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REGIMES, CARTELS, AND THE REMAPPING OF INFORMATION SPACE

At the turn of this century, literature on the Internet and information technology (IT) was dominated by the kind of hype and idealism historically associated with technological breakthroughs as scholars and analysts from many different disciplines and policy perspectives tried to imagine and assess the potential impact of IT's new inventions and organizational patterns. The burst of the IT investment bubble-beginning in 2000-2001 and occurring in close proximity to the events of September 11, 2001-has considerably widened the scope of the discussion about IT and has brought it down to earth. The two books reviewed here reflect a growing literature that might be conceived as second-generation studies of the IT "revolution" of the 1980s and 1990s. They are based on an accumulation of experience with the new technologies, a cascade of new studies and data from around the globe over the past few years, and the lessons of hindsight thrust upon the world as stock markets went into freefall and major population centers were forced to ponder-more intensely than ever before-an insecure future of terror and counterterror.

Media and Sovereignty is a balanced and thoughtful attempt to deal with media communications transformations, which the author neatly identifies by major landmarks: cable television three decades ago, communications satellite development in the ensuing two decades, and in the 1990s the convergence of the Internet with a number of other new technologies. Focusing on the ways that states have responded to IT and the Internet, Monroe E. Price has crafted a broad theoretical overview designed to help explain and appreciate the many complex elements of the enormous changes we are witnessing at the beginning of the 21st century. Price rejects as "naïve" the notion that information could be made to routinely move freely throughout the world without restrictions and argues convincingly that those who perceive IT as the death knell of the state "may ring too soon" (28). Instead, he analyzes "tropes of restructuring" by states, individuals, religions, corporations, and other organizations, all engaged in "an interlacing process" to restructure and "remap" global media, a process he describes as "organic, complex, yeasty, contradictory, [and often characterized by] oppressive forms of adjustment ..." (54).

The result of these "tropes of restructuring," Price argues, is redefined state power, rather than a weakening of sovereignty, and changes in the modes and practices of authority characterized most markedly by a shift away from singularly inward forms of control of the media to outward-looking, regional or multilateral approaches. National responses to the complexity of IT development include both "defensive" and "offensive" strategies as states try to protect their own national "bubbles of identity" against unwanted incursions while simultaneously considering ways to invade or alter the information space of other states. Domestically, states try to create communications cartels that include public and private interests and organizations, with the cartels being based on what Monroe calls "a market for loyalties" in which "large-scale competitors for power, in a shuffle for allegiances, use the regulation of communications to organize ... imagery and identity among themselves" (31). Price concludes that, in most cases, "those in charge of the cartel of loyalties would want to find devices to place the power of destabilizing images in what are deemed safe hands. Safe hands might be local hands, corporate hands, or transnational hands; the question would generally be whether those hands are as non threatening [to a particular regime] as possible" (39).

Media and Sovereignty sets forth and weighs several theories that might be used to explain state communications strategies, including analysis of a variety of models and metaphors as well as detailed consideration of significant influences on IT development (e.g., privatization, self-regulation, national security, and attempts to control offensive content) (Chapters 2-6). The Price book is less interested in the Internet per se than is the Kathalil/Boas volume, but is replete with detailed analyses of both national strategies and the complex web of forces and organizational capabilities that drive and influence the direction of domestic communications cartels. These include (among many others) extended discussions of the Al Jazeera satellite network, focusing on its changing roles in the mix of Middle Eastern IT politics and the ways it has forced American and European communications foreign policies to adapt to its programming, reach, and effectiveness; the intricate relationships between Canadian and U.S. communications interests, public and private; complicated efforts by the European Union (EU) to create transnational broadcasting regulation, initiated by the Television Without Frontiers Directive of 1989; "remapping" of the media laws and policies of Afghanistan after the 2002 war there; the creation and development of MED-TV, the British-based satellite service broadcasting to Kurdish populations, which has been strongly resisted by Turkey; efforts by U.S. and European communications cartels to use satellite transmission capabilities to control the "mix of voices" in Iran, Iraq, Central Asia, Kosovo, and elsewhere; Tonga's success in claiming seven valuable orbital slots that it subsequently leased to others before the ITU in 1997 modified its procedures to prevent such "warehousing of space;" encouragement by the U.S. and NATO of a "Stability Pact" for Southeastern Europe, drawing on the Royaumont Process for the elaboration of a Media Charter; the long and involved policy transformations in China and India that have resulted in these large nations developing both their own global communications space as well as ambitious communications foreign policies; and much more.

