Power, Information Technology, and International Relations Theory

The Power and Politics of US Foreign Policy and the Internet

D. McCarthy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137306890
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306906
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the internet as a form of power in global politics. Focusing on the United States' internet foreign policy, McCarthy combines analyses of global material culture and international relation theory, to reconsider how technology is understood as a form of social power.

1

Introduction

The conceptual place of technology in International Relations

Technology has been central to the discipline of International Relations (IR) throughout its history. The formal inception of the discipline emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, in which the horrific destructive potential of modern military weaponry had been amply illustrated. The industrialization of warfare and the utilization of the most advanced technological artefacts for the slaughter of a generation formed the background for the varied intellectual responses that the war engendered, ranging from institution building to reinforcement of the balance of power.¹ Alfred Zimmern, Leonard Woolf and Norman Angell, central figures in the early development of the field, emphasized industrialization as driving the process of international integration. It was this integration that made war both terribly destructive and pointless, as interdependence altered the material benefits bestowed by conquest. Zimmern – holder of the world’s first chair in International Politics, created in Aberystwyth in 1919 – stressed the centrality of industrialization and modern communications technologies in the creation of the discipline of International Relations itself (Osiander 1998: 424). For Zimmern, international integration was a ‘result of technological innovation, more specifically the increasing speed and ease and hence volume of global communications’ (Osiander 1998: 417; Zimmern 1928: 154). Technological change formed a central conceptual and empirical referent point for interwar ‘idealists’.

During the Second World War, and in its aftermath, the study of International Relations was similarly shaped by the discipline’s reaction to technological developments, as Auschwitz and the atom bomb brought about a new realization of the destructive impact of human technological capabilities. Hans Morgenthau, perhaps the central figure in shaping the field of International Relations after the war, stressed that technological development was as destructive as it was productive (Morgenthau 1946). Reinhold Niebhur similarly noted that, while technological development had made a ‘universal community imperative’, it had in turn also provided the potential to destroy this nascent community (Niebhur 1944: 160, quoted in Craig 2003: 50). The intellectual trajectory of IR during the early Cold War was shaped by the encounter with humankind’s newfound ability to destroy all life on earth through thermonuclear war (Craig 2003; Sylvest 2013). In the 1970s the transnationalization of production, enabled by shipping containerization and the continued spread of communications technologies, shifted the focus of the field from a concern with Armageddon towards a reconsideration of global politics and power in conditions of intense interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1989 [1977]). As the threat of nuclear exterminism allegedly receded in the post–Cold War era, the discipline engaged with the potential and impact of newly emerging information-communications technologies, from satellites to faxes to the Internet, a revolution in military affairs that seemed to alter the experience of warfare (at least for Western publics) and the potentially catastrophic environmental consequences of technological development and industrialization. The past decade has seen the re-emergence of weapons of mass destruction as a central fulcrum for the field, as threats of inter-state nuclear war and non-state nuclear violence appeared again as issues of concern. Biotechnology, robotics and big data look set to continue to shape both the discipline and its subject.

Yet, despite the centrality of technological growth in shaping IR’s subject matter, conceptualization of technology within the discipline has been quite limited. While contestation over the meaning and practice of scientific knowledge has been at the centre of IR theory debates, the politics of technology are all too often treated as exogenous to the concerns of IR theorists – an environmental condition or set of instrumental possibilities rather than the product of political contestation in which the International itself is central. The politics of technological design, and thus the creation of the technological possibilities central to theoretical work throughout the history of the field, has largely remained on the sidelines.

Were the technological not central to various other concepts in International Relations Theory this gap may not matter: technology could be safely ignored, and a consideration of anarchy, sovereignty, power, institutions and systemic interactions could continue without harm. However, the technological is central both to these concepts and to the practices they attempt to grasp. As recent work in the field has noted, nuclear weapons may alter the historical condition of anarchy, pushing global politics towards the development of a world state (Deudney 2008; Craig 2003, 2009). Anarchy is thereby reconceptualized, not as a transhistorical condition, but as an historically limited form of interaction between political communities constituted by specific technological capabilities. Sovereignty, anarchy’s attendant, is often viewed as undergoing processes of disaggregation due to the possibilities presented by information technology (Held et al. 1999; Scholte 2005). Sovereignty is, as a result, conceptualized as a condition exercised by multiple actors in territorially overlapping jurisdictions that are dependent on technological development occurring in directions that support these changes. Indices of power have often taken technological resources as central to the measurement of the ‘effective power’ of states, arguing that ‘power is nothing more than specific assets or resources that are available to a state’ (Mearsheimer 2001: 55). This stress on technology as one of the material resources that define power – the only shared characteristic across disparate Realist conceptions of power (Schmidt 2005: 528) – has, in many ways, defined our understanding of technology as a form of power in global politics, to the extent that scholars arguing for alternative perspectives effectively cede this ground to a Realist understanding (Guzzini 2005). Finally, the nature of various international societies is claimed to be constituted by the interaction present in the system, a function of the technological capacities present at any given time (Buzan and Little 2000). Approaches that seek to develop comparative historical sociologies of distinct international societies rely upon either an implicit or explicit understanding of how technology structures these societies. The place of technology is central, both to the conduct of international politics and to the manner in which we understand and analyse this conduct.

