How Knowledge Moves

Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

John Krige

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226605999, 9780226605852
• eBook ISBN: 9780226606040
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Knowledge matters, and states have a stake in managing its movement to protect a variety of local and national interests.  The view that knowledge circulates by itself in a flat world, unimpeded by national boundaries, is a myth. The transnational movement of knowledge is a social accomplishment, requiring negotiation, accommodation, and adaptation to the specificities of local contexts.  This volume of essays by historians of science and technology breaks the national framework in which histories are often written. Instead, How Knowledge Moves takes knowledge as its central object, with the goal of unraveling the relationships among people, ideas, and things that arise when they cross national borders. 
 
This specialized knowledge is located at multiple sites and moves across borders via a dazzling array of channels, embedded in heads and hands, in artifacts, and in texts. In the United States, it shapes policies for visas, export controls, and nuclear weapons proliferation; in Algeria, it enhances the production of oranges by colonial settlers; in Vietnam, it facilitates the exploitation of a river delta. In India it transforms modes of agricultural production.  It implants American values in Latin America. By concentrating on the conditions that allow for knowledge movement, these essays explore travel and exchange in face-to-face encounters and show how border-crossings mobilize extensive bureaucratic technologies.

PART I

The US Regulatory State

CHAPTER ONE

Restricting the Transnational Movement of “Knowledgeable Bodies”

The Interplay of US Visa Restrictions and Export Controls in the Cold War

Mario Daniels

The complex process of globalization has created new dependencies between multiple historical actors. In particular, these dependencies have challenged the notion of the national border as a meaningful barrier to the circulation of knowledge, people, and goods. This is not to say that national borders do not matter. On the contrary, a multitude of instruments (classification, visas and passports, and export controls, to name the most prominent) have been put in place by national states to protect their economic competitiveness, national security, the national identities of their peoples—and also the knowledge produced by national innovation systems.

Beginning in the 1940s, the US government imposed a variety of controls on the circulation of knowledge, mapping the perceived dangerousness of bits of information onto a multi-tier system of regulations over access and transmission. Classification is the best known and most widely studied of the instruments used to control the sharing of knowledge.1 Classificatory regimes have (and still do) controlled the exchange of information using the criteria of nationality, political allegiance, and a “need to know.” A differentiated and complex system embeds information control in the control over people, restricting circulation to those nationals who have security clearance and curtailing its communication to foreign individuals and entities within and without the US borders. The key criterion prohibiting any transmission of knowledge was whether it could reach the adversary beyond the national border, enabling him to harm the United States.

As for regulating the mobility of people, since World War I, and in the United States even more so since World War II, passports and visas have become the centerpiece of modern border policing. They, like classification, are a “documentary regime” that regulates the entry to and exit from nation-states.2 In fact, a wide and constantly redefined array of complex visa criteria establishes a fine-grained system of decision-making about who should be let in and who should be refused entry to national territory.3

Finally, as regards the movement of “things”—running the gamut from commercial merchandise to rifles and high-tech weaponry, from machine tools to complex production systems, from mundane scientific instruments to high-speed computers—the United States has since the 1940s set up an incredibly complex export control regime, based on bureaucratic methods that define strategically relevant technology and trace their global movements using a sophisticated paper trail.4 The “export license” is the regulatory equivalent of visas and passports and serves to open up a temporary gate in the border to let through the exported commodity. And it impacts not only trade. Export controls also cover the exchange of what has been legally defined as unclassified “technical data.” Classification is thus one but by no means the only instrument controlling the circulation of knowledge. Export controls directed at the transnational movement of unclassified technical data restrict the movement of not only printed information but also intangible know-how, adding another layer to the US knowledge control efforts.

This article argues that the bureaucratic tools to keep tabs on the circulation of information, things, and people are not separate systems of control. They are in fact closely intertwined and complementary. To show the interplay of the regimes, I will analyze how visa regulations are directly and closely linked to the US export control regime.5 At first sight they seem to regulate different things. In practice, by virtue of the broad sweep of export controls, the two sets of regulations converge where they both target scientific-technological knowledge. In combination with export controls, visa regulations are not simply directed at suspect aliens. More fundamentally they target “knowledgeable bodies,” people who could acquire sensitive formal and tacit knowledge that could subvert US interests.

Basically there were—and still are—two bureaucratic procedures that determine whether or not a foreign national can legally enter the United States. They bring the regulatory strands of visa policy and export controls together. First, export control regulations provide knowledge-based criteria for the decision to issue a visa. Second, if a visa is issued, export controls are used to circumscribe and police the knowledge acquisition activities of foreign scientists as they travel within the United States.

This analysis of bureaucratic practices will to a certain extent correct as well as enrich a story line that still dominates the Cold War literature. It moves beyond the work of Galison, Dennis, Wellerstein, and others by focusing the argument on unclassified sensitive knowledge. It complements the work of Wang by focusing on the restrictions on transnational movement in the decade after the end of World War II. Of course, Cold War historians are familiar with the constraints on the travel of foreign communist or left-leaning researchers in the McCarthy period. And as is once again evident today, political and national allegiance alone can be reason enough to deny a visa to a potential visitor to the United States. But ideological vetting is only one, and not necessarily the most important, dimension of travel control. Thus, the historiographical focus on the story of ideological, especially anticommunist discrimination, relevant and important as it is, distracts one from the other, often much more mundane, day-to-day practices that inform decisions to grant visas to scientists, engineers, and researchers who want to enter the United States. Consequently, the scholarly literature has largely been oblivious to how the implementation of export controls in combination with visa controls obstructed the circulation of people bearing sensitive knowledge in their heads and hands, a lacuna this chapter will fill.

