OIL COMPANIES IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM 103 industry" (p 168), and the Italians who "had long played a slightly maverick role in international oil affairs^ (p 169). Turner opines that this could have possibly been rectified had the French and Italians been given a better share of the Middle East cake in the 1950s. However, the failure to evolve any effective strategy was in fact due to the sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry, with the Continental nations striving to break the stranglehold of the US. This was particularly so in oil. Also, the US's determined bid to secure highly favourable commitments in its dealings with its OEGD partners, pre-empted the effectivity of any strategy sought to be evolved. Thus, in 1972 the USA refused to add its domestic production to the emergency-sharing scheme of the OECD. The US insisted that only water-borne imports be considered, which meant not only the exclusion of US domestic industry but also imports from Canada, while practically the entire petroleum consumption of the European countries would be covered. Turner notes this, but hastens to provide an apologia, . .. the US administration sensed the need for some form of contingency planning but was not willing to sponsor a programme that would involve major sacrifices on the part of US citizens. . . (p 169). In contradistinction to this indecisiveness on the part of governments, Turner hails the clear, pragmatic approach of the oil companies, which enabled them to maintain crude supplies to the embargoed US and Dutch markets. The companies5 success in switching crude supplies from one intended destination to another, stepping up production in Nigeria and Iran and making a clear profit in the bargain, is an old established fact and Turner had hardly to point out the companies5 dexterity where profits are involved, anew. Although the shifting of the basis of monopoly control has constituted a successful adaptation by the oil companies to the changing correlation of forces, unlike the conspiracy theorists1 contention, this does not constitute a victory for the oil industry or the oil companies/OPEC axis. For the oil companies, it was a defeat of sorts, while the latter axis did not exist. Turner is correct, when he envisages that increasingly, consumer governments will seize a greater share of their domestic markets through State-owned companies. He is correct in seeing that the companies will increasingly capitalize on the frontiers of technology and production {high cost oil), but his happy prognostication of the majors' continued stability on the high-cost, high-profit horizon, ignores the basic instability of the system to which oil companies rightly be-