Consequently, excavating the discipline’s treatment of technology presents itself as a necessary task. Absent this consideration, the precise nature of our concepts and the theories that encompass them remain incomplete. It is for this reason that, in conjunction with a wider reconsideration of the role that science has played in constituting IR – and the social sciences more broadly (Bell 2009) – over the past decade the field has engaged, sparingly but increasingly, with the politics of technological design and construction, drawing upon Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the philosophy of technology.² Alongside more general treatments of the technological (Fritsch 2011; Herrera 2006; McCarthy 2011b; McCarthy 2013; Sylvest 2013), and in an effort to deepen our understanding of how material objects are created and how they structure global political conduct, studies in IR have examined the politics of information technologies (Carr 2012; Herrera 2002, 2006; Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009; McCarthy 2011a; Townes 2012), nuclear weapons (Herrera 2006; Peoples 2009; Sylvest 2013; Wyn Jones 1999), technology and changing forms of warfare (Bousquet 2009; Holmqvist 2013; Sauer and Schornig 2012), border technologies (Salter 2004; Scheel 2013), and naval warfare (Mukunda 2010).³ This present work stresses that technological development is not deterministic: it does not operate according to any intrinsic rationale and does not, as a result, follow any linear path. Instead, technological development is a deeply conflictual process with no predetermined outcomes. At a given moment of technological development, multiple potential design paths are present; the choice of any given path is the product of politics.

This book is part of the wider rethinking of technology in International Relations Theory and international relations practice. It seeks to contribute to this evolving body of work through a theoretical reconsideration of the relationship, in IR theory, between power and technology, arguing that technological artefacts must be considered as institutions with specific cultural norms and values embedded within their physical makeup. Technological objects share the characteristics of social institutions in general, in that they have formal ‘routines, procedures, norms and conventions embedded’ in their organizational structure (Hall and Taylor 1996: 938).⁴ As institutions, they structure paths of historical development – the QWERTY keyboard is an oft-used example – and shape actors’ interests and identities. Technologies are as social and political as any other human institution. For this reason, our understanding of the material aspects of power should be extended beyond a narrow concern with non-human objects as assets or resources. To this end, the book argues that technological artefacts are a form of institutional power – power at a spatio-temporal distance. This requires both rethinking how we understand technology and, as a result, how we think about technology as a form of social power. First, noting technology as socially constructed recognizes that social power relations are important in the making of design decisions. Levels of hierarchy or anarchy, democratic governance, legal institutionalization, and normative integration within an international system will thereby influence the types of technological institutions created at any given moment in time. In this manner, and to an extent largely unrecognized by Science and Technology Studies, international relations play a central role in the politics of technology, generating particular forms of technological development (including distinct national trajectories) and the manner in which these developments do or do not diffuse.⁵ Second, technological objects are not merely resources in the manner in which bombs or bullets are normally understood as power resources. Rather, technological objects have a social content that structures forms of political organization and their attendant politics of identity, material reproduction, and geopolitical manifestations.

These theoretical arguments are given empirical bite through focusing upon the politics of information-communications technologies and the Internet within American foreign policy. The technological architecture of the Internet allows for the creation, conveyance and display of media content – allowing for representation to occur, or not, within the boundaries the technology sets. In this way the Internet is an end as much as a means – the medium does indeed express a message (McLuhan 1997 [1964]; Innis 1972; Deibert 1997).⁶ Moreover, information technology is central to many of the core concerns of the discipline of IR, such as: the changing nature of global governance and transnational regulation; the transformation of the state; the extent, nature and possible limits of democracy; and the nature of hegemonic transitions within the international system. Far from being a narrow-issue area (contra Mueller 2010) the politics of information technology touch upon a broad terrain.⁷ The contestation over the technological architecture of information networks determines how information and communications technologies (ICTs) contribute to these broader processes.

This focus is partially driven by a dissatisfaction with the dominant treatment of information technology as a form of power in IR, although, as noted, this situation is changing. Far too often, when investigating major changes occurring in the global system, scholars have attributed causal agency to information technology (Drezner 2007: 91). As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, such an approach casts technology in a deterministic mould. Barring the adoption of a radical ontology that attributes agency to inanimate objects – the stance taken by Actor-Network Theory, purposefully avoided here⁸ – the formulation is unsatisfactory. Information technology does not possess intention. The attribution of agency to technology is an example of fetishism, a form of alienation that an historical materialist approach is well placed to examine. The drive behind this aspect of the book is, in some sense, a classic ideology critique of dominant approaches to technology in International Relations. If human agency and intentionality in crafting global politics are to be adequately acknowledged, the power of information technology should be examined as a human power, a product of historically specific social relations and created in historically specific ways, with temporally restricted (not universal) qualities and characteristics.

