rather nasty internecine disputes and the often authoritarianlocal dynastic regimeswhich provide their context, however, alwaysneed to be seen against the biggerpicture. Pipelinepoliticsimpliesthat the routesthat bring oil to the West are also the determinantsof wider regional political influence in which pro-Westernor anti-Russianforces strugglefor dominance where previously there was the secure hegemony of the Soviet Union. Now increasinglyvital in the shiftingand uncertain reconfigurationof the post-Soviet empire, the politics of oil representthe concluding but unfinished chapter in the saga of the Cold War. Turkey, Russia and the United States are thus all enthusiasticplayers in the great game and the client states are Azerbaijan,Armenia and Georgia. To give but one example, Turkishrestrictions on tanker trafficthrough the Bosphorus had less to do with ecological concerns than with a desire to limit any increases in Russian transportation of Azerbaijan oil delivered via the 'northern' pipeline from its sea port of Novorossiysk.At the same time, this was usefulfor Turkeyin securinga third pipeline route to the West through its own territory,directlylinkingBakuvia Tbilisi to the TurkishMediterraneanoil port of Ceyhan. The sponsorsof this recently inauguratedbut much criticizedventure are an alliance of Western multi-national oil companies with a somewhat disreputable group of local players seeking a piece of the action. Crucially, it is control over the flow and routing of this Azerbaijan oil which decreasesWesternreliance on...