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Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, by Ronald J. Deibert


Introduction


There is a sense among a growing number of observers of the world today that the present era is one in which fundamental transformation is occurring. Among International Relations theorists, 1   for example, John Ruggie has argued that we are witnessing "a shift not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is performed." 2   Similarly, James Rosenau contends that the present era constitutes a historical breakpoint leading to a "postinternational politics" 3   while Mark Zacher has traced the "decaying pillars of the Westphalian temple." 4   This belief in epochal change is mirrored outside of the mainstream of International Relations theory in, for example, pronouncements of a coming "information age," 5   "postindustrialism," 6   "postfordism," 7   or, more generally, "postmodernism." 8   While these analyses differ widely in terms of their respective foci and theoretical concerns, there is at least one common thread running through each of them: the recognition that current transformations are deeply intertwined with developments in communication technologies--popularly known as the "information revolution."

Communication is vital to social cohesion. The ability to communicate complex symbols and ideas is generally considered to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of the human species. Yet in the International Relations field little or no attention has been given to the wider implications of large-scale shifts in the means through which humans communicate. In part, this can be attributed to the discipline's conservative tendencies; as Ruggie points out, International Relations theorists are not "very good help at studying the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international system." 9   With studies of transformation in general being rare, it should come as no surprise that few focus on the implications of changing communication technologies. Those that do attempt to account for change in the international system typically focus on modes of either production or destruction as the most important variables. 10   When considered at all, communication technologies are typically viewed through the prism of, or are reduced to, these other factors. Even in analyses that point to the independent role of "ideas" or "knowledge" in shaping various aspects of world politics, little corresponding attention is given to the specific form in which ideas and knowledge are stored, transmitted, and distributed. 11   For a discipline concerned arguably more so than others with the "Big Picture," this silence is remarkable and contrasts sharply with what is found outside of the International Relations field, where popular accounts and speculations proliferate. It is also remarkable when we look to the past, where even a quick glance suggests that important historical junctures coincide with major changes in communication technologies. To take just a few examples:

My main argument here is that these coincidences are no coincidences at all; that changes in modes of communication--the various media by which information is stored and exchanged--have significant implications for the evolution and character of society and politics at a world level. In making this argument, I will be retrieving a theoretical position that, while largely absent from International Relations literature, nevertheless has a long intellectual lineage--this is "the history of communications as an aspect of the general history of civilizations." 12   While its major proponents are associated with twentieth-century scholarship, the themes that are raised can be traced as far back as Rousseau, Locke, and even Plato. Its nuances and metatheoretical orientation harken back to a late nineteenth-early twentieth century tradition of scholarship grounded in cultural materialist thinking, associated with thinkers such as Gordon Childe, Lewis Mumford, and Edward Tylor. However, it is the Canadian economic historian Harold Adam Innis who is generally recognized as the first to have articulated and applied the theory. The core of this "medium theory" approach is aptly summarized by Paul Heyer:

Loosely stated it refers to the belief that the transformation of basic information into knowledge is not a disembodied process. It is powerfully influenced by the manner of its material expression. In other words, the medium is never neutral. How we organize and transmit our perceptions and knowledge about the world strongly affects the nature of those perceptions and the way we come to know the world. 13  

My objective is to develop a theoretical and analytical framework, derived and modified from the tradition of scholarship alluded to above, and apply it to the question of world order transformation. As will be made clear throughout this study, my purpose in doing so is not to assert that communication technologies offer a "master key" to the unlocking of human history, nor is it even to argue for the priority of the mode of communication over other forces of change. Rather, it is to construct a lens through which we can interpret the relationship between large-scale changes in modes of communication and world order transformation--a problematique that should be of central importance to International Relations theorists today, yet is not. Doing so, I believe, can then provide some insights into the character of an emerging postmodern world order as well.

In the remainder of this chapter I will provide a general introduction to the theoretical backdrop and central focus of the study: the role of communication technologies in world order transformation. Because this level of analysis is unusual in comparison to the majority of International Relations theorizing, a significant portion of the introduction will be spent situating this study as a contribution to what Charles Tilly refers to as "world-historical" research. 14   As will be shown below, this study "problematizes" the taken-for-granted foundations and structures that are typically "assumed away" by most theorists. It requires, then, a "desensitization" exercise, one that strips away those presuppositions to provide an orientation for the analysis to follow. Chapter 1 will then provide a more detailed overview of the theoretical perspective that informs this study.

