Technology and ‘the International’ or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Determinism

Defining Determinism

Technological determinisms are not all of a kind. ¹¹ While the concept of technological determinism seems relatively straightforward – technology causes social change – the actual nature of deterministic arguments covers a wide range of claims regarding the status of technology in society. A working definition of technological determinism is useful in clarifying the key elements and problems of determinist thought: technological determinist arguments posit that technology develops according to a single linear rationale which causes outcomes of social development. Four elements are highlighted by this definition. Firstly, an absence of human agency. Secondly, a teleological element in which technological development is intelligible as a linear process – one may read back into the history of technology a succession of steps as inventions approximate ever-more closely a socially exogenous rationale. This conceptualisation points, in turn, to a third element – a Realist ontology. Finally, there is a causal argument in which this linear development creates particular social outcomes, either immediately or over time. Of these four elements, it is the last historical-temporal aspect that is perhaps least questioned. Two broad types of technologically determinist argument are present in IR scholarship – technological instrumentalism and technological essentialism. ¹² Both share the first two aspects quite clearly, but on the question of causality, there is significant difference. We will now deal with each in turn.

The first variant, instrumentalism, is closely related to a common-sense understanding of technology. ¹³ In this conception, technology does not carry with it, as non-human physical objects, any determination that structures social outcomes. James Rosenau provides the clearest example of this tendency in IR:

It is more permissive than dismissive to argue that information technologies are essentially neutral. They do not in themselves tilt in the direction of any particular values – neither good or bad, nor left or right, nor open or closed systems. They are, rather, neutral, in the sense that their tilt is provided by people. It is people and their collectivities that infuse values into information. For better or worse, it is individuals and organizations that introduce information into political arenas and thereby render it good or bad. Accordingly, the neutrality of information technologies is permissive because it enables the democrat as well as the authoritarian to use information in whatever way he or she sees fit.

There is, in other words, some utility in starting with the premise that information and the technologies that generate and circulate it are neutral. It enables us to avoid deterministic modes of thought in which people are seen as being deprived of choice by the dictates of information technologies. Put more positively, the neutrality premise compels us to focus on human agency and how it does or does not make use of information technologies. ¹⁴

This is a ‘tool-like’ understanding of technology in which it is a mere instrument of human action. The use of a technological object does not necessarily lead to any outcome. Nuclear weapons do not restructure forms of international politics; the Internet does not lead to democracy, authoritarianism or any specific social outcome. Any given object can be used to meet any given set of ends – the means do not determine them.

Conceiving technologies as neutral and ‘tool-like’ in this manner brings with it a number of either explicit or implicit claims. Firstly, as noted, there is the claim that a given technological object does not create any specific social determinations – technology does not cause social change, human agents do. This causal claim is usefully captured in the infamous National Rifle Association (NRA) slogan ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.’ ¹⁵ Secondly, the invention of technology occurs regardless of social context. This view accords with a simple philosophical Realism in which our social context does not influence the determination of scientific or technological findings – a mind-independent world and its rationality necessitate a specific outcome. ¹⁶ A particular set of circumstances, such as substantial research and development funding, strong higher education institutions, and a critical mass of researchers, may be necessary to technological development, but this context does not influence actual scientific and technological findings. Instrumentalist accounts thereby employ a pre-Kuhnian understanding of science. To draw on a classic example from STS, the instrumentalist perspective suggests that the development of the bicycle was a result of progressive technological improvement, rather than a contested struggle over the social and moral norms the technology would realise. ¹⁷ By suggesting that means do not affect ends, instrumentalist accounts stress agency in the use of technologies but not in their design and creation. Struggles over the design of technological objects are, ultimately, irrelevant – they have no role in structuring social outcomes and are the same in any social context. Fordist technologies developed to discipline labour may be used in socialist societies without distortion or impact upon workers’ control; an Internet designed to facilitate the free flow of information may be used in illiberal societies without concern. What appears as an emphasis on human agency – the ability to use non-human objects to any end – cannot grasp our ability to make specific objects to meet specific aims.

