Networking Empire: International Organizations, American Power, and the Struggle over Global Communications in the 20th Century

Abstract

“Information freedom” is a powerful discourse in the 21st century. Its invocation often trades in the sense that information “wants to be free”: that the unrestrained flow of information across borders inherently facilitates freedom of speech, liberal marketplaces of goods and ideas, and democratic self-expression. But this idea has a long and fraught history. Between the late 19th and late 20th centuries, “information freedom” was freighted with all manner of ambitions for how news and communication should travel between people and nations, in a world overwrought by the interests of industrializing empires. These debates over information freedom transformed how news and other communication moved in the world. And, I argue, they became referenda on what it meant to govern globally, spurring new standards of sovereignty and norms of international governance during decolonization and Cold War. To excavate the contentious parameters of information freedom across the 20th century, the dissertation follows a variety of interest groups as they made claims on international communications governance in the 20th century, including international press professionals, telecommunications engineers, state officials, and social scientists. I trace the debates they waged and policy regimes they created across four overlapping periods: the successive remaking of the International Telecommunication Union between 1865 and 1947; the United Nation’s attempts to enshrine a human right to information freedom in the 1940s and ‘50s; ITU and Unesco debates over the use of satellite communications for media development in the 1960s; and the Non-Aligned Movement’s campaign for a “New World Information Order” in the 1970s and ‘80s. Throughout, I argue, information freedom remained a deeply and perpetually contested political goal, caught at the center of broader debates over the exercise of imperial power, the jurisdictions of international governance, and the anticolonial fight for economic equity and national sovereignty. By recovering debates over what freedom of information meant, and what regulatory orders could be made in its name, this dissertation aims to demystify a century’s worth of telecom governance in the service of the world’s wealthiest states, and to reinvigorate questions of how to govern communication technologies in a way that amplifies democratic self-determination and diminishes global information inequality.