Theorizing the Communications Revolution

That we are currently living through a revolutionary change in technologies of communication is beyond dispute. The signs and evidence of this change are no more apparent than in the technology I use to write these words. With the touch of a few buttons, I could send this entire study within seconds to any one of millions of people around the planet. With a few coding alterations, I could "post" it to my World Wide Web page on the Internet making it immediately accessible to millions of anonymous people many of whom might live thousands of miles apart from each other and from me. If I so desired, I could "enter" the Library of Congress in the United States--without ever leaving my chair in Toronto, Canada--and access whatever it currently has stored in digital-electronic format, which is growing exponentially. Anecdotes and illustrations similar to those above are plentiful and well-known. But how do we understand--amidst the maelstrom of changes occurring around us--the wider implications of these developments? How can we assess where we are heading? How do we do so without being swept up in the hype? In other words, where can we find a proper framework or guide that will give us some perspective on the relationship between these changes and society and politics at a world level?

Those groping for answers to these questions would be hard pressed to find many preliminary leads within the International Relations literature. There is no tradition of International Relations scholarship that takes communications per se as its central focus. The one scholar who is an exception to this generalization--Karl Deutsch--wrote most of his studies prior to the recent developments surrounding the so-called "information revolution." 15   Moreover, as his work focused on measurable flows of communications across borders largely without regard to the different media employed, it is of limited use to those interested in changing communication technologies.

More recently, of course, there have been a growing number of studies that allude to "information technologies" or the "media," but many of them subsume communications under a theoretical perspective that privileges other independent variables, such as the capitalist mode of production by Marxists and neo-Marxists, or weapons technologies by security materialists. 16   The few exceptions in which communication technologies do play an important role include James Rosenau's Turbulence in World Politics, 17   some recent and thought-provoking postmodern and poststructuralist works, 18   which have attempted to tap into the new sensibilities of cyberspace, and an edited book on the "political economy" of communications. 19   Some military analysts have also begun to focus on the "revolution" in military-strategic affairs unleashed by new communication and information technologies. 20   These few forays are an important sign that at least some attention is beginning to be paid to communication technologies in the International Relations field. However, the issue-area as a whole remains seriously underdeveloped. While sharing some significant commonalities with each of these various analyses, both the theoretical perspective and scope of this study make it a substantially different and, as I hope to demonstrate, significantly novel contribution. More will be said about the dearth of scholarship in the International Relations/communication technologies nexus in chapter 1.

Outside of the International Relations field there is, of course, plenty of often insightful and entertaining popular speculation about the impact of new communication technologies on society, culture, and politics. Such literature, is of course not written in a social science mode and thus tends to be more journalistic or sensational than systematic. Here, the problem is not so much a dearth of scholarship as it is a surfeit of hyperbole. One finds the opinions of Luddites and optimists that seem to accompany every technological innovation of the last two centuries, only now they are magnified a thousandfold by the reproductive and distributive capacities of the communication technology itself! 21   Corralling this virtual stampede of publications is surely one of the more challenging tasks in writing a study such as this one. For example, James Beniger has listed with exasperation no less than seventy-five books written between 1950 and 1984 dedicated to major societal transformations associated with new communication technologies. 22   Depending on the author, we are now in the midst of, or are or transforming into, "posthistoric man," "postcapitalist society," the "end of ideology," the "computer revolution," the "postcivilized era," the age of discontinuity," the "technetronic era," a "republic of technology," a "wired society," and, of course, "the third wave." 23   In this headlong rush to grasp the implications of a seemingly endless chain of improvements in the speed and scope of communications, hype about "what's in store" for us in the misty future--what we will be able to do--often displaces informed analyses of what is going on here and now. 24   Depending on the moral proclivities of the author, the result is typically an invocation of either optimism or despair that can make for entertaining reading, but poor analysis of contemporary trends in world politics.

One tradition of scholarship that does take as its central focus the impact of changing communication technology on society and politics falls under the rubric "medium theory." 25   This approach is associated with (but by no means exclusive or original to) Marshall McLuhan, arguably the most cited, but least understood, theorist of the "information age." 26   At the heart of medium theory is the argument that changes in modes of communication--such as the shift from primitive orality to writing or the shift from print to electronic communications--have an important effect on the trajectory of social evolution and the values and beliefs of societies. Medium theory traces these effects to the properties of the medium itself regardless of the content or the message being transmitted. In other words, different modes of communication, it is argued, have a certain "logic" or "nature," not in any determinist sense, but only in the sense of making certain types of communication easier or more difficult. 27   As communication is such a vital part of human existence, a change in the mode of communication will have substantial effects on factors such as the distribution of power within society, the nature and character of individual and social cognition, and the values and beliefs that animate a particular population.

