Telecommunications, Politics, Economics, and National Sovereignty: A New Game

TECHNOLOGY—the societal process for the pro duction and operation of artifacts, both tangible and intangible—impacts virtually every other so­ cietal structure and process and is, in turn, influenced by them. From its inception at the early emergence of humans as a distinct species, technology was the in­ strument that extended our biological capabilities, eventually making possible increasingly large human aggregates. The emergence of a complex sociotechnological system, the polis (a Greek word for city-state), gave its name to the process we call poli­ tics. The polis was a territorial entity, and politics to this day remains eminently a territorial phenomenon. In the words of the late Speaker of the House Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, “all politics is local” as it is wed­ ded to the people living in a given geographical region.1 So is sovereignty itself—the phenomenon defining the sphere of power of an entity, whether it be a polis, a nation, or an empire, or whether it be politi­ cally democratic or not. Economics, as an emanation of the polis, also can be viewed as having a territorial substratum. In its broad acception of consideration of costs and returns, however, it becomes a nonterritorial abstraction. Political power and economic power may operate over the same territory (as in the now rare case of iso­ lated economies) but, more often, their domains do not coincide. The direct or indirect agent of the divergence is technology, the very process that created them and now makes possible global markets, which cross fron­ tiers. When the domains of political and economic pow­ ers diverge, inevitably some elements of political ter­ ritorial sovereignty are lost, while purely economic communities almost inevitably tend to acquire politi­ cal power that carries with it some elements of sover­ eignty. Today we are at a very critical moment when technology has greatly accelerated this divergence. Given human nature, it was inevitable that tech­ nology, by its ability to dramatically extend our capa­ bilities, would create an inexhaustible demand for ever greater and more powerful extensions—whatever their purpose—with enormous impacts on politics, econom­ ics, and other social processes. In 1957 the first artificial satellites, circling way above any state’s ability to capture or destroy them, forced states to officially concede limits to the exten­ sion of their sovereignty in the vertical dimension—a sovereignty that was held to be limitless until then.