The International Materiality of Domestic Information: The Geopolitics of Newsprint During World War II and the Cold War

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, as newspapers were the most important means of communicating information about current events, Canada became the world’s leading producer of newsprint. Its neighbor, the United States, was its leading consumer and the top global newsprint consumer. European countries depended substantially on Scandinavian newsprint production, and many countries around the world lacked domestic resources to make paper. By 1940, some 60% of the newsprint used around the world crossed an international border as it moved from paper manufacturer to newspaper publisher, and more than 90% of that came from Canada. Even in peacetime, printing a newspaper in the mid-twentieth century was a geopolitical challenge. Once World War II broke out, outside of North America paper supplies were significantly constrained as import flows were disrupted. The US and the Canadians partnered to distribute newsprint around the world to papers deemed ‘friendly’ to Allied interests in Latin America, and this practice of strategically disbursing newsprint continued into the early Cold War period and extended to Europe. At the same time, the United Nations understood global newsprint shortages to be one of the primary impediments to promoting postwar democratization and development efforts, and the organization sought ways of encouraging both a more equitable global distribution of newsprint and projects that would enable countries in the Global South to manufacture paper from raw materials that were domestically available. In the World War II and Cold War era, newsprint was the material precondition for press freedom, and the US and Canada held tremendous sway over regional and local public spheres as their policymakers decided where and to whom that newsprint was to be distributed.