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I n 1997, Jodie Williams, then a Vermont-based grassroots activist, won the Nobel peace prize for helping to create a treaty banning antipersonnel land mines despite the opposition of the Penta-

gon, the strongest bureaucracy in the strongest country in the world. She organized her campaign largely on the Internet. In 1999, fifteen hundred groups and individuals met in Seattle and disrupted an im- portant meeting of the World Trade Organization. Again, much of their campaign was planned on the Internet. The next year, a young hacker in the Philippines launched a virus that spread round the world and may have caused $4 billion to $15 billion in damage in the United States alone. Unknown hackers have stolen information from the Pentagon, NASA, and major corporations such as Microsoft. The hard drives of computers seized from terrorists have revealed sophis- ticated networks of communication. On the other hand, young Ira- nians and Chinese use the Internet surreptitiously to plug into Western web sites and to discuss democracy. An information revolu- tion is dramatically altering the world of American foreign policy, making it harder for officials to manage policy. At the same time, by promoting decentralization and democracy, the information revolu- tion is creating conditions that are consistent with American values

the information revolution

Nye, J. S. (2003). The paradox of american power : Why the world's only superpower can't go it alone. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from du on 2021-01-25 14:48:26.

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and serve our long-term interests—if we learn how to take advan- tage of them.

Four centuries ago, the English statesman-philosopher Francis Ba- con wrote that information is power. At the start of the twenty-first century, a much larger part of the population both within and among countries has access to this power. Governments have always worried about the flow and control of information, and the current period is not the first to be strongly affected by changes in informa- tion technology. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, which al- lowed printing of the Bible and its accessibility to large portions of the European population, is often credited with playing a major role in the onset of the Reformation. Pamphlets and committees of corre- spondence paved the way for the American Revolution. In the tightly censored world of eighteenth-century France, news that circulated through several media and modes outside the law — oral, manu- script, and print—helped lay the foundation for the French Revolu- tion. As Princeton historian Robert Darnton argues, “Every age was an information age, each in its own way.”1 But not even Bacon could have imagined the present-day information revolution.

The current information revolution is based on rapid technologi- cal advances in computers, communications, and software that in turn have led to dramatic decreases in the cost of processing and transmitting information. The price of a new computer has dropped by nearly a fifth every year since 1954. Information technologies have risen from 7 percent to nearly 50 percent of new investment in the United States. Computing power has doubled every eighteen months for the last thirty years and even more rapidly in recent times, and it now costs less than 1 percent of what it did in the early 1970s. If the price of automobiles had fallen as quickly as the price of semicon- ductors, a car today would cost $5.

Traffic on the Internet has been doubling every hundred days for the past few years. In 1993, there were about fifty web sites in the world; by the end of decade, that number had surpassed five million.2 Communications bandwidths are expanding rapidly, and communications costs continue to fall even more rapidly than com- puting power. As late as 1980, phone calls over copper wire could

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carry only one page of information per second; today a thin strand of optical fiber can transmit ninety thousand volumes in a second.3 In terms of 1990 dollars, the cost of a three-minute transatlantic phone call has fallen from $250 in 1930 to considerably less than $1 at the end of the century.4 In 1980, a gigabyte of storage occupied a room’s worth of space; now it can fit on a credit-card-sized device in your pocket.5

The key characteristic of the information revolution is not the speed of communications between the wealthy and powerful—for more than 130 years, virtually instantaneous communication has been possible between Europe and North America. The crucial change is the enormous reduction in the cost of transmitting information. For all practical purposes, the actual transmission costs have become neg- ligible; hence the amount of information that can be transmitted worldwide is effectively infinite. The result is an explosion of informa- tion, of which documents are a tiny fraction. By one estimate, there are 1.5 billion gigabytes of magnetically stored digital information (or 250 megabytes for each inhabitant of the earth), and shipments of such information are doubling each year. At the turn of the twenty- first century, there were 610 billion e-mail messages and 2.1 billion sta- tic pages on the World Wide Web, with the number of pages growing at a rate of 100 percent annually.6 This dramatic change in the linked technologies of computing and communications, sometimes called the third industrial revolution, is changing the nature of governments and sovereignty, increasing the role of non-state actors, and enhanc- ing the importance of soft power in foreign policy.7

lessons from the past

We can get some idea of where we are heading by looking back at the past. In the first industrial revolution, around the turn of the nine- teenth century, the application of steam to mills and transportation had a powerful effect on the economy, society, and government. Pat- terns of production, work, living conditions, social class, and politi- cal power were transformed. Public education arose to satisfy the need for literate, trained workers to work in increasingly complex

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and potentially dangerous factories. Police forces such as London’s bobbies were created to deal with urbanization. Subsidies were pro- vided for the necessary infrastructure of canals and railroads.8

The second industrial revolution, around the turn of the twentieth century, introduced electricity, synthetics, and the internal combus- tion engine and brought similar economic and social changes. The United States went from a predominantly agrarian nation to a pri- marily industrial and urban one. In the 1890s, most Americans still worked on farms or as servants. A few decades later, the majority lived in cities and worked in factories.9 Social class and political cleavages were altered as urban labor and trade unions become more important. And again, with lags, the role of government changed. The bipartisan Progressive movement ushered in antitrust legisla- tion; early consumer protection regulation was implemented by the forerunner of the Food and Drug Administration, and economic sta- bilization measures by the Federal Reserve Board.10 The United States rose to the status of a great power in world politics. Some ex- pect the third industrial revolution to produce analogous transfor- mations in economy, society, government, and world politics.11

These historical analogies help us understand some of the forces that will shape world politics in the twenty-first century. Economies and information networks have changed more rapidly than govern- ments have, with their scale having grown much faster than that of sovereignty and authority. “If there is a single overriding sociological problem in post-industrial society—particularly in the management of transition—it is the management of scale.”12 Put more simply, the building blocks of world politics are being transformed by the new technology, and our policies will have to adjust accordingly. If we fo- cus solely on the hard power of nation-states, we will miss the new reality and fail to advance our interests and our values.

centralization or diffusion?

Six decades ago, the eminent sociologist William Ogburn predicted that new technologies would result in greater political centralization

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and strengthening of states in the twentieth century. In 1937, Ogburn argued that “government in the United States will probably tend to- ward greater centralization because of the airplane, the bus, the truck, the Diesel engine, the radio, the telephone, and the various uses to which the wire and wireless may be placed. The same inven- tions operate to influence industries to spread across state lines. . . . The centralizing tendency of government seems to be world-wide, wherever modern transportation and communication exist.”13 By and large, he was right about the twentieth century, but this trend is likely to be reversed in the twenty-first century.

Questions of appropriate degrees of centralization of government are not new. As the economist Charles Kindleberger pointed out, “how the line should be altered at a given time —toward or away from the center — can stay unresolved for long periods, typically fraught with tension.”14 If the nation-state has “become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems,”15 we may find not centralization or decentralization but a diffusion of gover- nance activities in several directions at the same time. The following table illustrates the possible diffusion of activities away from central governments—vertically to other levels of government and horizon- tally to market and private nonmarket actors, the so-called third sec- tor. Nonprofit institutions have grown rapidly in the United States, now accounting for 7 percent of paid employment (more than the number of federal and state government employees) and United States–based international nongovernmental organizations ex- panded tenfold between 1970 and the early 1990s.16 If the twentieth century saw a predominance of the centripetal forces predicted by Ogburn, the twenty-first may see a greater role of centrifugal forces.