The second variant of determinism, essentialism, is the clearest form of the determinist argument. Essentialists do not form a coherent body of thought. Differences arise between different variants of determinism according to their view of how technology develops. There is a strain of Romanticism within essentialist arguments that pushes for a rejection of the technological and a return to simpler forms of life. Associated perhaps most prominently with Heidegger, this view also resonated in the work of William Blake and the Romantics and in some variants of ecological theory, and remains a subterranean influence within certain strains of Marxist thought. ¹⁸ Essentialist understandings of technology are often wildly divergent, splitting into optimist and pessimist camps. ¹⁹ However, several characteristics of essentialist arguments are common across these varied understandings.

Technological essentialists assert that technology possesses an intrinsic character. Technological artefacts and institutions have a necessary form and develop in a linear direction as a result. Rather than being neutral in their social effects, non-human objects have an essence which impacts upon social and political relations – technology does cause social change. To draw on the NRA again, it is guns that kill people – gun possession alters social contexts and creates distinct social outcomes. ²⁰ In IR, this viewpoint is most readily apparent in the work of scholars influenced by Paul Virilio, in the literature on the offence–defence balance and in Daniel Deudney’s (impressive) historical security materialism. ²¹ Understanding technological development as autonomous, as outside human control, is pervasive in essentialist accounts. Human beings may seek to modify the impact of technological objects, to restrain their negative outcomes, but if technology is to be used, then it can only be used in one manner and for one purpose – the purpose inherent in the objects themselves.

Theorists of technological essentialism have often sought to apply their arguments at a broad, overarching level of social development. In these accounts – typified by G.A. Cohen’s Marxist technological determinism ²² – technology is the driving force behind the totality of human history. Claims of this kind are justifiably subject to criticism. They neglect the role of human agency in creating technological objects, obscure the intensely political struggle over design decisions and impose a Whiggish linearity upon a deeply fractured historical development of technology. For these reasons, a return to a traditional technological essentialism is foreclosed.

If there is a central element uniting essentialist and instrumentalist conceptions of technological determinism, it is the excising of human agency. In both accounts, agency is either handed over to non-human objects as the driving force behind social change or is excluded from a role in the human labour process itself. Technological development thereby occurs without relevant human input. This denial of agency in making and creating the social world – including considerations of science and technology as social practices – have been the main target of critical reaction to these currents of thought. Sally Wyatt notes that: ‘One of the problems with technological determinism is that it leaves no space for human choice or intervention and, moreover, absolves us from responsibility for the technologies we make and use.’ ²³ The concept of power, fundamental to any account of international politics, is in danger of being excluded in our considerations of how social actors physically make global politics. This account of agency is inadequate, as has been demonstrated comprehensively by STS and increasingly within IR.

Developing Determinist Insights

Despite the opprobrium heaped upon essentialist accounts of technological change, essentialist perspectives are more rigorous and defensible than their instrumentalist counterparts. There remains at the core of the essentialist position a central insight – that non-human objects do structure the social world and do mediate the potential forms that human social interactions may take. Technological artefacts do have biases that determine – in the sense of structuring processes – how human beings relate to each other and to nature. ²⁴ Grasping this process is central to understanding historical development. Moreover, acknowledging the central insight of essentialism does not require abandoning the insights of social constructionism, although it does require a minimal philosophical Realism. Essentialism has the benefit of emphasising the material context of ideational phenomena, stressing the role of material objects and institutions in shaping what we think about the world, and how we do so. These accounts foreground social being in determining social consciousness, the manner in which human beings remake their natures through a labour process mediated by technology. ²⁵ This material aspect of human sociality is key to any account of social development.