Medium theory has received less attention than one might expect given recent developments in communication technology--a neglect that is probably at least indirectly related to the way it was introduced to a wider audience by its two main practitioners: Harold Adam Innis (the "father" of medium theory) and Marshall McLuhan ("the oracle of the electronic age"). 28   Both theorists had a notoriously dense and complex writing style--a limitation that both invited misinterpretation and discouraged further investigation. Innis's writings seem rushed--as if they were working drafts for a larger project that was never completed before his relatively early death. McLuhan, on the other hand, practiced a self-conscious "mosaic" style of writing that consisted mostly of bulletlike aphoristic probes designed to challenge the reader. However, one person's "probe" is another's "gross gener alization." While achieving widespread popular notoriety, McLuhan's work was received less kindly in academic circles--a reflection perhaps not so much of the poverty of McLuhan's analysis as of the envy that seems to arise within academia when a scholar achieves widespread fame. Whatever the root cause, by the time of McLuhan's death in 1980 the substance of medium theory had been reduced to a few well-worn clichés, like the "global village" or "the medium is the message." To this day most remain unaware of the theoretical grounds that underlie such claims.

In chapter 1, I provide a substantial elaboration and modification of medium theory designed to resurrect the core propositions of this approach while shedding those elements that have come to be seen through criticism and the passage of time as misguided, overstated, or merely tangential. The majority of these elaborations and modifications are attempts to "get back to the roots" of this approach, so to speak--to unearth what I see as the cultural materialist or social anthropological grounds out of which medium theory developed. In doing so, I am linking the basic postulates of medium theory to a much deeper tradition of scholarship that includes figures such as Gordon Childe, Lewis Mumford, and the French Annales school of medieval historians, associated with Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, and more recently Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff. Embedding medium theory in this deeper tradition of scholarship enables me to articulate a more holistic view of the role of communication technology in social change, one that is able to confront and overcome the most basic perceived fault in medium theory: technological determinism. It also enables me to situate medium theory more clearly within the International Relations field. As I will point out in chapter 1, what I call the "ecological holist" position that underlies my version of medium theory aligns me closest to the work of historicists in the field, such as John Ruggie, Robert Cox, and Daniel Deudney. It also bears a close resemblance to the social constructivist approaches developed by Alexander Wendt, Friedrich Kratochwil, and Nicholas Onuf. And it diverges fundamentally from the more ahistorical, rationalist approaches associated with mainstream neorealist and neoliberal theories. Indeed, what I believe to be one of the more important contributions of this study is the argument that the elements of international politics which mainstream rationalist approaches presuppose to be "natural," "essential," and "unchanging" are, in fact, the products of historical contingencies and thus subject to change over time.

The Study of World Order Transformation

Fundamental changes, such as those being pursued here in communications, by definition resonate throughout the whole of society leaving virtually nothing untouched. Presented with this overwhelming scope of change, the analyst concerned with explaining specific relations must narrow the focus considerably. While medium theory has been applied in the past to a wide range of issue-areas at a variety of levels of analysis, my focus in this study is on the relationship between changes in modes of communication and world order transformation. It is important, then, to specify clearly what is entailed by this analytical focus.

When most people think of "international relations" they tend to think of the relations between states or nations, be it in the form of war, trade, or diplomacy. Indeed, the majority of scholarship in the International Relations field focuses on these very same types of questions--that is, on the interactions between political units whose existence is more or less considered unproblematic. Theories of international relations generally assume a basic structure--they take for granted the division of political authority into territorially distinct sovereign states and they theorize about the relations between those states. As Robert Cox has pointed out, this level of analysis is appropriate under conditions of "apparent stability or fixity in power relations," when the basic structure of the system can be taken for granted. 29   However, when fundamental change is thought to be occurring in the very parameters in which such interaction takes place, a deeper level of analysis is required, one that problematizes what is normally assumed away.

This deeper level of analysis focuses on the structure of political authority at a world level, or what is generally referred to as "world order." 30   Since this level of analysis occupies a crucial place in this study, it may be useful to unpack "world order" and more carefully delineate what is meant by the term. First, world order does not necessarily have to correspond to the planet as a whole; in other words, we can think of world order on a number of different levels, from fairly self-contained regional groupings to the globe itself. Second, world order, in its standard formulation, typically refers to the structure of political authority or system of rule found in a specific world at a particular time in history. 31   In general terms, it refers to the "basis on which the human species is socially individuated and individuals in turn bound together into collectivities." 32   It does not focus on the ongoing, day-to-day relations between these units, nor even whether these day-to-day relations form some discernible recurring pattern--say, the predisposition toward bandwagoning under a particular distribution of power. 33   Rather, it focuses attention on the nature and spatial organization of the units themselves--from the ideas, values, and principles that sustain and underpin this organization to the institutional and functional embodiments of the actual units of political authority.

