The Technopolitics of Swedish Iron Mining in Cold War Liberia, 1950–1990 T Karl Bruno
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Extractive Industries and Society 7 (2020) 39–49 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis Original article The technopolitics of Swedish iron mining in Cold War Liberia, 1950–1990 T Karl Bruno Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen 74D, SE-100 44, Stockholm, Sweden ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: Earlier research on Cold War resource politics has not focused significantly on the interests of smaller, non- Cold War colonial industrialized states. This paper examines the iron mining company LAMCO in Liberia, dominated Iron mining strategically and operationally by Swedish actors and interests, between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s. It LAMCO argues that the creation of LAMCO must be understood in the context of the early Cold War and its international Liberia politics, and that the enterprise’s subsequent development was characterized by a specific technopolitical dy- Technopolitics namic resulting from the encounter between the Liberian government’s development strategy and the Swedish investors’ need to mitigate political risks both in Liberia and at home. The findings help clarify the conditions under which actors from an ostensibly non-aligned and non-colonial country could gain access to minerals in Africa. They also contribute to our understanding of iron mining in Liberian political history, showing how LAMCO developed in close association with particular developmental policies in Liberia that sought to promote national development while simultaneously increasing the power of the Liberian presidency. Though it initially served this purpose successfully, its operations also generated a string of unexpected outcomes that eventually made the company a serious problem for the Liberian government. 1. Introduction clear material improvements anyway, was not sufficient to prevent tensions from building. Resource sovereignty became a key point of The Cold War and the post-war creation of the Third World as a contention in North-South relations. This was clearly expressed in the political project reconstituted the global politics of natural resources. 1962 UN General Assembly Resolution 1803 that formulated “the in- The East-West divide began to replace colonial contestations and re- alienable right of all States freely to dispose of their natural wealth and source extraction regimes, and the newly independent states were resources in accordance with their national interests” and in debates at shaped by the entanglement of their resource possessions with super- the first U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in power interests and needs. Resources, and the industrial systems Geneva in 1964.1 The tensions culminated in OPEC’s 1973 oil embargo needed to extract them, also became important instruments as former and the subsequent demands by a range of Third World countries for a colonizers sought to build new relationships with the formerly colo- New International Economic Order that included raw materials sover- nized. In both contexts, resource extraction became inextricably tangled eignty and a pricing mechanism more in favour of developing coun- up with ideologies of modernization, either of the American variety that tries—even if those countries eventually got little out of this seeming “reconfigured the imperial civilising mission as a non-colonial discourse “triumph of third-worldism” (Rist, 2014: ch. 9). pivoted on building independent. national developmental states,” or The literature detailing this history of natural resources is mostly of the Soviet variety that emphasised state-led industrialism as the path geared towards the broad historical strokes, or else is slanted towards to socialism and real independence (Romero, 2014: 695). In Western- the interactions of developing countries with superpowers or former dominated contexts it also became tangled up with the interests of colonial powers (see, e.g., Eckes, 1979; Priest, 2005; Brands, 2007; multinational corporations that designed and implemented extractive Abraham, 2011; Dietrich, 2011; Dorn, 2011; Hecht, 2012; Gendron, projects, and which often justified their involvement in terms ofde- Ingulstad et al. 2013; Ingulstad et al., 2015; Black, 2016). Scholars have velopment and national interest, both to home constituents and when paid less attention to the group of industrialized states that held no interacting with Third World governments. territorial colonies in 1945. These were also involved in global resource However, the lure of development, which often failed to bring about markets, yet we know little about their aims or choice of strategies. For E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 1803, “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources,” December 14, 1962, http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/ga_1803/ ga_1803.html [accessed 7 May 2019]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.06.008 Received 7 January 2019; Received in revised form 7 May 2019; Accepted 24 June 2019 Available online 01 August 2019 2214-790X/ © 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/). K. Bruno The Extractive Industries and Society 7 (2020) 39–49 Sweden, which is in focus here, we do know that there were numerous are less interested in the companies as such, however, and do not en- efforts from business actors to secure and extract resources abroadin gage empirically with them. The second approach is grounded more in the interwar and pre–World War One periods (Avango, Högselius et al. economic and business history and primarily focuses on the companies 2018; Vikström, Högselius et al. 2017). It is also recognized that after themselves. Prominent examples include Fred van der Kraaijös (1983) World War II, Sweden had considerable political involvement in the economic history of Liberia and William D. Coale, Jr.ös (1978) mono- Third World through its extensive program of development aid and graph on the Bong Mining Company. Both engage in source-based study high-profiled politics of solidarity with the global poor(Bjereld and of the mining concessions and their relationship with the Liberian state. Ekengren, 2004). Recent research has demonstrated, furthermore, that However, they do not clearly contextualize the companies in relation to Swedish industrial leaders simultaneously were keen on accessing the the long-term Liberian government strategies and goals discussed by new markets opening up through decolonization (Glover, 2016, 2018). Liebenow, Sawyer, and Whyte. The same applies to a much briefer Swedish interests in foreign natural resources in the Cold War period overview of LMC by Emmanuel Urey (2015). The most significant study have, however, scarcely been considered by earlier research. In this of LAMCO itself, a dissertation by Göran Bergström (2009), also follows paper, I will examine the major realization of such interest, namely, the this pattern.3 Bergström provides a thorough overview of LAMCO’s mining company LAMCO (the Liberian American-Swedish Minerals managing company’s strategic decision-making, but his analysis is si- Company) in Liberia, dominated strategically and operationally by a milar to van der Kraaij’s and Coale’s work in that it does not emphasize group of Swedish investors. I seek to understand how and why these long-term political aspects. Other work on LAMCO focus more on the Swedish actors got access to Liberian iron, and how their engagement in Swedish and less on the Liberian context. Nikolas Glover (2019) has Liberia developed. recently analysed media representations of LAMCO and their role in A starting point for my analysis is work by historians of technology Swedish debates on corporate social responsibility, and I have myself interested in the material underpinnings of the Cold War that has em- addressed the extent and goals of Swedish government support for phasized that technology was also a means to make politics: that “[t] LAMCO in an earlier study (Bruno, 2018). I will therefore not elaborate echnological systems and expertise offered less visible—but sometimes on the latter dimension in this paper. more powerful—means of shaping or reshaping political rule, economic It follows from the above that there is an asymmetry in the earlier arrangements, social relationships, and cultural forms.” (Hecht, 2011: historical studies of mineral extraction in post-war Liberia. The studies 1) Technological systems employed to extract natural resources are that discuss the broader politics of the Liberian resource concessions do prime examples. In the paper, I understand LAMCO as an expression of not study them empirically, while the empirical studies of the conces- such technopolitics, a notion that signals how, in Liberia, the technolo- sions have narrower conceptions of their role in larger political projects. gies of mining were means to achieve political ends for the involved Neither, furthermore, consider the particular context of Cold War re- actors. These ends could converge but also diverge. In addition, the source politics. My paper fills this gap with two specific contributions. technopolitics of mining often produced outcomes that were both un- First, I argue that the creation of LAMCO must be understood in the intended and unexpected. This reflects how the making of politics context of the early Cold War and its international politics. This