It is not that technology develops outside of human agency, but that it develops outside of some humans’ agencies. The ability to control technological design and development is a significant facet of social power relations. While not phrased in precisely these terms, the debate around the relationship between democracy and science revolves regarding the issue of asymmetric structures of power and the determinations that some social actors can thereby impose upon others. In this way, technological determinism does exist, and the forces of social change for less powerful agents may indeed be technologies over which they exhibit no control. For most people, our daily encounters with the Internet occur without any input into how they should take place, whatever our feelings about the free flow of information. If we drive, we do so in a carbon-intensive manner, even if we would like to use green but impracticable forms of individual automotive transportation. Work is structured by the forces of production developed and designed to meet the interests of their owners. ²⁶ This asymmetry, present within a given society, is amplified and intensified when it occurs internationally, among different political communities.

Just as technological determinism varies according to which set of actors the analyst identifies as ‘determined’, it also varies according to the complexity of the technological object undergoing a process of diffusion. Less complex objects exert less deterministic pressures upon societies; more complex objects exert greater determination. ²⁷ For example, prisons are highly determining, biased technological institutions. Their barbed wire, gates, fences, towers, gun emplacements, concrete walls, cells and searchlights make prisons suitable for detaining people and not very much else. These are strongly biased technological institutions. Barbed wire, however, is a relatively simple object that, on its own, does little to determine social outcomes in any specific direction. It may be used to fence in people, to protect cattle, to secure military positions or to be tied around the mic stand of a Scandinavian death metal band. The simpler elements of the prison thus exhibit greater malleability than the complex institution. Ambivalence, and the opportunity for agents to exploit it, fades according to the level of technological complexity. Technological institutions are thereby best conceived as ‘biased but ambivalent’, alerting us to the causally determining qualities of technology, yet also pointing towards the ever-present potential for change.

Three steps are involved in reconceptualising determinism, outlined in increasing order of importance. Firstly, it is vital to recapture the sense of social development as process in order to avoid the pitfalls of the essentialist position. While essentialism is important in highlighting the very real bias that technological institutions carry, essentialists tend to view the imposition of these determinations as a once-and-for-all, singular event. This is, of course, not the case. The process of technological development involves the initial identification of a social problem requiring a technological solution, the politically contested development and design of a given object to solve a given problem, and the practice of technological closure by which an object is discursively narrated as a fitting solution to an – equally narrated – problem. It is vital to note this precisely as a politically contested process, and one that cannot be fully closed due to the necessary ambivalence of technological objects. ²⁸ Furthermore, the politically contested nature of this technological development and design is embedded within structured relations of social power, and is a ‘battlefield of struggle’ in its own right. ²⁹ Technological institutions are continually maintained and recreated by actors. Even objects as saturated with deterministic qualities as nuclear weapons require continual attention for their reproduction. Benjamin Sims and Christopher R. Henke illustrate this process in a fascinating account of US attempts to maintain nuclear capabilities and credibility after the Cold War. They note that ‘sociotechnical systems and institutions, just like conversations, are dynamic processes that must remain under constant repair in order to maintain their coherence and boundaries’. ³⁰ Constant maintenance requires significant effort, both discursively and in time and money. The causal determinations of technology are thereby maintained by settled social relations, and in the absence of human intervention, they would decay. A focus on process draws our eye to the practical nature of technological reproduction. This is characteristic of the history of science in general, as the development of science results in the loss of certain forms of scientific understanding entirely. ³¹ In this light, the claim to technological determinism as path-dependency neglects the everyday reproduction of non-human objects.

Secondly, we need to emphasise the social, political and historical context when detailing the design, development and diffusion of technological artefacts. Popular understanding of the brilliant inventor – typified in the imagination by Thomas Edison – abstracts from this context, often with pernicious results. ³² Even when historians of technology stress the centrality of lone inventors to the process of technological creation, they necessarily place these inventors within the wider social, political and economic context that allowed their work to proceed. Thomas Hughes, for example, in his history of American technology from the late 1870s, details not only Edison’s or Tesla’s flashes of inspiration, but also the mundane tasks of securing adequate funding and laboratory space and forging strong working relationships. ³³ These form parts of the process of technological development and its socially, often nationally, embedded character. It is important to note that contextualisation should be historical and spatial.