"Political authority" is perhaps best defined more precisely as the "right to set the rules of the game." 34   Although it is one of the most basic and important notions in politics, it is also one of the most intractable and confusing. For example, although most people locate authority today in sovereign-territorial states, not all systems of rule have been territorially based and/or mutually-exclusive. John Ruggie, for example, has pointed to medieval feudalism as a system of rule characterized by multiple and overlapping layers of political authority (of which more will be said below). 35   Also often confused are the notions of political authority and state "control" or "autonomy." 36   When observers point to flows of commerce or communications across state borders and see in them the "end of the sovereignty" or a loss of authority, what they are often pointing to is, in fact, a loss of state control. While there may be some sort of a relationship between such a loss and the recasting of political authority over time, as Janice Thomson notes, the two concepts should be carefully distinguished. 37   It is the specific form in which political authority is manifested at different times and in different contexts that is the proper focus of world order studies, and not the ability (or lack thereof) to control flows or act autonomously.

One way to help conceptualize the study of world order is by way of an architectural analogy. Different buildings employ a variety of principles and styles upon which space is ordered and rooms arranged and divided. Buildings also serve particular functions: stairwells or exits are placed in strategic locations while hallways may be designed to accommodate large flows of foot traffic, or conversely, to facilitate privacy and exclusion. An architectural analyst studying the spatial order of a particular building will not concern him or herself with the conversations or relations of the people occupying the building, but will focus instead on the building itself, perhaps beginning with the social nuances and cultural styles that inform the design, moving next to the general architectural principles that undergird the structure as a whole, and finally outlining in careful terms the division of space within the building--the number and arrangement of rooms and floors. Similarly, in an analysis of the architecture of world order, the concern is not so much with the relations between "units" of political authority as it is with the constitution of the "units" themselves. Here, the focus is on the social nuances and cultural styles that give meaning to order, to the principles and rules that constitute and legitimate political authorities, and finally to the nature and character of the institutions that structure and differentiate the practice of political, economic, and social organization. The study of world order is thus above all the study of the organization of political space--the architecture of political authority--at a world level.

While "political" authority is the prime focus, it is important to emphasize that a variety of factors will influence the nature or character of a particular world order, including the organization and production of subsistence, the provision of physical security, and the supply of spiritual, religious, or other metaphysical yearnings. Consequently, studies of world order should be wide-ranging and sociological in their scope, willing to track a deep current of forces that might not otherwise be associated with a narrow definition of "politics" per se. It is also important that studies or world order not conflate what are essentially theoretical categories with the substance of the world order in question. In other words, we should not presuppose the "modern" distinction maintained between "politics," "economics," and "religion" in the composition of past or future world orders. For those living at the time these categories may be inextricably linked--in fact, the very distinction might have little or no conceptual currency in the language of the day. This heuristic focus on world order as the "structure of political authority" may even come to be seen in the passage of time as parochial and typically "modern," but it has not yet exhausted its intellectual "cash-value." 38  

By these terms, world order is an example of what is called the long durée by the Annales school of historians. As Ruggie points out, the longue durée does not refer simply to a long period of time: "It depicts the lives of large-scale historical structures, as opposed to day-to-day events, structures which may shape those events for extended periods of time." 39   These historical structures become so much a part of the enduring practices of people that they "come by them to be regarded as fixed attributes of human nature and social intercourse." 40   Of course, they are not. We know as much because not all systems of rule throughout the course of human history have assumed the same form. In other words, there have been "breaking points" between past world orders where the architecture of political authority has undergone transformation. Whether the current period can be defined as one of those breaking points is a question that is beginning to occupy a considerable amount of scholarly attention in the field. It is for this reason that theorists have increasingly looked back to the origins of the sovereign state-system--to the medieval-to-modern transformation of political authority--and have begun to "problematize" modern world order itself.

Similarly, my research strategy in this study has been to go back and explore the transformation that ushered in the sovereign states system in an attempt to draw lessons and apply them to contemporary changes. Like today, the medieval-to-modern transformation of political authority coincided with a major shift in the way people communicated, with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg. Using medium theory as a guide, in part 1 of this study I examine the way this change in the mode of communication played a part in the transformation of political authority. Then, using the same theoretical and analytical lens, I turn in part 2 to the contemporary era, and examine the relationship between new digital-electronic-telecommunications--what I refer to as the hypermedia environment--and the modern to postmodern transformation of political authority.