The height of twentieth-century centralization was the totalitarian state perfected by Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union.17 It aptly fit—in- deed, was made possible by—industrial society, and it was ultimately undermined by the information revolution. Stalin’s economic model was based on central planning, which made quantity rather than profits the main criterion of a manager’s success. Prices were set by planners rather than by markets. Consumers as customers played lit- tle role. The Stalinist economy was successful in mastering relatively

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unsophisticated technologies and producing basic goods such as steel and electricity on a massive scale. It was effective in extracting capital from the agricultural sector in the 1930s and using it to build heavy in- dustry. It was also effective in postwar reconstruction, when labor was plentiful. However, with a diminishing birthrate and scarce capital, Stalin’s model of central planning ran out of steam.18

In addition, Soviet central planners lacked the flexibility to keep up with the quickened pace of technological change in the increas- ingly information-based global economy; they did not come to terms with the third industrial revolution. As Russian specialist Marshall Goldman once put it, “Stalin’s growth model eventually became a fetter rather than a facilitator.”19 As computers and microchips be- came not merely tools of production but imbedded in products, the life cycles of products shortened, sometimes dramatically. Many products were now becoming obsolete in only a few years or even

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Table 2.1 The Diffusion of Governance in the Twenty-first Century

Private Public Third Sector

Transnational

corporations

(e.g., IBM, Shell)

International governmental

organizations

(e.g., UN, WTO)

Nongovernmental

organizations

(e.g., Oxfam,

Greenpeace)

National

corporations

(e.g., American

Airlines)

Twentieth-Century

central government

National

non-profits

(e.g., American

Red Cross)

Local businesses Local government Local groups

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N at

io na

l Su

pr an

at io

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sooner, even though a rigid planning system might take much longer to react or simply continue toward obsolete goals. The Soviet bureau- cracy was far less flexible than markets in responding to rapid change, and for years the very word market was practically forbidden.20

Stalin’s political legacy was yet another hindrance to the Soviet Union. An information-based society required broadly shared and freely flowing information to reap maximum gains. Horizontal com- munication among computers became more important than top- down vertical communication. But horizontal communication involved political risks, in that computers could become the equiva- lent of printing presses. Moreover, telephones multiplied these risks by providing instant communication among computers. For political reasons, Soviet leaders were reluctant to foster the widespread and free use of computers. Two simple statistics demonstrate the Soviet disadvantage in the expanding information economy of the 1980s: by the middle of the decade, there were only fifty thousand personal computers in the USSR (compared to thirty million in the United States), and only 23 percent of urban homes and 7 percent of rural homes had telephones.21 Although this situation made political con- trol easier, it had disastrous economic effects. In the mid-1980s, the Soviets failed to produce personal computers on a large scale. At the end of the decade, Soviet officials reluctantly admitted that their computer technology lagged seven to ten years behind that of the West. Further, lack of freedom for hackers and other informal inno- vators severely handicapped the development of software. The Sovi- ets paid a heavy price for central control.22

Governments of all kinds will find their control slipping during the twenty-first century as information technology gradually spreads to the large majority of the world that still lacks phones, computers, and electricity. Even the U.S. government will find some taxes harder to collect and some regulations (for example, concerning gambling or prescription drugs) harder to enforce. Many governments today control the access of their citizens to the Internet by controlling Inter- net service providers. It is possible, but costly, for skilled individuals to route around such restrictions, and control does not have to be com- plete to be effective for political purposes. But as societies develop,

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they face dilemmas in trying to protect their sovereign control over information. When they reach levels of development where their knowledge workers want free access to the Internet, they run the risk of losing their scarcest resource for competing in the information economy. Thus Singapore today is wrestling with the dilemma of re- shaping its educational system to encourage the individual creativity that the information economy demands, and at the same time main- tain some existing social controls over the flow of information. In the words of Singapore’s prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, “We have to reinvent ourselves. We have to go beyond being efficient and produc- tive to create and attract new enterprise.”23 When asked how Singa- pore could control the Internet after its schools educated a new generation in how to work around the controls, the senior minister, Lee Kuan Yew, replied that at that stage it would not matter any- more.24 Closed systems become more costly, and openness becomes worth the price.

China is a more complicated case than Singapore because of its size and lower level of economic development. The Chinese govern- ment has traditionally doled out information depending on bureau- cratic rank and discouraged the flow of information among individuals. As Sinologist Tony Saich has described, “Under such a system the real basis of exchange is secrets and privileged access to information.”25 Now the Chinese government is trying to profit from the economic benefits of the Internet without letting it unravel their system of political control. They do this by authorizing only four networks for international access, blocking web sites, and forbidding Chinese web sites to use news from web sites outside the country. The Internet is censored via the service providers and the portals that host bulletin boards.

Use of the Internet in China has grown dramatically, from a mil- lion users in 1998 to about twenty million two years later. Nonethe- less, those users represent only about 1.3 percent of the population and are mostly relatively well-off city dwellers, not the majority rural population. Some sites and topics are quickly suppressed, but general critiques of communist leaders and the party’s monopoly on power are common, as are debates about the growing divide between rich

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and poor in China.26 Underground dissident journals are sent to hundreds of thousands of Chinese e-mail accounts from the safety of overseas. The New York Times reported recently that the influence of “shadow media is growing exponentially, along with China’s Inter- net, as articles from even the most obscure newspapers quickly find their way onto web sites and into chat rooms.”27

Some of the articles are radical and chauvinistic rather than liberal and democratic. During the crisis following the spring 2001 midair collision between a U.S. surveillance aircraft and a Chinese fighter plane, the Chinese government toughened its public position after monitoring the nationalistic responses on the Internet.28 The Inter- net is not necessarily a fast path to liberal democracy. The Chinese leadership is aware that it cannot control completely the flow of in- formation or access to foreign sites by its citizens. Its intention is to lay down warnings about limits.29 In a sense, Chinese leaders are bet- ting that they can have the Internet à la carte, picking out the eco- nomic plums and avoiding the political costs that come with the whole menu. In the near term, they are probably correct in their bet, but the long run remains more doubtful. In the opinion of Singa- pore’s Lee Kuan Yew, “Over the next 30 to 40 years there is going to be a drift into all the cities and the small towns will become big ones, all with access to the Internet, access to information. There is no way you can govern a well informed, large managerial/professional class without taking their views into account.”30

One political effect of increased information flows through new media is already clear: governments have lost some of their tradi- tional control over information about their own societies. In 2001, for example, the Indian government lost several ministers and nearly collapsed after reports of corruption appeared on an Internet news site. Scandals that were once more easily contained in New Delhi proved impossible to control. “Not only did Tehelka.com reveal the corrupt underbelly of the Indian military: it also helped fan the con- troversy by serving as a bulletin board for readers and politicians to air their views.”31 In the Philippines, hundreds of thousands of pro- testers working successfully to oust President Joseph Estrada “were able to call meetings at short notice by sending text messages on their

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mobile phones.”32 Corruption remains a problem in many countries, but it is no longer solely a domestic affair, as nongovernmental orga- nizations now publicize corruption rankings of countries on the In- ternet. Countries that seek to develop need foreign capital and the technology and organization that go with it. Increasingly, foreign capital demands transparency. Governments that are not transparent are less credible, since the information they offer is seen as biased and selective. Moreover, as economic development progresses and mid- dle-class societies develop, repressive measures become more expen- sive not merely at home but also in terms of international reputation. Both Taiwan and South Korea discovered in the late 1980s that re- pression of rising demands for democracy would be too expensive in terms of their reputation and soft power.