The third, and most important, aspect of this reconceptualisation relates to the spatial dimensions of technological determinism. Most accounts of the determining impact of technology are concerned with its impact upon ‘society’ in the singular. The resulting notion of technological determinism is thereby only temporal in nature. That is, technologies are invented that structure human societies through time, but the differential impact of technologies across space is neglected. Conceptually, theorisations of this sort occlude a consideration of ‘the International’. As a result, the processes by which technological diffusion between societies that co exist in time but are politically differentiated cannot be taken into account theoretically. This crucial area of sociological development, empirically detailed time and time again, must be theoretically re-embedded in order to account for the specific processes that generate this pattern. It is to this task that we now turn. ³⁴

The Differentiation of International Society: Technology and Systemic Change

This section will examine the work of Geoffrey Herrera and Stefan Fritsch in an effort to outline the features of a systemic approach to the politics of technology in IR. ³⁵ Fritsch and Herrera offer strong insights into the politics of technology in IR. Moving beyond traditional conceptions of materialism and beginning an engagement with the sociology of technology, they contribute to the ongoing sociological development of the field, and significantly advance the project of integrating STS with IR. While these strengths are to be applauded, both authors also reproduce some of the conceptual apparatus of essentialist determinism. This occurs due to the referent object of their study of (socially constructed) technological determinations – the international system – and their subsequent conceptualisation of technological bias as functioning temporally, but not spatially, via the concepts of path-dependence and ‘momentum’. The result is a presentation of technological determinism within ‘the International’ that cannot capture its specific characteristics. This section will first examine the conceptual roots of this approach in the work of Barry Buzan and Richard Little’s English School, before turning to Herrera and Fritsch’s marriage of SCOT approaches to this system-centric approach.

Herrera and Fritsch locate their work as a development of Barry Buzan’s understanding of interaction capacity and differentiation, cultivated from Durkheim via an engagement with Kenneth Waltz. ³⁶ In this understanding, technologies of communication operate to increase the interaction capacity of the international system. Buzan and his co-authors offer a relatively clear conception of essentialist technological determinism – they stress that information, communication and transportation technologies cause change in international systems by altering interaction capacity. Buzan and Little state, ‘Although command of these technologies is unquestionably an element of unit power, their availability quickly transforms conditions of interaction for all units, and therefore transforms the system itself.’ ³⁷ Physical technologies are ‘part of the foundational conditions that determine how the system operates’. ³⁸ Buzan and Albert assert that population pressures and technological capacities lead to the increased functional differentiation of the international system, and that the dynamic density these create is the driver of international change. ³⁹ They make this claim quite clearly: ‘The ideas from sociology and anthropology discussed earlier about the interplay of population growth and technological innovation within environmental constraints as the “primary engine” for the evolution of social forms, look like a good place to start such thinking.’ ⁴⁰ Aside from problems with the Malthusian account of historical development, this is an ahistorical and apolitical understanding of technological development and change. ⁴¹ This view of technology is quite explicitly evolutionary in nature within an overall argument focused on the nature of systemic change. At this level, the actual decision-making processes that lead to technology either enhancing or retarding forms of interaction capacity or functional differentiation are lost, as is agency. Certain technological institutions, such as the Internet or ICBMs, do indeed have the effects that Buzan and Albert attribute to them. But we need to recognise that these effects are the outcome of politically contested processes occurring over time. ⁴² Buzan and Little acknowledge an uneven distribution of technological objects and capabilities. They assert that:

there can be no doubt that the international system is marked by quite extreme uneven development in interaction capacity as in many other spheres of life. Both physically and socially, the global system was made by a small number of leading states … interaction capacity remains very uneven, as do the flows of action that rest on it. ⁴³

Yet this understanding sits in tension with their essentialist arguments centred upon interaction capacity. The possession of high technology seems to benefit advanced states in their interaction with other states due to its simple possession. That is, the fact that one state has steamships and another does not works to the advantage of the leading state. Once these artefacts – tool-like in their conceptualisation as state possessions – diffuse throughout the system, the system changes. Such an understanding of the power of technology as a material capability is consistent with this refurbished structural Realism, but does not capture the diffusion of technology in its full complexity. Missing is an account of how the process of technological diffusion structures forms of social development within societies via relations between them.