In its focus on communication technologies, the scope of this study is necessarily limited in important ways--particularly in part 1, which focuses on the medieval-to-modern transformation. My primary goal is to develop a lens through which to interpret changing communication technologies and world order transformation. Those searching for a more comprehensive or general treatsment of the rise of the state or a history of the Middle Ages would be well advised to look elsewhere. That said, I do believe that this study can provide an important guide to where we are headed today. Communication technologies are unique insofar as they are implicated in all spheres of human interaction--from production to security to knowledge and culture. As a consequence, changes in communication technologies both influence, and provide a window on, changes in other spheres of life. In focusing on changing modes of communication, then, we may be able to gain insight into the nature and direction of world order transformation as a whole. In setting the stage for the analysis to follow, the remainder of this chapter provides a general description of the medieval and the modern world orders.

The Architecture of the Medieval and Modern World Orders

Generalizing about the architecture of the medieval world order is an inherently dangerous enterprise. Gone are the days when the "Middle Ages" were viewed in static, sterile terms. The trend in medieval studies today is toward an affirmation of cultural diversity and idiosyncrasy, a view of life from the "bottom up," so to speak. 41   Structural features invariably tend to mask this rich complexity and diversity of medieval life, so there is always a risk of running roughshod over a thicket of contradictory nuances between different eras and regions that might diverge from the more general pattern. However, the study of structures by definition necessitates a degree of generalization in order to "give expression to phenomena deeper than everyday reality and to capture movement of a slower tempo." 42   At the risk of necessarily sidestepping important contextual details and "numberless tiny areas," 43   some broad generalizations about the form of world order during the High to late Middle Ages (a period running roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries) can be made that would probably find agreement among most medievalists. 44  

Despite the existence of competing and overlapping local and regional sentiments, it is safe to say that all of western Europe at this time defined itself as part of a single spiritual community. "Almost all medieval men moved contradictorily between two sets of horizons," notes Le Goff, "the limited horizons of the clearing in which they lived, and the distant horizons of the whole of Christendom." 45   In cosmological terms this spiritual community was ordered hierarchically, "a Great Chain of Being" with Christ poised at the top of the apex, followed by the Church, and by extension its visible head, the Pontiff, who acted as an intermediary between God and temporal life. 46   It was a society deeply imbued with religion from top to bottom, one in which the "destinies of man and the universe" were perceived within boundaries "traced by a Westernized Christian theology and eschatology. …" 47   All past and present believers were linked together seamlessly in a great corpus mysticum. 48  

Although the unity of Christendom provided a broad sense of common identity, especially in relation to the non-Christian world, it never crystallized into a single political structure, in part because "the actual social structure of power, the difficulties of travel and communication, the confused pattern of local and regional differences prevented any such expression." 49   Late medieval political rule was characterized by multiple and overlapping layers of authority, resting primarily on hierarchical and personalized feudal relations, with often competing jurisdictions among various social and cultural cells. In Perry Anderson's words, it was "a jungle of particularist dependencies." 50   In most cases, vertical and horizontal powers were entangled within the same nonexclusive territorial spheres, making it difficult to determine to which of the many lords, churches, towns or princes people were subordinate. 51   The vestiges of Roman Imperial authority, the interweaving papal-monastic networks, the fluid hereditary kingdoms, free cities, Germanic settlements, and scattered dukedoms, all co-existed together in a political space determined not so much by territorial boundaries, as by the sacred tributaries of the Christian commonwealth and the personal linkages of the feudal system of rule. As Hendrick Spruyt put it, "the church, Holy Roman Empire, and feudalism" were all based on "nonterritorial logics of organization." 52  

In the medieval world order, there were no sharp demarcations between "inside" and "outside," or between "private" and "public" realms, as each blended seamlessly into the other in a patchwork of personalized jurisdictions. The modern notion of dividing political space into mutually exclusive sovereign political entities would have been considered by philosophers of the time as a "repulsive anarchy, a contradiction to their basic assumption of a hierarchically ordered universe--almost a blasphemy." 53   If there was any clear dividing line that cut through society it was a trifunctional one, as Duby has explained, among those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored. 54   Although in formal terms the late medieval period was anarchic (lacking a supreme political authority), it was one in which the constituent units considered themselves to be "municipal embodiments of a universal community." 55   This sense of inclusive rights and overlapping jurisdictions provided the distinctive characteristics of the architecture of medieval world order. As Ruggie aptly describes it, the medieval world order "represented a heteronomous organization of territorial rights and claims--of political space." 56  