Countries will vary in how far and how fast the information revolu- tion will push decentralization. Some states are weaker than the private forces within them, others not. Private armies have played a key role in Sierra Leone; drug cartels are a major force in Colombia. Ecuador and Haiti have far weaker bureaucracies than South Africa and Singapore. Even in the postindustrial world, most European countries have a tra- dition of stronger central government than the United States does. To- tal government spending is about half of gross national product in Europe, while it has held steady at around a third of the economy in the United States and Japan and declined in New Zealand.33

Two other trends are closely related to the information revolution and reinforce the prospect that this century will see a shift in the lo- cus of collective activities away from central governments. As we shall see in the next chapter, globalization preceded the information revolution but has been greatly enhanced by it, opening up opportu- nities for private transnational actors such as corporations and non- profits to establish standards and strategies that strongly affect public policies that were once the domain of central governments. Similarly, the information revolution has enhanced the role of markets. The balance between states and markets shifted after the 1970s in a way that made the state just one source of authority among several.34

Even in Sweden and France, not to mention Eastern Europe and the less economically developed countries, significant privatizations have

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expanded market forces in the past two decades. The causes of mar- ketization involved more than just the information revolution. They include the failure of planned economies to adapt to the information revolution, the inflation that followed the oil crises of the 1970s, the early success of the East Asian economies, and changes in political and ideological coalitions (the Thatcher-Reagan revolution) inside wealthy democracies. The net effect, however, is to accelerate the diffusion of power away from governments to private actors, and that, in turn, pre- sents new challenges and opportunities for American foreign policy.

as the revolution progresses

We are still at an early stage of the current information revolution, and its effects on economics and politics are uneven. As with steam in the late eighteenth century and electricity in the late nineteenth, productivity growth lagged as society had to learn to fully utilize the new technologies.35 Social institutions change more slowly than tech- nology. For example, the electric motor was invented in 1881, but it was nearly four decades before Henry Ford pioneered the reorgani- zation of factories to take full advantage of electric power. Comput- ers today account for 2 percent of America’s total capital stock, but “add in all the equipment used for gathering, processing and trans- mitting information, and the total accounts for 12% of America’s capital stock, exactly the same as the railways at the peak of their de- velopment in the late nineteenth century. . . . Three-quarters of all computers are used in the service sector such as finance and health where output is notoriously hard to measure.”36 As we will see in chapter 4, the increase in productivity of the American economy be- gan to show up only as recently as the mid-1990s.37

The advent of truly mass communications and broadcasting a century ago, which was facilitated by newly cheap electricity, pro- vides some lessons about possible social and political effects today. It ushered in the age of mass popular culture.38 The effects of mass communication and broadcasting, though not the telephone, tended to have a centralizing political effect. While information was more

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widespread, it was more centrally influenced even in democratic countries than in the age of the local press. Roosevelt’s use of radio in the 1930s worked a dramatic shift in American politics. These effects were particularly pronounced in countries where they were combined with the rise of totalitarian governments, which were able to suppress competing sources of information. Indeed, some scholars believe that totalitarianism could not have been possible without the mass com- munications that accompanied the second industrial revolution.39

In the middle of the twentieth century, people feared that the computers and communications of the current information revolu- tion would create the central governmental control dramatized in George Orwell’s vision of 1984. Mainframe computers seemed set to enhance central planning and increase the surveillance powers of those at the top of a pyramid of control. Government television would dominate the news. Through central databases, computers can make government identification and surveillance easier, and commercialization has already altered the early libertarian culture and code of the Internet.40 Nonetheless, the technology of encryp- tion is evolving, and programs such as Gnutella and Freenet enable users to trade digital information anonymously.41 They promise greater space for individuals than the early pessimists envisioned, and the Internet is more difficult for governments to control than the technology of the second information revolution was. On balance, the communication theorist Ithiel de Sola Pool was correct in his characterization of “technologies of freedom.”42

As computing power has decreased in cost and computers have shrunk in size and become more widely distributed, their decentral- izing effects have outweighed their centralizing effects. The Internet creates a system in which power over information is much more widely distributed. Compared with radio, television, and newspa- pers, controlled by editors and broadcasters, the Internet creates un- limited communication one-to-one (e.g., via e-mail), one-to-many (e.g., via a personal home page or electronic conference), many-to- one (e.g., via electronic broadcast), and, perhaps most important, many-to-many (e.g., an online chat room). “Internet messages have the capacity to flow farther, faster, and with fewer intermediaries.”43

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Central surveillance is possible, but governments that aspire to con- trol information flows through control of the Internet face high costs and ultimate frustration. Rather than reinforcing centralization and bureaucracy, the new information technologies have tended to foster network organizations, new types of community, and demands for different roles for government.44

What this means is that foreign policy will not be the sole province of governments. Both individuals and private organizations, here and abroad, will be empowered to play direct roles in world politics. The spread of information will mean that power will be more widely distributed and informal networks, such as those mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, will undercut the monopoly of traditional bureaucracy. The speed of Internet time means that all governments, both here and overseas, will have less control of their agendas. Politi- cal leaders will enjoy fewer degrees of freedom before they must re- spond to events, and then will have to share the stage with more actors. Privatization and public-private partnerships will increase. As we shape our foreign policy in the information age, we will have to avoid being mesmerized by terms such as unipolarity and hegemony and by measures of strength that compare only the hard power of states run by centralized governments. The old images of sovereign states balancing and bouncing off each other like billiard balls will blind us to the new complexity of world politics.

a new world politics

The effects on central governments of the third industrial revolution are still in their early stages. Management expert Peter Drucker and the futurists Heidi Toffler and Alvin Toffler argue that the informa- tion revolution is bringing an end to the hierarchical bureaucratic organizations that typified the age of the first two industrial revolu- tions.45 In civil societies, as decentralized organizations and virtual communities develop on the Internet, they cut across territorial ju- risdictions and develop their own patterns of governance. Internet guru Esther Dyson refers to the “disintermediation of government”

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and portrays a global society of the connected being overlaid on tra- ditional local geographical communities.46

If these prophets are right, the result would be a new cyberfeudal- ism, with overlapping communities and jurisdictions laying claims to multiple layers of citizens’ identities and loyalties. In short, these transformations suggest the reversal of the modern centralized state that has dominated world politics for the past three and a half cen- turies. A medieval European might have owed equal loyalty to a local lord, a duke, a king, and the pope. A future European might owe loy- alty to Brittany, Paris, and Brussels, as well as to several cybercom- munities concerned with religion, work, and various hobbies.

While the system of sovereign states is still the dominant pattern in international relations, one can begin to discern a pattern of cross- cutting communities and governance that bears some resemblance to the situation before the Peace of Westphalia formalized the state sys- tem in 1648. Transnational contacts across political borders were typ- ical in the feudal era but gradually became constrained by the rise of centralized nation-states. Now sovereignty is changing. Three decades ago, transnational contacts were already growing, but they involved relatively small numbers of elites involved in multinational corporations, scientific groups, and academic institutions.47 Now the Internet, because of its low costs, is opening transnational communi- cations to many millions of people.