In contrast to the Price book, Open Networks, Closed Regimes does not attempt to break new ground at any complex theoretical level, nor does it generate new empirical data sets or cover the breadth of empirical data in the Price book. But the Kalathil/Boas volume is more pointedly relevant to policy makers and has a sharper focus on a particular subset of issues than is the case for Price's lengthier study. As part of an IT project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the authors of Open Networks, Closed Regimes were primarily interested in what they call "policy discourse," but they also express an interest in contributing to "scholarly debates" (5). They describe the main thread of their work as "a framework that allows for methodical thinking about limited evidence ... in the short to medium term" (3).

The unique contribution of the Kalathil/Boas work is its concentration on a specific set of authoritarian states that have had to respond to the potentially destabilizing effects of the Internet and other information technologies. Information about six of the eight states studied in depth in this volume-Cuba, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt-has not previously been collected together in one place in as much detail as it is here. The IT politics and communications policies of the remaining two states-China and Singapore-have been written about many times, from diverse perspectives, but the value of the Kalathil/Boas treatment is a format that makes possible ready comparisons of the six less frequently studied states to China and Singapore, both of which are often looked to as models for the strategies of communications cartels in authoritarian countries. The authors wisely preserve the conciseness of their argument by mentioning but not including detailed studies of other authoritarian regimes significantly involved in IT and Internet development (157).

The conclusions of the Kalathil/Boas book are (1) that the Internet does not necessarily threaten authoritarian regimes, even though (2) some types of Internet use do present challenges to authoritarian governments and could contribute to political change in the future; (3) some uses of the Internet clearly reinforce the positions of authoritarian governments, many of which proactively promote Internet activities that serve state-defined interests. These conclusions are developed and supported by relatively comparable material about the book's eight subject states, with evidentiary data being clustered around four "comprehensive categories": civil society, politics and the state, the economy, and the international sphere. On the public policy front, the authors support Catharin Dalpino's advice to foreign policy makers not to always seek complete regime change or the collapse of governments through international communications strategies, but instead to explore opportunities for "gradual, liberalizing changes in authoritarian regimes." Kalathil and Boas found, for example, that reform-minded elites in some of the countries they studied wanted to use IT and the Internet to increase transparency, reduce corruption, and make government more responsive. "What is needed," the authors argue, is "a clear-eyed realism that separates facts about the technology's potential from the froth of wishful thinking," including shifts of attention from the present-day tendency to focus on the potential of grassroots opposition to stir up discontent with authoritarian rulers to creative thinking about how Internet use can support liberalizing trends at the elite level in authoritarian regimes (153).

The policy recommendations in the Kalathil/Boas book are likely to be more acceptable to liberal democratic politicians in Europe and the U.S. than they are to the leaders and followers of other suasions. But almost all political leaders have come to realize, as Price points out, that the scale, the stakes, and the manner of proceeding with international communications policies has been dramatically altered since the Cold War, with the result that "issues of transition, stability, and control are as permeating as principles of freedom, individuality, and creativity" (197). The two books under review here will not have the final word on the destiny of communications theory or the role of the Internet in the growth or decline of authoritarianism, but both contribute substantially to the efforts of scholars and policy analysts to better understand how, in Price's words, "new media giants, new regional alliances, [and] new geopolitics, all conspire in the remapping of information space" (250).

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