Importantly, Herrera and Fritsch challenge the ahistorical conceptualisation of technological development employed by Buzan, Little and Albert. They stress the political nature of technological design and development and the subsequent impact these technologies have on the international system, drawing upon the work of Thomas Hughes to formulate their arguments regarding the centrality of technology to global politics. Two of Hughes’s central concepts are employed: the notion of a sociotechnical system and the idea of technological momentum. Herrera notes that sociotechnical systems are ‘the mix of material and social institutions that cohere around artifacts’, which includes not only non-human objects, but also operators, interest groups, institutions, rules and procedures which enable the non-human to function. ⁴⁴ Technological momentum results from the maturation of these sociotechnical systems. Herrera argues that:

This process follows the famous ‘S’ curve long used by economists, sociologists, and cultural historians to map the spread of new products, technologies, and social and cultural trends and behaviors. ⁴⁵

This leads to particular causal outcomes:

As systems mature and spread, the situation shifts and a mature sociotechnical system stands, as far as social actors are concerned, as an independent causal force. The spread of the technology has created facts on the ground: groups with an interest in the perpetuation of a particular sociotechnical system, and ‘sunk costs’ –investments that make switching to an alternative system unpalatably expensive. ⁴⁶

Thus ‘momentum’ creates the deterministic quality of technology internationally, distinct from social actors and processes. Sociotechnical systems thereby structure the international system through altering the interaction capacity of the system, but not to the exclusion of systemic change. Change occurs through the development, diffusion and decline contained in the technological life cycle. In contrast to static accounts of the international system or the rump materialism of mainstream constructivism, ⁴⁷ Herrera and Fritsch are able to incorporate the politics of technology within their approach to IR.

Fritsch, in his overall accurate criticism of Liberal positions, notes Liberals have a tendency for ‘underestimating the reciprocity between technology and the global system’. ⁴⁸ An understanding of ‘reciprocity’ suggests interaction between two separate and distinct objects. This sits uneasily both with Hughes’s understanding of a ‘sociotechnical’ system and with a focus upon the international system as the object of study. Discussing the relevance of Hughes’s work in relation to weapons, communication and energy systems, Fritsch asserts:

Their distinct qualities, such as their network character, their tendency to diffuse globally over time, their vital backbone function in global economics, security, and culture, and particularly their impact on time-space compression in global social relations make them so relevant for any in-depth exploration of the mutual relationship between technology and global affairs. ⁴⁹

Here Fritsch reintroduces a separation between the technological and the social. The agential language used to refer to technology is telling, granting technology status as an actor rather than an object. Effects of technological systems are outlined, most notably ‘time-space compression’, which are currently undergoing processes of intense political contestation ⁵⁰ (if indeed these effects exist at all). ⁵¹ Technologies are given ‘life cycles’ as ontological properties, rather than embedded in processes that continually reproduce this dynamic. ⁵² The maturation of technologies, their ‘momentum’, creates a path-dependency which thereby structures social outcomes. ⁵³ This argument results in a concept of technological systems ‘evolving’, a biological metaphor that is problematic. If an evolutionary argument is to be made, it must rely on some kind of feedback mechanism akin to natural selection in order to account for the direction of evolutionary changes. ⁵⁴ In the context of the social sciences, this functionalist argument is generally taken to mean that social systems reproduce themselves in the absence of human intention, as in Waltzian neo-Realism, but not absent human activity. The separation between technological ‘evolution’ and social processes breaks down once we consider how social action generates this selection dynamic, how momentum is the outcome of human action, intentional or not. An understanding of technology as evolving – in a biological sense – displaces the ongoing process of technological reproduction noted above.