The issue of sovereignty is hotly contested in American foreign policy today. The sovereigntists, closely allied with the new unilater- alists, resist anything that seems to diminish American autonomy.48

They worry about the political role of the United Nations in limiting the use of force, the economic decisions handed down by the World Trade Organization, and efforts to develop environmental institu- tions and treaties. In their eyes, the notion of an international com- munity of opinion is illusory.

But even excluding the fringe groups that believe the United Na- tions has black helicopters ready to swoop into American territory, the debate over the fate of the sovereign state has been poorly framed. As a former UN official put it, “There is an extraordinarily impoverished mind-set at work here, one that is able to visualize

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long-term challenges to the system of states only in terms of entities that are institutionally substitutable for the state.”49 A better historical analogy is the development of markets and town life in the early feudal period. Medieval trade fairs were not substitutes for the institutions of feudal authority. They did not tear down the castle walls or remove the local lord. But they did bring new wealth, new coalitions, and new atti- tudes summarized by the maxim “Town air brings freedom.”

Medieval merchants developed the lex mercatoria, which governed their relations, largely as a private set of rules for conducting busi- ness.50 Similarly today, a range of individuals and entities, from hack- ers to large corporations, are developing the code and norms of the Internet partly outside the control of formal political institutions. The development of transnational corporate intranets behind fire- walls and encryption “represent private appropriations of a public space.”51 Private systems, such as corporate intranets or worldwide newsgroups devoted to specific issues like the environment, do not frontally challenge the governments of sovereign states; they simply add a layer of relations that sovereign states do not effectively con- trol. Americans will participate in transnational Internet communi- ties without ceasing to be loyal Americans, but their perspectives will be broader than those typical of loyal Americans before the Internet came into existence.

Or consider the shape of the world economy, in which a nation’s strength is usually measured by its imports and exports from other sovereign nations. Such trade flows and balances still matter, but the decisions on what to produce and whether to produce it at home or overseas are increasingly made within the domains of transnational corporations. Some American companies, such as Nike, produce vir- tually none of their products inside this country, though intangible (and valuable) design and marketing work is done here. In the 1990s, declining information and telecommunications costs allowed firms to broaden the geographic dispersion of their operations. Thus im- ports and exports provide a very incomplete picture of global eco- nomic linkages. For example, overseas production by American transnational corporations was more than twice the value of Ameri- can exports; sales by foreign-owned companies inside the United

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States were nearly twice the value of imports.52 Microeconomic links “have created a nonterritorial ‘region’ in the world economy— a decentered yet integrated space-of-flows, operating in real time, which exists alongside the spaces-of-places that we call national economies.”53 If we restrict our images to billiard ball states, we miss this layer of reality.

Even in the age of the Internet, the changing roles of political in- stitutions is likely to be a gradual process. After the rise of the territo- rial state, other successors to medieval rule such as the Italian city-states and the Hanseatic League persisted as viable alternatives, able to tax and fight for nearly two centuries.54 Today, the Internet rests on servers located in specific nations, and various governments’ laws affect access providers. The real issue is not the continued exis- tence of the sovereign state, but how its centrality and functions are being altered. “The reach of the state has increased in some areas but contracted in others. Rulers have recognized that their effective con- trol can be enhanced by walking away from some issues they cannot resolve.”55 All countries, including the United States, are facing a growing list of problems that are difficult to control within sovereign boundaries — financial flows, drug trade, climate change, AIDS, refugees, terrorism, cultural intrusions—to name a few. Complicat- ing the task of national governance is not the same as undermining sovereignty. Governments adapt. However, in the process of adapta- tion they change the meaning of sovereign jurisdiction, control, and the role of private actors.

Take, for example, the problems of controlling U.S. borders. In one year, 475 million people, 125 million vehicles, and 21 million import shipments come into the country at 3,700 terminals in 301 ports of entry. It takes five hours to inspect a fully loaded forty-foot shipping container, and more than 5 million enter each year. In addition, more than 2.7 million undocumented immigrants have simply walked or ridden across the Mexican and Canadian borders in recent years. As we have seen, terrorists easily slip in, and it is easier to bring in a few pounds of a deadly biological or chemical agent than to smuggle in the tons of illegal heroin and cocaine that arrive annually. The only way for the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization

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Service to cope with such flows is to reach beyond the national bor- ders through intelligence and cooperation inside the jurisdiction of other states, and to rely on private corporations to develop transpar- ent systems for tracking international commercial flows so that en- forcement officials can conduct virtual audits of inbound shipments before they arrive. Thus customs officers work throughout Latin America to assist businesses in the implementation of security pro- grams that reduce the risk of being exploited by drug smugglers, and cooperative international mechanisms are being developed for polic- ing trade flows.56 The sovereign state adapts, but in doing so it trans- forms the meaning and exclusivity of governmental jurisdiction. Legal borders do not change, but they blur in practice.

National security—the absence of threat to our major values—is changing. Damage done by climate change or imported viruses can be larger in terms of money or lives lost than the effects of some wars. But even if one frames the definition of national security more narrowly, the nature of military security is changing. As the U.S. Commission on National Security in the Twenty-first Century pointed out, the country has not been invaded by foreign armies since 1814, and the military is designed to project force and fight wars far from our shores. But the military is not well equipped to protect us against an attack on our homeland by terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction or mass disruption or even hijacked civil air- craft.57 Thus in July 2001, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, dropped from the Pentagon’s planning priorities the ability to fight two major regional conflicts and elevated homeland defense to a higher priority. But as we discovered only a few months later, mili- tary measures are not a sufficient solution to our vulnerabilities.

Today, attackers may be governments, groups, individuals, or some combination. They may be anonymous and not even come near the country. In 1998, when Washington complained about seven Moscow Internet addresses involved in the theft of Pentagon and NASA secrets, the Russian government replied that phone numbers from which the attacks originated were inoperative. We had no way of knowing whether the government had been involved or not. More than thirty nations have developed aggressive computer-warfare programs, but as

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anyone with a computer knows, any individual can also enter the game. With a few keystrokes, an anonymous source anywhere in the world might break into and disrupt the (private) power grids of American cities or the (public) emergency response systems.58 And U.S. government firewalls are not enough. Every night American software companies send work electronically to India, where soft- ware engineers can work while Americans sleep and send it back the next morning. Someone outside our borders could also embed trap- doors deep in computer code for use at a later date. Nuclear deter- rence, border patrols, and stationing troops overseas to shape regional power balances will continue to matter in the information age, but they will not be sufficient to provide national security.

Competing interpretations of sovereignty arise even in the do- main of law. Since 1945, human rights provisions have coexisted in the charter of the United Nations alongside provisions that protect the sovereignty of states. Article 2.7 says that nothing shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters within domestic jurisdic- tions. Yet the development of a global norm of antiracism and repug- nance at the South African practice of apartheid led large majorities at the UN to abridge this principle. More recently, the NATO inter- vention in Kosovo was the subject of hot debate among international lawyers, with some claiming it was illegal because it was not explicitly authorized by the UN Security Council and others arguing that it was legal under the evolving body of international humanitarian law.59 The 1998 detention of General Augusto Pinochet in Britain in response to a Spanish request for extradition based on human rights violations and crimes committed while he was president of Chile is another example of this complexity. In 2001, a magistrate in Paris tried to summon former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to testify in a trial related to Chile.

