The History of the International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet ed. by Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers

Abstract

Reviewed by: The History of the International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet ed. by Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers Sarah Nelson (bio) The History of the International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet Edited by Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Pp. vi + 354. Maintaining global communications networks takes a tremendous amount of work. It requires standardizing telecommunication technologies so that devices at one point in a network—whether a teleprinter, telephone, fax machine, or satellite ground station—can exchange messages with devices at any other point. It also requires a system for sharing the mutually incurred costs of communicating across national borders, using agreed-upon rate structures, set in a common currency. Since the advent of electronic communications in the mid-1800s, an international cohort of technocratic experts has gathered regularly to do this work in one of the oldest and least-studied institutions of global governance: the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This thirteen-chaptered edited volume, authored by an interdisciplinary set of scholars, is the first academic work to study the ITU from its 1860s founding to the present. Editors Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers hang these essays on the analytical hook of "technodiplomacy," which they use in three senses. First, they contend, the ITU has served as an arena of technodiplomacy, providing an institutional space to debate and build consensus around technological standardization, tariff-setting, and broader regulatory norms. But the ITU is no mere stage. The Union has also been a key actor, intervening directly in disputes over global telecom regulation. Finally, it has served as an antenna by "picking up" emerging conflicts in telecom geopolitics and resolving them through multilateral negotiation (p. 4). As a trinity of technodiplomacy, Balbi and Fickers argue, the ITU cultivated a "community of practice driven by the belief in the power of techno-scientific expertise" (pp. 2–3). The volume offers crucial insights to scholarship on the history of the geopolitics of communications. The authors distinguish three periods in the ITU's 170 years of telecom governance. First, from 1865 to 1947, the ITU developed as a Eurocentric union of industrializing and imperial nation-states, whose regulatory norms presumed public ownership over the telecommunications sector (chs. 1–3, 9). In the second period (1947–2000s), the ITU's Eurocentrism was challenged when it became a specialized agency of the United Nations, and the United States worked to make the organization more receptive to private sector interests. The third period (2000s–present) has been defined by the simultaneous rise of the internet and BRICS states, with the United States insisting that the digital age has rendered the ITU's multilateral governance model obsolete (chs. 5–6, 13). [End Page 578] This temporal frame also reveals the ITU's attempts to manage technological innovation from the mechanical and electronic to the digital era—and how it acted as a crucial producer and gatekeeper of technical knowledge. The authors show that the ITU has managed the polemics of technological standardization, in part, by siloing them within semi-independent "international consultative committees" (CCIs) for telegraphy, wireless radio, and telephony. Dominated by engineers from the world's wealthiest states, CCIs incubated the ITU's most potent operating logic: that technological questions should remain distinct from supposedly "political" or economic questions—and that the ITU's technical cooperation was superior to, and should remain insulated from, "politicized" bodies like the League of Nations or UN. This often muted critical conversations about inequality and communications sovereignty across the developing world, to the deep frustration of poorer and decolonizing states (chs. 4–5, 12). Similarly, the volume offers fascinating insights on the work and thought of engineers-cum-administrators who circulate(d) in and out of the ITU, whose deep connections to military and colonial interests imbued the ITU with a distinctly imperial orientation and a highly mutable conception of "sovereignty" (chs. 1–2, 7, 10). There are some missed opportunities. The theme of technodiplomacy, for example, develops somewhat unevenly, and the language of "arena, actor, and antenna" in some chapters appears forced. Although the authors seek to place the ITU in a transnational...