Herrera and Fritsch employ a form of soft essentialism, in which technological processes follow a specific path even if the content of the non-human objects themselves varies. Noting that social constructionists have been criticised for being ‘unable to deliver convincing answers to the question of how technology then could be meaningfully distinguished from other social phenomena’, Fritsch’s argument denies one of the central insights of STS, that technology cannot be distinguished from other social phenomena. Arguing for technology as distinct due to its path-dependent qualities rests upon ontological claims that technological objects possess uniquely durable properties. While common sense may suggest that technological objects are particularly path dependent, the role of ideas as ‘material forces’ and their tremendous endurance, and evolution, over time suggest this quality is not exclusive. ⁵⁵ Gramsci, for instance, expended significant effort tracing the endurance and revision of Catholic doctrine in a modernising Italy; ⁵⁶ socialism as an ideal has endured when the material circumstances that gave rise to it have long passed; and the substantial constructivist literature in IR systematically captures the centrality of enduring cultural and ideational phenomena in social life. ⁵⁷ The quality of endurance alone does not necessarily distinguish technology’s character as social phenomena.

Fritsch’s and Herrera’s arguments are based upon an understanding of technological path-dependency – the momentum of technology causes social change – as occurring within a single bounded social entity: the international system. This understanding is a temporal dimension of technological determination, not a spatial one. Technology determines human social development through time, but not through the interaction of differently located and developed political communities unless conceived as a tool. Instead, these interactions are determined by technology as a feature of the systemic environment. ⁵⁸ It is this missing spatial element of technological determinism that is at the core of its possible recapture as a valid concept within the social sciences. There is a form of determinism generated by sociological processes of development that we must take into account, but the blend of STS and systemic explanation cannot, in the end, reach that aim.

Uneven and Combined Determinism

In order to rescue the insights of a determinist perspective – the sense that technology can and does cause social change – we need to reconfigure its conceptual boundaries. As noted, this requires: firstly, sensitivity to technological development as a historical process; secondly, remaining conscious of the context in which technological objects are developed and their resultant biases; and, thirdly, an introduction of spatial coordinates to overcome a purely temporal understanding of deterministic arguments. The first two considerations are present in much work in STS – that the impact of technological institutions must be maintained in order to operate, and that non-human objects are material condensations of social relations. Technological determinations are thus extensions of human agents and not exogenous to human sociality in toto, while remaining exogenous to specific human agencies at specific times and places. Introducing the third element is necessary to internationalise the concept via a consideration of how the presence of multiple, coexisting, differentially developed political communities created, and are created by, their encounters with the non-human. This is best achieved through locating technological determinism within the processes of U&CD.

The fundamental starting points of the concept of U&CD are concisely laid out by Justin Rosenberg:

One need not accept all of these suppositions – and I remain somewhat agnostic towards some of them – to recognise that the presence of uneven tempos of social development between different societies may generate either the geopolitical pressure or the process of social emulation that leads to the adoption of advanced technologies from leading states. ⁶⁰ There are two aspects to the process of diffusion: firstly, there are the mechanisms that generate the spread of technological objects internationally, such as the expansion of capitalism, through trade or the transnationalisation of production; and, secondly, there are the processes that generate ‘take-up’ of new technological objects, such as the fear, and emulation, that international security competition can engender, or cultural receptivity to, or rejection of, new technologies. In a sense the ‘whip’ metaphor is slightly misleading, in that it strongly emphasises the coercive, rather than often cooperative, nature of international interactions. ⁶¹ I agree with Jamie Allinson and Alexander Anievas on the need to outline the social property relations of given societies in order to analyse the concrete determinations of U&CD in any specific instance. The important point to grasp for our purposes, however, is that the very presence of ‘the International’ – the presence of multiple political communities with distinct social relations, cultural values and a desire for autonomy – creates the space for technological determinism to exist.

While unevenness exists within all social formations, this does not lend itself to forms of ‘combination’, and thereby lacks the second crucial element of U&CD, often overlooked in some formulations of the concept. ⁶² This process cannot be understood as purely structural. An incorporation of subjectivity – how ‘advanced’ societies and ‘backward’ societies understand their conditions and relationships – is vital to completing the picture of both U&CD and the centrality of technological determinism to it. Absent in some recent work on U&CD, ⁶³ the role of subjectivity has often been noted as central to processes of unevenness through studies on nationalism, political theory and technological objects themselves. ⁶⁴ Subjective understandings of what a technology is, why it should be adopted or rejected its relationship to norms of civilisation, progress, power and wealth all form a key element structuring the reception and subsequent impact of technology in a new social context, beyond issues of capacity alone. ⁶⁵ Michael Adas notes the importance of such norms to Western practices of colonialism in the early 20th century:

Roosevelt did not categorize the Mexicans, much less the Spanish and the French, with the Indians as savages. But he defended U.S. annexations of their territories or military repulses of their imperial initiatives on the grounds that America’s superior technical acumen, entrepreneurial skills, and energetic laborers would develop the western regions for the benefit of all humankind. ⁶⁶

The design and development choices of ‘advanced’ societies are equally informed by their relationship to ‘backward’ states. ⁶⁷ In this sense the relativism of constructionist perspectives within STS is retained – again, not in contrast to a minimal Realism – as the varied social and political contexts of a technology’s development and reception are stressed. ⁶⁸ Nor is this claim Eurocentric in nature. Hobson has amply demonstrated this in his account of the development of Western Europe through its encounter with the advanced civilisations of China and the Near East. ⁶⁹ Combination draws our eye to the active agency of ‘receptive’ states and their ability to alter technological institutions, even if this process is often circumscribed. ⁷⁰ Colonial encounters often transmitted ‘indigenous’ forms of knowledge back to the metropole to be duly categorised, appropriated and retransmitted. Here, a distinction is necessary to avoid confusion: the forms of knowledge embodied in technology are not necessarily produced by the designers and developers of that technology.

When Trotsky analysed the course of the Russian revolution in his work of 1930, he produced a clear statement of inter-societal technological determinism within the context of his broader understanding of U&CD. Trotsky argued:

Savages [sic] throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. The European colonists in America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England was made possible by the very backwardness of their capitalist development.… The development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process. Their development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character. ⁷¹

Asserting the presence of an ‘advantage of backwardness’, Trotsky notes the process by which technological artefacts structure the form of social development for late-developing societies. While an ‘advantage’ to this process is at least questionable (and remarkably understudied), ⁷² nevertheless, there is an indication in this passage that the introduction of technological objects produced to meet the aims and goals of a given society will create definite social and economic impacts once introduced into a different social context.

With these ground-clearing processes in place, the status of technology, a rehabilitated understanding of technological determinism and ‘the International’ begin to come into clearer focus. Generated by the historical processes of U&CD, technological objects diffuse throughout the international system. As these objects are encountered in social contexts distinct from their initial arena of design and development, the physically embodied norms and values of a technology cause social change, enacted in the process of combination. This occurs independently of social actors, rupturing coherent sociotechnical systems, by effectively introducing an exogenous and external encounter between a given technology and the political community seeking to adopt it. ⁷³ It is in this sense that U&CD creates technological determinism – again, conceived as setting limits and exerting pressure. This causal determination, enacted as combination, occurs independently of the subjective orientation towards the technological institution imported. When the social context is radically different, the new technological institutions may disrupt forms of social development over the longer term. Sidney Pollard notes the distinction between these different forms of combination in ‘Inner Europe’ and ‘Outer Europe’ over the course of the 19th century. ⁷⁴ German society, for example, was much closer in type and orientation to the source of advanced technology, Britain. Technological development remained difficult in Germany, often failing initially, ⁷⁵ but the disruption caused by new technology – such as railways and machine production – paled in comparison to that brought about by its implementation in backward Russia. Russian social development was substantially altered through the combination of advanced technology and backward social relations. The peculiar fusion of the most advanced technological objects and extensive underdevelopment created conditions for revolution and for the distortion of Soviet socialist development, pursued through the use of American Taylorist technologies. ⁷⁶

Where social property relations and cultural attitudes have undergone alteration prior to importing new technologies, this process may be less pronounced – and less immediately apparent to the analyst – yet still operative. Kenkichiro Koizumi charts these processes in relation to pre- and post-1945 Japanese reception of Western technology. ⁷⁷ As Koizumi notes: ‘A clear consensus formed [post-1945] that survival depended ultimately on the development of significant exports, a goal that in turn entailed the manufacture of cheap, good quality products.’ ⁷⁸ This cultural shift – linked, as Koizumi notes, to altered social property relations – was intimately related to the spread of technologies copied from the US both prior to and after the war. ⁷⁹ Kazo Wada and Takao Shiba argue that the Japanese production system:

evolved through efforts to catch up with, or to learn, imitate, and modify American methods before the Second World War. After the war, the fact that the country was defeated and occupied by the American forces led the Japanese to appreciate Detroit’s mass production system all the more. Even if the Japanese production system had seemed to be completely different from the American one, it evolved under the strong influence of US methods. ⁸⁰

The development of manufacturing industry and its commodities, typified by washing machines and televisions, in turn generated significant cultural reconfigurations. The resulting combination of externally developed technological institutions, initially diffused through processes of emulation, created a unique social form and uniquely saturated objects in Japan.

Actors confront technologies as determining forces – and thus as a form of power outside of their control which structures their choices according to its norms and rules – contemporaneously with their development, and not merely temporally. Different power capabilities, structured by social property relations, establish how the determining qualities of a technology will be produced and which values will congeal in its rules and norms. The technological institutions embodying these norms exercise a form of institutional power between societies – the power of actor A, the creator of a technological institution, to structure actor B’s social development at a distance. ⁸¹ This applies not simply to the material costs of building a new technology, but also to the social forms and communal identities that will take shape around these objects. In this understanding, the power of technology qua non-human object to cause social change is clearest, and it highlights the practical, moral and evaluative dimensions of the relationship between technology and social change in global politics. ⁸² Combination is not part of an evolutionary process, but a highly disruptive, contemporaneous technological mediation between the advanced and the backward. The ‘peculiar combination’ Trotsky highlights is not merely the texture of ‘the International’ aspect of social development – it is an encounter between the hegemonic and the subaltern taking place via the technological determinism produced by ‘the International’.

Conclusion

This argument gives us a closer insight into how technological determinism operates as a form of institutional power in international politics. What is required is to ‘internationalise’ the concept of technological determinism. A rehabilitated concept of technological determinism – no longer linear or containing an essential rationality – highlights the moment of exogeneity and independence of technology within uneven and combined development. A determinist process is at work in the course of social development, and it is constituted by the presence of multiple political communities. Technological institutions – with norms, rules and decision-making procedures – exercise a specific type of determinism in the context of ‘the International’. As actors engage and grapple with the institutional power of technology, they must either adapt their internal social relations or adapt the technology itself. The manner in which these predicaments are resolved alters the social development of a given political community and, in turn, alters the character of the international system. Systemic change is related to technological development, but at a lower level of abstraction than is commonly outlined. With these concepts in play, the power relations between advanced and backward states are clarified. This concept of power may cast new light on the problem of hegemonic transitions, the international political economy of development, and considerations of how IR conceptualises power in its multiple forms.

If the potential benefits of an ‘uneven and combined’ conceptualisation of technology as a form of institutional power are evident in IR, the extension of this approach to the conceptual underpinnings of STS is potentially promising. There is scope for considering the crucial role of international politics in constituting a global technological order, particularly regarding the politics of international standards, and the manner in which technological ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is inflected by strategic state interactions. Issues surrounding the democratisation of technological development take on an entirely different dimension in the context of global politics. Finally, the process of technological closure, reliant upon shared social norms, may look significantly different within an international society characterised by pluralism, a pluralism itself generated by the processes of U&CD. These considerations suggest that the relationship between U&CD, technological determinism and STS, while in its earliest stages, provides ample scope for further development.