Information technology, particularly the Internet, has eased the tasks of coordination and strengthened the hand of human rights ac- tivists, but political leaders, particularly in formerly colonized coun- tries, cling to the protections that legal sovereignty provides against outside interventions. The world is likely to see these two partly con-

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tradictory bodies of international law continue to coexist for years to come, and as we shall see in chapter 5, Americans will have to wrestle with these contradictions as we decide how to promote human rights and when to intervene in conflicts for humanitarian reasons.

For many people, the national state provides a source of the politi- cal identity that is important to them. People are capable of multiple identities—family, village, ethnic group, religion, nationality, cos- mopolitan—and which predominates often depends on the context.60

At home, I am from Lexington; in Washington, I am from Massachu- setts; overseas, I am an American. In many preindustrial countries, subnational identities (tribe or clan) prevail. In some postindustrial countries, including the United States, cosmopolitan identities such as “global citizen” or “custodian of planet Earth” are beginning to emerge. Since large identities (such as nationalism) are not directly ex- perienced, they are “imagined communities” that depend very much on the effects of communication.61 It is still too early to understand the full effects of the Internet, but the shaping of identities can move in contradictory directions at the same time—up to Brussels, down to Brittany, or fixed on Paris—as circumstances dictate.

The result may be greater volatility rather than consistent move- ment in any one direction. The many-to-many and one-to-many characteristics of the Internet seem “highly conducive to the irrever- ent, egalitarian, and libertarian character of the cyber-culture.” One effect is “flash movements”—sudden surges of protest—triggered by particular issues or events, such as antiglobalization protests or the sudden rise of the anti-fuel-tax coalition that captured European politics in the autumn of 2000.62 Politics becomes more theatrical and aimed at global audiences. The Zapatista rebels in Mexico’s Chi- apas state relied less on bullets than on transnational publicity, and, of course, terrorists seek theatrical effects as well as destruction. Tele- vision is as important as weapons to them. The political scientist James Rosenau has tried to summarize such trends by inventing a new word, fragmegration, to express the idea that both integration toward larger identities and fragmentation into smaller communities can occur at the same time. But one need not alter the English language to realize

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that apparently contradictory movements can occur simultaneously. They do not spell the end of the sovereign state, but they do make its politics more volatile and less self-contained within national shells.

Private organizations also increasingly cross national boundaries. Transnational religious organizations opposed to slavery date back to 1775, and the nineteenth century saw the founding of the Socialist In- ternational, the Red Cross, peace movements, women’s suffrage orga- nizations, and the International Law Association, among others. Before World War I, there were 176 international nongovernmental organizations. In 1956, they numbered nearly a thousand; in 1970, nearly two thousand. More recently, there has been an explosion in the number of NGOs, increasing from five to approximately twenty- seven thousand during the 1990s alone. And the numbers do not tell the full story, because they represent only formally constituted orga- nizations.63 Many claim to act as a “global conscience” representing broad public interests beyond the purview of individual states, or in- terests that states are wont to ignore. They develop new norms by di- rectly pressing governments and business leaders to change policies, and indirectly by altering public perceptions of what governments and firms should be doing. In terms of power resources, these new groups rarely possess much hard power, but the information revolu- tion has greatly enhanced their soft power.64

Not only is there a great increase in the number of transnational and governmental contacts, but there has also been a change in type. Earlier transnational flows were heavily controlled by large bureau- cratic organizations such as multinational corporations or the Catholic Church that could profit from economies of scale. Such or- ganizations remain important, but the lower costs of communication in the Internet era have opened the field to loosely structured network organizations with little headquarters staff, and even individuals. These nongovernmental organizations and networks are particularly effective in penetrating states without regard to borders. Because they often involve citizens who are well placed in the domestic poli- tics of several countries, they are able to focus the attention of the media and governments on their preferred issues. The treaty ban- ning land mines, mentioned above, was the result of an interesting

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coalition of Internet-based organizations working with middle- power governments, such as Canada, and some individual politicians and celebrities, including the late Princess Diana. Environmental is- sues are another example. The role of NGOs was important as a channel of communication across delegations in the global warming discussions at Kyoto in 1997. Industry, unions, and NGOs competed in Kyoto for the attention of media from major countries in a transnational struggle over the agenda of world politics. And NGOs sometimes compete with each other for media attention. The World Economic Forum, an NGO that invites top government and business leaders to Davos, Switzerland, each winter, included some NGOs in its 2001 programs, but that did not prevent other NGOs from staging local demonstrations and yet others from holding a counterforum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, designed to garner global attention.

A different type of transnational community, the scientific com- munity of like-minded experts, is also becoming more prominent. By framing issues such as ozone depletion or global climate change, where scientific information is important, such “epistemic commu- nities” create knowledge and consensus that provide the basis for ef- fective cooperation.65 The Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion was in part the product of such work. While not entirely new, these scien- tific communities have also grown as a result of the lowered costs of communications.

Geographical communities and sovereign states will continue to play the major role in world politics for a long time to come, but they will be less self-contained and more porous. They will have to share the stage with actors who can use information to enhance their soft power and press governments directly, or indirectly by mobilizing their publics. Governments that want to see rapid development will find that they have to give up some of the barriers to information flow that historically protected officials from outside scrutiny. No longer will governments that want high levels of development be able to afford the comfort of keeping their financial and political situa- tions inside a black box, as Myanmar and North Korea have done. That form of sovereignty proves too expensive. Even large countries with hard power, such as the United States, find themselves sharing

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the stage with new actors and having more trouble controlling their borders. Cyberspace will not replace geographical space and will not abolish state sovereignty, but like the town markets in feudal times, it will coexist with them and greatly complicate what it means to be a sovereign state or a powerful country. As Americans shape foreign policy for the global information age, we will have to become more aware of the importance of the ways that information technology creates new communications, empowers individuals and nonstate actors, and increases the role of soft power.

power among states

The information revolution is making world politics more complex by enabling transnational actors and reducing control by central governments, but it is also affecting power among states. Here the United States benefits, and many poorer countries lag behind.66

While some poorer countries such as China, India, and Malaysia have made significant progress in entering the information economy, 87 percent of people online live in postindustrial societies.67 The world in the information age remains a mixture of agricultural, in- dustrial, and service-dominated economies. The postindustrial soci- eties and governments most heavily affected by the information age coexist and interact with countries thus far little affected by the in- formation revolution.

Will this digital divide persist for a long time? Decreasing costs may allow poor countries to leapfrog or skip over certain stages of development. For instance, wireless communications are already re- placing costly land lines, and voice recognition technologies can give illiterates access to computer communications. The Internet may help poor farmers better understand weather and market conditions before they plant crops, and more information may diminish the role of predatory middlemen. Distance learning and Internet connections may help isolated doctors and scientists in poor countries. But what poor countries need most is basic education and infrastructure. As an editorial in the Far East Economic Review put it succinctly: “Closing

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the digital divide would be good, but right now most of Asia’s poor are still looking forward to home electricity.”68

Technology spreads over time, and many countries are keen to de- velop their own Silicon Valleys. But it is easier to identify the virtual keys to the high-tech kingdom than to open the actual gates. Well- developed communications infrastructure, secure property rights, sound government policies, an environment that encourages new business formation, deep capital markets, and a skilled workforce, many of whom understand English (the language of 80 percent of all web pages), will come to some poor countries in time, but not quickly. Even in India, which meets some of the criteria, software companies employ about 340,000 people, while half of India’s popu- lation of one billion remains illiterate.69

The information revolution has an overall decentralizing and lev- eling effect, but will it also equalize power among nations? As it re- duces costs and barriers of entry into markets, it should reduce the power of large states and enhance the power of small states and non- state actors. But in practice, international relations are more complex than such technological determinism implies. Some aspects of the information revolution help the small, but some help the already large and powerful. There are several reasons why.