One should not be deluded by the massive circulation of knowledge in our interconnected world into thinking that export controls are peripheral to visa adjudications. For, as John Krige and I have shown elsewhere, the vast unregulated space that embodies “scientific internationalism” was coconstructed with the export control regime, a regime that deliberately excluded certain categories of knowledge, notably basic science, from government control.6 It is the bureaucratic application of this criterion (and others) that gives scholars from nontargeted countries the impression that getting a visa is a mere formality.

Indeed, after World War II, US policy-makers turned the idea of scientific internationalism into a tool of US national security and foreign policy.7 In the Cold War mind-set, national security did not stop at the American national border. Central to this concept was the building of an international order that created the “West” as a bulwark against the perceived threat of an expansionist Soviet Union.8 Part of this project of constructing a Western alliance was the sharing of scientific-technological knowledge to strengthen economic prowess and military power through cooperative innovation and technology transfers.9 Yet, as much as international cooperation and US national interest went hand in hand, there was a constant tension between them.10 Since the United States claimed the role of international leadership and understood being ahead of everybody else as the very base of its power, it jealously monitored what knowledge it shared and what it denied—not only with enemies but even among allies. The communication of knowledge was allowed as long as it buttressed US interests, but it was stopped as soon as it was deemed to threaten the American lead.11 Thus, at the same time as the United States fostered scientific internationalism and, by extension, the internationalization of science and technology, it carefully defined its boundaries. Export controls and visa regulations were central bureaucratic instruments to enforce these limits in practice.

In this chapter I will not only show how this remarkably creative interplay of visa and export control regulations worked in practice but also offer, more importantly, a bureaucratic and intellectual history of the visa and export control systems as regimes of knowledge regulation, situating their development in the gradually changing Cold War context from the 1940s to the 1960s. My central point is that the US national security state made—and still makes—the decision to allow a scientist or student to visit the United States not least on the basis of considerations about what the individual scientist knows but, more importantly, about what he or she could potentially learn in the United States and take back with her to her home country (see also Krige, chapter 2).

The McCarran Acts and the “Uranium Curtain”: Visa Restrictions in the Early Cold War

Increasingly since the late 1940s, American scientists who wanted to travel abroad were subjected to special scrutiny regarding not only their political leanings but also, and even more important, their expertise and the knowledge they potentially could share beyond US borders. US physicists and chemists were in fact the only professional group singled out for a particularly close security screening by the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs within the State Department’s Passport Office.12 Scientists applying for a passport were “screened as to their loyalty to the United States, keeping in mind what the individual knows.”13 If doubts existed about the political beliefs of a scientist and if his knowledge seemed to be too sensitive to be shared abroad, the State Department could deny him a passport or issue a limited passport allowing travel only to certain, clearly stated destinations. This happened time and again, not surprisingly mainly to scientists with leftist political leanings. Then, in the late 1950s, a series of Supreme Court decisions established step-by-step the concept of a US civil “right to travel.” Henceforth, passport denials could not be used as an instrument of knowledge transfer control.14

US visa policy, by contrast, was not affected by these legal changes. Beginning in the late 1940s visas had become an increasingly powerful instrument of national security policy in general and of managing an anticommunist border regime in particular. The use of visas to fight political groups extends back to the early twentieth century. In 1903 Congress voted for legislation that denied admission to the United States of “anarchists, or persons who believed in or advocated the overthrow by force or violence” of the US government. This was the first federal legislation that directly linked immigration and national security. This link became even more pronounced during World War I, when the United States for the very first time introduced a general requirement of visas to enter the country. The Immigration Act of October 1918 and its amendments in the 1920s codified the targeting of anarchists, “saboteurs,” and other “subversive aliens” for the next decades.15

After World War II, this legislation was increasingly used to prevent communists from entering the United States, and in the late 1940s it began to visibly affect US scientific exchanges with foreign countries.16 These travel restrictions became even more pronounced with the enactment of the two McCarran acts (so called after their main sponsor, Senator Pat McCarran, D-NV)17 passed during the Korean War in a climate of strident anticommunism, to replace the Immigration Act of 1918. The new legislation, officially called the Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran act) and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter act), denied visas especially to communists—a broadly defined category—whose presence in the United States was deemed to be “prejudicial to the public interest, or endanger the welfare, safety, or security of the United States.” In addition to political subversion, the acts were directed against the threats of sabotage and espionage.18

These stipulations complicated the lives of the international scientific community. The Federation of American Scientists reported in 1952 that “at least 50 per cent of all the foreign scientists who want to enter the United States” faced visa denials or delays of their visa applications of four months up to one year. French scientists were even more seriously affected: 70–80 percent of them experienced difficulties, mainly because about 70 percent of all French scientists were members of the Association des travailleurs scientifiques, an organization that US national security bureaucrats deemed “subversive.” The Federation of American Scientists had collected information on about sixty cases but estimated that altogether three times as many scientists had had visa problems.19 Conferences were particularly affected by these difficulties, and from 1950 onward some scientific organizations began to plan to hold their meetings outside the United States to spare foreign colleagues the “embarrassment” of the visa procedure.20

Even though businessmen, journalists, artists, and—also of interest for our argument—technical assistance team members felt the effects of the stricter visa policy, it seems that no professional grou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology
• part i  The US Regulatory State
• part ii  Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts
• part iii  Individual Identities in Flux
• part iv  The Nuclear Regime
• List of Contributors
• Index