The transformation from this medieval heteronomous structure to the modern world of territorially distinct, mutually exclusive sovereign nation-states was a slow process encompassing changes that span centuries. Although theorists traditionally date the modern states system to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, there is no one single year that signals its emergence, making the assigning of a time-line somewhat arbitrary. 57   For years elements of what might be considered "medieval" coexisted with what are now considered benchmarks of the "modern." 58   Furthermore, within this transformation no single overarching variable stands apart as a primary driving force; instead the origins of the modern world order lay in what Michael Mann calls "a gigantic series of coincidences." 59   Drawing from the Annales school, Ruggie's recent essay on the medieval to modern transformation provides a compelling overview of some of these multifaceted "coincidences," beginning with base material changes in ecodemographics and the environment, moving upward to military and productive technologies, to explorations and travels, to shifts in strategic and commercial relations, and resting finally on important changes in mentalites collectives. Assigning weight to different variables within this complex may be somewhat futile if not misguided given the interwoven series of contingencies involved. At best what we might conclude from the medieval-to-modern transformation is that "when the creation of a new mental attitude falls together with extensive material and economic changes, something significant happens." 60   The result, over a period of centuries, was the emergence of the modern world order: territorially distinct, mutually exclusive, sovereign nation-states.

The key feature of the modern world order is implicit in the definition above--the parcelization and segmentation of all economic, social, and cultural activity into mutually exclusive, functionally similar political entities, or territorial "bundles." 61   Displacing the nonterritorial logics of organization that had characterized the feudal system of rule, political authority gradually coalesced into administrative control over fixed territorial spaces. 62   At a more specific level, the transformation entailed the creation of centralized state bureaucracies that ruled these territorial spaces from a single center. As part of this "centering" process, the medieval Christian Commonwealth was atomized into discrete community identifications centered first on the person of the monarch, and later on national-linguistic ties, or the "nation." At its foundation, however, the division of political authority into territorially distinct, sovereign nation-states defined the architecture of modern world order in Europe.

This mode of organizing political space spread gradually, by imitation and force; by the twentieth century, it would encompass the entire planet, and it was strongly reaffirmed following decolonization in the mid-1950s. 63   Today it stands as the dominant "paradigm" of world order at a global level. 64   The institutional depth of this paradigm is strong, as evidenced by the wide range of social, political, and economic activities that reinforce it daily. At the most basic level, the overwhelming majority of people around the world vote in a single state, carry passports of a single state, and consider themselves to be citizens and thus subject to the government and laws of a particular sovereign state. 65   Breaches of sovereign territorial boundaries are still strongly condemned, as revealed by the international community's reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 66   And the majority of independence movements around the world still overwhelmingly define their political goals in terms of sovereign aspirations. It was with these many interlocking ideas and social practices in mind that Stephen Krasner concluded that "The breadth of the state in terms of its links with other social entities, and the depth of the state reflected in the very concept of citizenship as a basic source of individual identity, make it very hard to dislodge." 67  

However, as pointed out in the opening pages of this introduction, a number of scholars are now beginning to question the continued viability of this mode of organizing political space. For many, there is a sense of profound transformation at work in world politics today--transformations that some believe are on an epochal scale, reaching beyond just the end of the Cold War into the very organization of politics and community itself. Everything from environmental to economic and military changes are increasingly seen as presenting fundamental challenges to the architecture of modern world order. 68   For others, however, such changes signal nothing new of significance, and the sovereign state system remains the fundamental basis of world order. 69   It is in the hope of contributing in a constructive way to this debate that this study is put forth. As will be revealed in the pages to follow, the conclusions reached strongly suggest that many of those interlocking elements that have traditionally provided the "institutional depth" for the modern world order paradigm are being rapidly dismantled. The architecture of political authority is undergoing profound transformation. While it is far too early to provide a clear outline of that emerging world order, the trends unearthed point away from single mass identities, linear political boundaries, and exclusive jurisdictions centered on territorial spaces, and toward multiple identities and nonterritorial communities, overlapping boundaries, and nonexclusive jurisdictions. Whether these developments continue in this direction or not depends on a variety of contingent factors in the future. But certainly changes in communication technologies occurring today suggest they will.


Note 1: Throughout this study, I will capitalize "International Relations" when referring to theorists or the discipline itself but will leave it lower case when referring to actual relations between modern states or nations. Back.

Note 2: John Gerard Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations," International Organization 47 (Winter 1993): 139-140. Back.

Note 3: James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 4: Mark Zacher, "The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian Temple: Implications for International Order and Governance," James N. Rosenau and ErnstOtto Czempiel, eds. Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 58-101. Back.

Note 5: Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and AntiWar: survival at the dawn of the 21st century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); and Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (London: Pan Books, 1983). Back.

