'Russia, Germany and European energy policy', Open Democracy
14th December 2006 publication
Energy Policy has shot up the European political agenda in the last couple of years, as the realisation has dawned that the decades of cheap energy are over, and that external dependency is not only going up, but is increasingly focused on a worryingly small number of countries - Russia; in the Middle East, on the trio of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia; and in the Caspian ex-Soviet countries such as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Chechnya (and again Russia and Iran).