Of course, exposure of fetishism cannot be the sole task of an interrogation of information technology in international politics. While the socially constructed nature of information needs to be stressed within a discipline still prone to determinism, a critique of fetishism soon reaches its limits. IR theory needs to develop clear conceptual and analytical frameworks with which to investigate how information technology is developed and implemented, why it is developed and implemented in this manner, and the effects of these processes on the structure of global politics – to date, only the third of these has been of central interest to the field. Important steps have been taken in this direction within IR and in the amorphous field of Internet Studies (DeNardis 2009, 2012; Mueller 2010), but so far there have been fewer attempts to outline how the development of technology in international politics is related to one of the core categories of disciplinary work: power (Deudney 2008: 80–81). The resources for such a project are present within IR theory and social theory without having to invent neologisms such as ‘network power’ or ‘smart power’. As institutions, technological artefacts can be analysed as the product of social power relations using concepts with which IR scholars are quite familiar: concepts such as structural, productive, institutional, and coercive power (Barnett and Duvall 2005). In this sense, the present study is not aiming to add to an already heavily burdened and complex conceptualization of power in the field. Instead, the aim is to rethink how technological objects fit within existing IR frameworks. As noted at the end of Chapter 2, one of the primary tasks in this project is embedding Internet scholarship in existing social theory with greater depth and clarity.

Technology, facets of power and ‘the International’

The approach taken here is rooted in Marxist historical materialism, treating this literature in a catholic manner by drawing, in equal measure, upon neo-Trotskyism, Political Marxism and Gramscian scholarship (Wood 1981; Rosenberg 1994; Rupert 1995; Robinson 1996; Teschke 2003; Lacher 2006; Bieler and Morton 2008; Anievas 2011). This approach stresses the centrality of social property relations in generating specific strategies of reproduction for social actors – capitalists require certain profit rates to remain capitalists, and so forth – that shape the policies of state apparatus and, subsequently, the form of geopolitical relations in capitalist modernity (Teschke 2003; Lacher 2006). Examining the actions of the US state is more precisely comprehended as an examination of the actions of social forces that dominate the state apparatus (conceived of as an institution). Lest the pragmatic choice of statist language in the following obscure this point: for our purposes this is an examination of the policies and interests of American capitalism as narrated by its state managers, who articulate a holistic understanding of capitalism as a political economy, comprised of economic, political and ideological aspects.

While embedded within IR theory, however, the initial development of this approach in this book emerged not from IR theory but from a consideration of the literature within STS. Marxist IR theory has not outlined a clear theorization of the relationship between technology and power to a greater extent than any other approach in the discipline. Instead, the primary intellectual touchstone for the argument in this book is Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology (1991, 1999, 2002). Feenberg’s work embeds the politics of technological development and design within a theory that emphasizes the importance of historical and structural aspects of social relations, in contrast to other scholarship within STS. As noted in Chapter 2, STS scholarship has a marked tendency towards the study of micro-political processes. The scholarship produced by such studies is empirically rich and methodologically rigorous. At the same time, however, there is a tendency in the field to neglect how social structures limit, and enable, some actors to undertake technological development – or the reasons why actors may push for some forms of development over others. With these thoughts in mind, this book argues that we should conceptualize the relationship between power, technology, and the International through a consideration of the interaction between structural, productive, and institutional power within an uneven and combined process of human social development. Again, technology is understood here as a form of institutional power. Technology as institutional power is created through struggles embedded within structural power relations – both necessary and contingent – and defined, given meaning, and ultimately closed off from further political contestation through the productive, symbolic power of discourse.

Historical social structures grant some actors significant social power over others. The historical materialist approach developed in the book outlines structural power as generated through structures of social property rights that grant some actors the right (and gives them the motivation) to develop technological artefacts, a right denied to others by virtue of property non-ownership. As a result, technological institutions reflect the aims and desires of actors empowered in this way, and will, in turn, express these values in their physical rules. The concept of structural power locates technological institutions within historical and social contexts. This study emphasizes the power of the American government to embed the values of a specific historical conjuncture within the Internet architecture.

Productive power is central to our analysis in order to grasp how technological institutions are given meaning and value in the international system. Actors draw upon cultural norms to create symbolic meanings that surround a given technology in order to give direction to its development, to argue that a technology should take one specific form rather than its possible alternatives. These symbolic politics also grant actors the ability to achieve ‘technological closure’, whereby the further development of technology becomes uncontroversial between social actors. This process – similar, in some respects, to the idea of ‘securitization’ in IR, which it may encompass (Buzan et al. 1998) – is central in securing the institutional power of technology for the long-term. Closure is necessary for technological objects to form part of our everyday background: it is central to technological reproduction. The meaning of the Internet in global politics does not currently meet this criterion. A variety of international actors, led by the United States, seek to achieve this consensus via their discursive power. Unless we attend to the centrality of symbolic politics, the achievement of technological path dependency often charted ably but incompletely by econo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Power and Information Technology: Determinism, Agency, and Constructivism
• 3  A Historical Materialist Approach to Technological Power in International Relations
• 4  US Foreign Relations and the Institutional Power of the Internet
• 5  Pursuing Technological Closure: Symbolic Politics, Legitimacy, and Internet Filtering
• 6  The Narration of Innovation in US Internet Policy
• 7  Conclusion
• Appendix: Discourse Analysis Guide
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index