Note 6: Daniel Bell, The Coming of PostIndustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Back.

Note 7: See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 1987); and Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Back.

Note 8: See JeanFrançois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984); and Barry Smart, Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies (New York: Routledge Press, 1992). For more extensive citations on the topic of postmodernism, see chapter 7. Back.

Note 9: Ruggie, "Territoriality," pp. 143-144. Back.

Note 10: See, for example, Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1957); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Forces and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1990 (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Daniel Deudney, "Dividing Realism: Security Materialism vs. Structural Realism on Nuclear Security and Proliferation," Security Studies 2, nos. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1993). Back.

Note 11: On "ideas" and "knowledge" in the shaping of world politics, see Peter Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination," International Organization 46 (Winter 1992): 1-35; and Joshua Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), especially the article by John A. Hall, "Ideas and the Social Sciences," pp. 31-54. Back.

Note 12: Paul Heyer, Communications and History: Theories of Media, Knowledge, and Civilization (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. xiii. Back.

Note 13: Ibid., p. xiv. Back.

Note 14: Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), p. 61. Back.

Note 15: See Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York: Free Press, 1963); and Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966). A more detailed overview of Deutsch's work will follow in chapter 1. Back.

Note 16: See the works cited in note 10, above. A more extensive discussion and overview of the treatment of communications in International Relations will follow in chapter 1. Back.

Note 17: Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics. Back.

Note 18: I am thinking in particular of James Der Derian, AntiDiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); and Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Back.

Note 19: Edward Comor, ed. The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunication, and the Information Economy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). Back.

Note 20: See, for example, Martin Libicki, "The Emerging Primacy of Information," Orbis (Spring 1996), pp. 261-276. Back.

Note 21: Two studies that provide insightful overviews of the way past innovations in communication technologies were heralded as either the harbingers of utopia or despair are James Carey, Communication and Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge Press, 1989); and Ithiel de Sola Pool, "Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone," in The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976). Back.

Note 22: James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 4-5. Despite the title, which suggests yet another prophetic leap into the void, Beniger's analysis is one of the more interesting and balanced approaches to developments in communication technologies. Back.

Note 23: Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950); Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Basic Books, 1960); Edmund Berkeley, The Computer Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1962); Kenneth E. Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity (New York: Harper and Row, 1969); Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); James Martin, Wired Society (New Jersey: PrenticeHall, 1978); and Toffler, The Third Wave. In listing these works together I do not want to give the impression that they are all somehow equally insightful or impoverished as the case may be. I am merely illustrating the accumulation of literature addressing some aspect of epochal change in the last few decades. For similar frustrations, see W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 5-6. Back.

Note 24: "[P]rophecies tend to take the place of analysis" as Castells puts it. See Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the UrbanRegional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 1. Back.

Note 25: The "medium" in medium theory refers to the medium through which information is exchanged and not to the size or nature of the theory, as in "medium" versus "grand" theory. Back.

Note 26: Apart from other works by McLuhan cited throughout this study, see especially Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGrawHill, 1964). Back.

Note 27: Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience, p. 48. Back.

Note 28: For Innis, see Empire and Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950); and The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Back.

Note 29: Robert W. Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond International Relations Theory," in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 210. Back.

Note 30: For various discussions of world order, see Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders"; Robert W. Cox, "Towards a PostHegemonic Conceptualization of World Order: Reflections on the Relevancy of Ibn Khaldun," in Rosenau and Czempiel, eds., Governance without Government; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977); Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (New York: Routledge Press, 1992); and Daniel Deudney, "Binding Powers, Bound States: The Logic and Geopolitics of Negarchy," (Paper presented at the International Studies Association meeting, Washington D.C. March 28-April 2, 1994). Back.

Note 31: This definition is derived from the works listed in the previous note. It should be apparent that according to this definition "order" is not necessarily synonymous with the absence of conflict. Even anarchic systems in which war is a prominent feature are still "world orders" by this definition. For discussions on this point in particular, see Bull, The Anarchical Society, ch. 1; and Cox, "PostHegemonic Conceptualization of World Order," pp. 136-137. Back.

Note 32: John Gerard Ruggie, " 'Finding our Feet' in Territoriality: International Transformation in the Making," (Mimeo: 1990), p. 3; See also Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 148. Back.

Note 33: Cf. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979); Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder, eds. Dominoes and Bandwagons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Back.

Note 34: For a similar view, see Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond"; and Janice E. Thomson, "State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research," International Studies Quarterly 30, 2 (June 1995): 213-233. Back.

Note 35: Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond." Back.

Note 36: See Thomson, "State Sovereignty in International Relations," p. 216; and Ste Back.