First, size still matters. What economists call barriers to entry and economies of scale remain in some of the aspects of power that are related to information. For example, soft power is strongly affected by the cultural content of what is broadcast or appears in movies and television programs. Large established entertainment industries of- ten enjoy considerable economies of scale in content production and distribution. The dominant American market share in films and tele- vision programs in world markets is a case in point. It is hard for newcomers to compete with Hollywood. Moreover, in the informa- tion economy, there are network effects, with increasing returns to scale. One telephone is useless. The second adds value, and so forth as the network grows. In other words, “to those who hath a network, shall be given.”

Second, even where it is now cheap to disseminate existing informa- tion, the collection and production of new information often requires

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major investment. In many competitive situations, it is new informa- tion that matters most. In some dimensions, information is a nonri- valrous public good: one person’s consumption does not diminish that of another. Thomas Jefferson used the analogy of a candle—if I give you a light, it does not diminish my light. But in a competitive situation, it may make a big difference if I have the light first and see things before you do. Intelligence collection is a good example. America, Russia, Britain, and France have capabilities for collection and production that dwarf those of other nations.70 Published ac- counts suggest that the United States spends some $30 billion a year on intelligence. In some commercial situations, a fast follower can do better than a first mover, but in terms of power among states, it is usu- ally better to be a first mover than a fast follower. It is ironic, but no accident, that for all the discussion of how the Internet shrinks dis- tance, information technology firms still cluster in a congested little area south of San Francisco because of what is called the “cocktail party effect.” What makes for success is informal access to new infor- mation before it becomes public. “In an industry where new technol- ogy is perpetually on the verge of obsolescence, firms must recognize demand, secure capital and bring a product to market quickly or else be beaten by a competitor.”71 Market size and proximity to competi- tors, suppliers, and customers still matter in an information economy.

Third, first movers are often the creators of the standards and ar- chitecture of information systems. As described in Robert Frost’s great poem, once the paths diverge in the wood and one is taken, it is difficult to get back to the other. Sometimes crude, low-cost tech- nologies will open shortcuts that make it possible to overtake the first mover, but in many instances the path-dependent development of information systems reflects the advantage of the first mover.72 The use of the English language and the pattern of top-level domain names on the Internet is a case in point. Partly because of the trans- formation of the American economy in the 1980s, and partly because of large investments driven by Cold War military competition, the United States was often the first mover and still enjoys a lead in the application of a wide variety of information technologies.

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Fourth, as argued in chapter 1, military power remains important in some critical domains of international relations. Information technology has some effects on the use of force that benefit the small and some that favor the already powerful. The off-the-shelf commer- cial availability of formerly costly military technologies benefits small states and nongovernmental actors and increases the vulnera- bility of large states. For example, today anyone can order from com- mercial companies inexpensive one-meter-resolution satellite images of what goes on in military bases. Commercial firms and individuals (including terrorists) can go to the Internet and get access to satellite photographs that were top-secret and cost governments billions of dollars just a few years ago.73 When a nongovernmental group felt that American policy toward North Korea was too alarmist a few years ago, it published private satellite pictures of North Korean rocket launch pads. Obviously, other countries can purchase similar pictures of American bases.

Global positioning devices that provide precise locations, once the property of the military alone, are readily available at local electronics stores. What’s more, information systems create vulnerabilities for rich states by adding lucrative targets for terrorists who engage in asymmetrical warfare. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has looked deeply into the subject, believes that “there’s a real danger that a powerful nation will believe it can create the cyberspace equiva- lent of a Pearl Harbor sneak attack. It’s conceivable in the next 25 years that a sophisticated adversary (such as a small country with cyberwar- fare resources) will decide it can blackmail the United States.”74 There is also the prospect of freelance cyberattacks. For example, after the collision between the U.S. surveillance plane and the Chinese fighter, both Chinese and American hackers engaged in a spate of attacks on both government and private web sites in each other’s countries.

Other trends, however, strengthen the already powerful. As I ar- gued in chapter 1, information technology has produced a revolution in military affairs. Space-based sensors, direct broadcasting, high- speed computers, and complex software provide the ability to gather, sort, process, transfer, and disseminate information about complex

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events that occur over a wide geographic area. This dominant battle space awareness along with precision guided weapons produces a powerful advantage. As the Gulf War showed, traditional assessments of balance-of-weapons platforms such as tanks or planes become ir- relevant unless they include the ability to integrate information with those weapons. That was the mistake that Saddam Hussein made (as well as those in Congress who predicted massive American casual- ties). Many of the relevant technologies are available in commercial markets, and weaker states can be expected to purchase many of them. The key, however, will be not possession of fancy hardware or advanced systems but the ability to integrate a “system of systems.” In this dimension, the United States is likely to keep its lead. In informa- tion warfare, a small edge makes all the difference. The revolution in military affairs will not diminish and may, in some circumstances, even increase the American lead over other countries.75

three dimensions of information

In understanding the relation of information to power in world poli- tics, it helps if one distinguishes three different dimensions of infor- mation that are sometimes lumped together.76 The first dimension is flows of data such as news or statistics. There has been a tremendous and measurable increase in the amount of information flowing across international borders. The average cost of that information has been declining, and much of it is virtually free. Declining costs and added points of access help small states and non-state actors. On the other hand, the vast scale of free flows puts a premium on the ca- pacities of editors and systems integrators, which is a benefit to the large and powerful.

A second dimension is information that is used for advantage in competitive situations. With competitive information, as mentioned above, the most important effects are often at the margin. Here going first matters most, and that usually favors the more powerful. Much competitive information is associated with commerce, but as discussed

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above, the effect of information on military power can also be thought of as a subset of competitive information.

The third dimension is strategic information—knowledge of your competitor’s game plan. Strategic information is virtually priceless. It is as old as espionage. Any country or group can hire spies, and to the extent that commercial technologies and market research provide technical capabilities that were previously available only at the cost of large investment, there is an equalizing effect. But to the extent that large investments in intelligence gathering produce more and better strategic information, the large and powerful will benefit. While it is true that fewer of the interesting intelligence questions in a post–Cold War world are secrets (which can be stolen) than myster- ies (to which no one knows the answer), large intelligence collection capabilities still provide important strategic advantages.

One of the most interesting aspects of power in relation to in- creasing flows of information is the “paradox of plenty.”77 A pleni- tude of information leads to a poverty of attention. When we are overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting us, it is hard to know what to focus on. Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable signals from white noise gain power. Editors, filters, and cue givers become more in demand, and this is a source of power for those who can tell us where to focus our attention. Power does not necessarily flow to those who can produce or withhold information. Unlike asymmetrical interdependence in trade, where power goes to those who can afford to hold back or break trade ties, power in informa- tion flows goes to those who can edit and authoritatively validate in- formation, sorting out what is both correct and important. Because of our free press, this generally benefits the United States.

Among editors and cue givers, credibility is the crucial resource and an important source of soft power. Reputation becomes even more important than in the past, and political struggles occur over the creation and destruction of credibility. Communities tend to cluster around credible cue givers, and, in turn, perceived credibility tends to reinforce communities. Internet users tend to frequent web

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sites that that provide information they find both interesting and credible. Governments compete for credibility not only with other governments but with a broad range of alternatives including news media, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, intergovern- mental organizations, and networks of scientific communities.

Thinking counterfactually, Iraq might have found it easier to have won acceptance for its view of the invasion of Kuwait as a postcolo- nial vindication, analogous to India’s 1975 capture of Goa, if CNN had framed the issue from Baghdad rather than from Atlanta (from which Saddam was portrayed as analogous to Hitler in the 1930s). Soft power allowed the United States to frame the issue. Nongovern- mental organizations can mount public relations campaigns that im- pose significant costs and alter the decisions of large corporations, as Greenpeace did in the case of Royal Dutch Shell’s disposal of its Brentspar drilling rig. The sequel is equally illustrative, for Green- peace lost credibility when it later had to admit that some of its fac- tual statements had been inaccurate.

Politics then becomes a contest of competitive credibility. Gov- ernments compete with each other and with other organizations to enhance their own credibility and weaken that of their opponents— witness the struggle between Serbia and NATO to frame the inter- pretation of events in Kosovo in 1999. Reputation has always mat- tered in world politics, but the role of credibility becomes an even more important power resource because of the deluge of free infor- mation and the “paradox of plenty” in an information age. The BBC, for example, was an important soft power resource for Britain in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Now it (and other govern- ment broadcasts) has more competitors, but to the extent that it maintains credibility in an era of white noise, its value as a power re- source may increase. As we shall see in chapter 5, if the U.S. gover- ment thought in these terms, it would invest far more than it now does in the instruments of soft power (such as information and cul- tural exchange programs) and be less likely to try to constrain the Voice of America as it did in September 2001. We would be more concerned about how the policies we follow at home and unilateral- ist foreign policies sometimes undermine our credibility.

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soft power in the global information age

One implication of the increasing importance of editors and cue givers in this global information age is that the relative importance of soft power will increase, because soft power rests on credibility. Countries that are well placed in terms of soft power do better.78

The countries that are likely to gain soft power in an information age are (1) those whose dominant culture and ideas are closer to pre- vailing global norms (which now emphasize liberalism, pluralism, and autonomy), (2) those with the most access to multiple channels of communication and thus more influence over how issues are framed, and (3) those whose credibility is enhanced by their do- mestic and international performance. These dimensions of power in an information age suggest the growing importance of soft power in the mix of power resources, and a strong advantage to the United States.

Of course, soft power is not brand-new, nor was the United States the first government to try to utilize its culture to create soft power. After its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the French government sought to repair the nation’s shattered prestige by promoting its lan- guage and literature through the Alliance Française, created in 1883. “The projection of French culture abroad thus became a significant component of French diplomacy.”79 Italy, Germany, and others soon followed suit. The advent of radio in the 1920s led many governments into the area of foreign language broadcasting, and in the 1930s, Nazi Germany perfected the propaganda film. The American government was a latecomer to the idea of using American culture for the pur- poses of diplomacy. It established a Committee on Public Informa- tion during World War I but abolished it with the return of peace. By the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration became convinced that “America’s security depended on its ability to speak to and to win the support of people in other countries.” With World War II and the Cold War, the government became more active, with official efforts such as the United States Information Agency, the Voice of America, the Fulbright program, American libraries, lectures, and other programs. But much soft power arises from societal forces outside government

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control. Even before the Cold War, “American corporate and adver- tising executives, as well as the heads of Hollywood studios, were sell- ing not only their products but also America’s culture and values, the secrets of its success, to the rest of the world.”80 Soft power is created partly by governments and partly in spite of them.

A decade ago some observers thought the close collaboration of government and industry in Japan would give it a lead in soft power in the information age. Japan could develop an ability to manipulate perceptions worldwide instantaneously and “destroy those that im- pede Japanese economic prosperity and cultural acceptance.”81 When Matsushita purchased MCA, its president said that movies critical of Japan would not be produced.82 Japanese media tried to break into world markets, and the government-owned NHK network began satellite broadcasts in English. The venture failed, however, as NHK’s reports seemed to lag behind those of commercial news organiza- tions, and the network had to rely on CNN and ABC.83 This does not mean that Japan lacks soft power. On the contrary, its pop culture has great appeal to teenagers in Asia.84 But Japan’s culture remains much more inward-oriented than that of the United States, and its government’s unwillingness to deal frankly with the history of the 1930s undercuts its soft power.

To be sure, there are areas, such as the Middle East, where ambiva- lence about American culture limits our soft power. All television in the Arab world used to be state-run until tiny Qatar allowed a new station, Al-Jazeera, to broadcast freely, and it proved wildly popular in the Middle East.85 Its uncensored images ranging from Osama bin Laden to Tony Blair had a powerful political influence after Septem- ber 2001. Bin Laden’s ability to project a Robin Hood image en- hanced his soft power with some Muslims around the globe. As an Arab journalist described the situation earlier, “Al-Jazeera has been for this intifada what CNN was to the Gulf War.”86 In fundamentalist Iran, people are ambivalent. Pirated videos are widely available, and a government ban “has only enhanced the lure of both the best and the worst of Western secular culture.”87

There are, of course, tensions even within Western secular culture that limit American soft power. In the mid-1990s, 61 percent of

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French, 45 percent of Germans, and 32 percent of Italians perceived American culture as a threat to their own. Majorities in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy thought there were too many American- made films and television programs on national TV.88 And both Canada and the European Union place restrictions on the amount of American content that can be shown.

But such attitudes reflect ambivalence rather than rejection. In the 1920s, the Germans were the cinematographic pacesetters, as were the French and the Italians in the 1950s and 1960s. India produces many more films than does Hollywood, but all the distribution chan- nels in the world couldn’t turn Indian movies into global block- busters. In the eyes of German journalist Josef Joffe, the explanation is obvious: “America has the world’s most open culture, and there- fore the world is most open to it.”89 Or as a perceptive French critic notes, “Nothing symbolizes more the triumph of American culture than the quintessential art form of the 20th century: the cinema. . . . This triumph of the individual motivated by compassion or a noble ambition is universal . . . the message is based on the openness of America and the continuing success of its multicultural society.” But he also notes that “the more the French embrace America, the more they resent it.”90 Or as a Norwegian observed, “American culture is becoming everyone’s second culture. It doesn’t necessarily supplant local traditions, but it does activate a certain cultural bilingual- ism.”91 And like many second languages, it is spoken with imperfec- tions and different meanings. The wonder, however, is that it is spoken at all.

Of course, Serbs wearing Levi’s and eating at McDonald’s not only supported repression in Kosovo, but used a Hollywood film, Wag the Dog, to mock the United States during the war. Child soldiers in Sierra Leone committed atrocities such as lopping off the hands of civilians while wearing American sports team T-shirts. Osama bin Laden despised American culture as do some of his fundamentalist sympathizers. For better or worse, the U.S. is “exciting, exotic, rich, powerful, trend-setting—the cutting edge of modernity and innova- tion.”92 Despite vulgarity, sex, and violence, “our pictures and music exalt icons of freedom, celebrating a society conducive to upward

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mobility, informality, egalitarian irreverence, and vital life-force. This exaltation has its appeals in an age when people want to partake of the good life American style, even if as political citizens, they are aware of the downside for ecology, community, and equality.”93 For example, in explaining a new movement toward using lawsuits to as- sert rights in China, a young Chinese activist explained, “We’ve seen a lot of Hollywood movies—they feature weddings, funerals and go- ing to court. So now we think it’s only natural to go to court a few times in your life.”94 At the same time, such images of a liberal society can create a backlash among conservative fundamentalists.

Ambivalence sets limits on popular culture as a source of Ameri- can soft power, and marketing by American corporations can create both attraction and resistance. As historian Walter LaFeber puts it, transnational corporations “not only change buying habits in a soci- ety, but modify the composition of the society itself. For the society that receives it, soft power can have hard effects.”95 Protest is often di- rected at McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. For better and worse, there is not much the U.S. government can do about these negative impacts of American cultural exports. Efforts to balance the scene by supporting exports of American high culture—libraries and art exhibits—are at best a useful palliative. Many aspects of soft power are more a by- product of American society than of deliberate government actions, and they may increase or decrease government power. The back- ground attraction (and repulsion) of American popular culture in different regions and among different groups may make it easier or more difficult for American officials to promote their policies. In some cases, such as Iran, American culture may produce rejection (at least for ruling elites); in others, including China, the attraction and rejection among different groups may cancel each other. In still other cases, such as Argentina, American human rights policies that were rejected by the military government of the 1970s produced consider- able soft power for the United States two decades later when those who were earlier imprisoned subsequently came to power.

The Argentine example reminds us not to exaggerate the role of popular culture and that soft power is more than just cultural power. As we saw in chapter 1, soft power rests on agenda setting as well as

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attraction, and popular culture is only one aspect of attraction (and not always that). The high cultural ideas that the United States ex- ports in the minds of the half a million foreign students who study every year in American universities, or in the minds of the Asian en- trepreneurs who return home after succeeding in Silicon Valley, are more closely related to elites with power. Most of China’s leaders have a son or daughter educated in the United States who portray a realistic view of the United States that is often at odds with the cari- catures in official Chinese propaganda.

Government polices at home and abroad can enhance or curtail our soft power. For example, in the 1950s, racial segregation at home undercut our soft power in Africa, and today, our practice of capital punishment and weak gun control laws undercut our soft power in Europe. Similarly, foreign policies strongly affect our soft power. Jimmy Carter’s human rights policies are a case in point, but so also are government efforts to promote democracy during the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Conversely, foreign policies that appear arrogant and unilateral in the eyes of others diminish our soft power, as we will explore further in chapter 5.

The soft power that is becoming more important in the informa- tion age is in part a social and economic by-product rather than solely a result of official government action. NGOs with soft power of their own can complicate and obstruct government efforts to ob- tain the outcomes it wants, and purveyors of popular culture some- times hinder government agents in achieving their objectives. But the larger long-term trends are in our favor. To the extent that official policies at home and abroad are consistent with democracy, human rights, openness, and respect for the opinions of others, the United States will benefit from the trends of this global information age, even though pockets of reaction and fundamentalism will persist and react in some countries. But there is a danger that we may obscure the deeper message of our values through arrogance and unilateral- ism. Our culture, high and low, helps produce soft power in an infor- mation age, but government actions also matter—not only through programs such as the Voice of America and Fulbright scholarships but, even more important, when our policies avoid arrogance and

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stand for values that others admire. The trends of the information age are in our favor, but only if we avoid stepping on our own message.

conclusion

A century ago, at the height of the industrial age, the great German so- ciologist Max Weber identified a monopoly on the legitimate use of force as a defining characteristic of the modern state. That still remains true, but in the information age, governments are less securely in con- trol of the major sources of power than in the past century. Large states still have overwhelming military advantages, but the spread of tech- nologies of mass destruction opens opportunities for terrorists and creates vulnerabilities in postindustrial societies. And for preindustrial societies, private armies and criminal groups in some instances have forces that can overwhelm governments.

In terms of economic power, transnational corporations operate on a scale that is larger than that of many countries. At least a dozen transnational corporations have annual sales that are larger than the gross national products of more than half the states in the world. For example, the sales of Mitsubishi are larger than the GNP of Vietnam; the sales of Shell are three times the GNP of Guatemala; those of Siemens are six times the GNP of Jamaica.96 And with soft power, while large countries such as the United States have a lead, the gov- ernment is often unable to control it. Moreover, as soft power be- comes more important in an information age, it is worth remembering that it is the domain where nongovernmental organi- zations and networks are poised to compete because it is their major power resource. The state remains sovereign, but its powers, even for the United States, are not what they once were. As two perceptive for- eign observers put it, “If the state remains at the centre of governance in the world, what has changed? In a word everything. Never have so many different nonstate actors competed for the authority and influ- ence that once belonged to the states alone.”97

What conclusions can we draw in this early phase of the global in- formation age? Predictions of the equalizing effect of the information

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and communications revolutions on the distribution of power among states are wrong. In part this is because economies of scale and barriers to entry persist in regard to commercial and strategic in- formation, and in part because with respect to free information, the larger states will often be well placed in the competition for the cred- ibility that creates soft power. Second, cheap flows of information have created an enormous change in channels of contact across state borders. Nongovernmental actors and individuals operating transna- tionally have much greater opportunities to organize and to propa- gate their views. States are more easily penetrated and less like black boxes. Our political leaders will find it more difficult to maintain a coherent ordering of foreign policy issues.

Third, the Internet is creating a new transnational domain that is superimposed on sovereign states in the same way newly created me- dieval markets were centuries ago, and it promises an equally signifi- cant evolution of attitudes and identities. Fourth, the information revolution is changing political processes in such a way that open de- mocratic societies like the United States will compete more success- fully than authoritarian states for the key power resource of credibility, but democratization will not be rapid in much of the preindustrial world. Fifth, soft power is becoming more important in relation to hard coercive power than it was in the past, as credibility becomes a key power resource for both governments and non- governmental groups. Although the United States is better placed in terms of credibility and soft power than many countries, the coher- ence of government policies is likely to diminish. Finally, geographi- cally based sovereign states will continue to structure politics in an information age, but the processes of world politics within that struc- ture are undergoing profound change. The power of the sovereign state will still matter, but it will not be what it used to be.

What this means is that many of the traditional measures of Amer- ican preeminence that we saw in chapter 1 will prove to be illusory. Talk about unipolarity and hegemony will begin to sound increas- ingly hollow. If all we had to do in a global information age was fend off new military challengers, the tasks of American foreign policy would be relatively straightforward and our hard power would suffice.

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By traditional measures, no sovereign state is likely to surpass us, and terrorists cannot defeat us. But an information revolution is posing more subtle challenges by changing the very nature of states, sover- eignty, and control—and the role of soft power. Fewer issues that we care about will prove susceptible to solution through our dominant military power. Policy makers will have to pay more attention to the politics of credibility and the importance of soft power. And they will have to share a stage crowded with newly empowered nongovern- mental actors and individuals. As we shall see in the next chapter, all this will occur in a very diverse world in which globalization is shrinking the distances that provided protection in the past.

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