Note 37: Thomson, "State Sovereignty in International Relations," pp. 216-217. Back.

Note 38: What I am saying is that most political scientists today share a common sense of what is meant by the term "political authority." Hence, it is still useful as an analytic tool to orient thought and discussion around certain social practices. But because it is so today does not mean that it always has been in the past, nor will it by necessity be so in the future. Back.

Note 39: Ruggie, "Finding our Feet," p. 7; See also, John Gerard Ruggie, "International Structure and International Transformation: Space, Time and Method," in Ernst OttoCzempiel and James N. Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges: Approaches to World Politics for the 1990s (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath/Lexington Books, 1989), p. 29. For Braudel and the langue duree see Fernand Braudel, On History, [trans. Sarah Matthews] (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Stuart Clark, "The Annales Historians," in Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-198. Back.

Note 40: Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders," p. 246. Back.

Note 41: For expressions of this trend in medieval studies, see Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Morrow, 1991). Back.

Note 42: Ruggie, "International Structure and International Transformation" in Czempiel and Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, p. 21. Back.

Note 43: Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 95. Back.

Note 44: Periodization is tricky business when it comes to the Middle Ages. Although there is a considerable amount of scholarly debate about the proper situating of timelines and the essential differences between eras, I have chosen to follow the convention of dividing the Middle Ages into three periods: the early Middle Ages, running roughly from the fall of Rome in the fourth century to the tenth or eleventh century; the High Middle Ages, from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries; and the late Middle Ages, the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. For discussion, see Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, [trans. by William Weaver] (New York: HBJ Books, 1983), pp. 73-75; and Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, ch. 1. Back.

Note 45: Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 95. Back.

Note 46: See Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). Back.

Note 47: Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1, [trans. by L. A. Manyon] (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 81. See also Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms Back.

Note 48: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 194. Back.

Note 49: Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape Publishers, 1955), pp. 19-20. Back.

Note 50: Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), p. 33. Back.

Note 51: Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 96. Back.

Note 52: Hendrick Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 55. Back.

Note 53: Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 26. Back.

Note 54: Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, [trans. Arthur Goldhammer] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 150. Back.

Note 55: John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 143. Back.

Note 56: Ibid. Back.

Note 57: On the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 as the marking point for the emergence of the modern states system, see Zacher, "The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian Temple"; Leo Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," in Richard A. Falk and Wolfram F. Hanrieder, eds., International Law and Organization (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968), pp. 45-67; and F. H. Hinsley, The Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). Back.

Note 58: See on this score, Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, [trans. Arthur Goldhammer] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), especially the section entitled "For an Extended Middle Ages." See also, Krasner, "Compromising Westphalia," p. 141; and Stephen D. Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 59: Michael Mann "The Rise of the European State," in James Anderson, ed., The Rise of the Modern State (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986), p. 16. Back.

Note 60: John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Mentor Books, 1950), p. 53. Back.

Note 61: On "bundles" as a metaphor for modern world order, see David J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the TwentyFirst Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); and Friedrich Kratochwil, "Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State System," World Politics 34 (October 1986): 27-52. Back.

Note 62: Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 36. Back.

Note 63: See Gerrit, W. Gong, The Standard of 'Civilization' in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); and Robert H. Jackson, QuasiStates: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a useful overview of the changes in the notion of "sovereignty" as a world ordering principle, see J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, "The State and Nation: Changing Norms and Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations," International Organization 48 (Winter 1994): 107-130. Back.

Note 64: I use the word "paradigm" here to underscore that while the modern world order may be the predominant "wayofseeing" the world for most people, it may be one that no longer provides a useful mental map of the emerging postmodern practices of world politics. In Kratochwil's words, there is currently a "disjunction between the organizing principles and social reality." Kratochwil, "Of Systems, Boundaries and Territoriality," p. 27. Such "conceptual barriers" to postmodern world order will be the focus of the concluding chapter to this study. Back.

Note 65: Richard Falk, "Sovereignty," in Joel Krieger, ed., The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 66: For an affirmation of this view, see Robert H. Jackson, "Dialectical Justice in the Gulf War," Review of International Studies 18, no. 4 (1992), pp. 335-354. Back.

Note 67: Stephen D. Krasner, "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective," Comparative Political Studies 21, no. 1 (April 1988): 90. Back.

Note 68: Although space precludes a detailed overview, in the concluding chapter I will outline briefly some of the other studies that point to world order transformation today. For a more comprehensive overview, see Zacher, "The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian Temple." Back.

Note 69: See, for example, Krasner, "Compromising Westphalia," which will be addressed in more length in the conclusion to this study. Back.

Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation