This literature report will critically engage with the positions expressed in Nocetti’s article “Contest and conquest”, and Deibert’s “Authoritarianism Goes Global”. Firstly, this report will compare the stances of these two scholars on what the causes behind the movement towards nationalizing the Internet in general terms are; secondly, it will propose that both articles seem to suggest that no matter what the short-term aims behind the efforts of nationalizing the Internet are, the long-term goal of authoritarian states is to ensure their (the states’) regime stability and monopoly of influence over their respective territory; lastly, this report will closer examine the claim that by restricting, nationalizing or censoring the Internet the state preserves its sovereignty. This claim will be refuted at the end of the report.
Though many parallels and similarities can be drawn between the articles (for instance, Deibert’s distinction between countries advocating for openness of the Internet and countries that favor tighter control and its strong overlap with Nocetti’s idea that younger, less stable democracies (also non-democracies) tend to call for “sovereignification” of the Internet as opposed to established countries that act towards a more decentralized, independent cyberspace), the two works provide a contrasting view on the movement towards nationalizing parts of the internet. Nocetti’s approach and explanation of this phenomena is based largely on diplomatic relations between ‘younger’ and therefore ‘more likely to assert their sovereignty’ states on the one side of the spectrum, and ‘older’, which is to say more ‘secure in their independence’ states. According to him, younger states either want ‘to claim their slice’ of the Internet pie, or at least to protect themselves from foreign influence through this supraphysical.[1] In this way, as Nocetti concludes, the central driving force towards erecting more and more restrictions when it comes to viewing and accessing Internet content that Deibert talks about in his “four-generation” model, is the competition between countries that are essentially fighting to spread or establish their influence over the virtual land of the Internet.
Deibert’s reasoning is different: to him, the move towards nationalizing the Internet is closely related to the world-wide attempts of ensuring the security of the cyberspace in light of new, modern risks to government power such as terrorism. That, Deibert argues, creates a demand and a market for technologies allowing this greater degree of control. Those technologies, he states, more often than not have a restricting effect on the civil society. However, the issue that he points out is that countries with an established tendency of disregard towards or even abuse of human rights are much more vulnerable to the effects of this move towards greater Internet security, as the understanding of those less liberal states of what security is often stretches beyond continuity of the state and also often covers continuity of a particular government, which leads to people losing out on their right to freely express their political beliefs as those are deemed to be “dangerous”. In this way, though his initial approach might be seen as politically charged, Deibert does not place the blame onto any particular country; rather, as many scholars nowadays, he believes that the issue lies within this contemporary race towards ‘more safety’, and that nobody in particular is to blame for the mishaps that go side by side with implementing tighter and stricter security protocols.
Both articles offer another interesting perspective: no matter what the short-term motivation of regimes is that drives them towards “nationalizing” the cyberspace (be it to “de-Americanize” the Internet (Nocetti), or make it more secure (Deibert)), the long-term goal seems to be the consolidation of the regime and protection of the political status-quo by defining an ‘area’ of the Internet that coincides with a country’s national borders and ‘securing’ it, ‘colonizing’ it if you will. Deibert notes this by admitting that some states try to tighten “their grip on cyberspace within sovereign territorial boundaries…which often [has] the effect of strengthening the state”[2]. Nocetti, in turn, points out that some countries, e.g. Russia believe that in doing so they are protecting their national sovereignty.[3] Both works, therefore, point to the idea, that the states in question attempt to strengthen their regime, insure it from foreign or domestic intervention and thus avoid the regime collapse. But should this in fact be understood as an innocuous motivation of a state to preserve its sovereignty?
The understanding of the term “sovereignty” varies across disciplines, but the consensus is that “sovereignty” means “independence”. Therefore, in geopolitical sense, national sovereignty is the ability of a state to exercise its legislative, executive and judicial power over specified territory and population without any hinderances thereto.[4] In this sense, of course, the efforts in nationalizing parts of the Internet seem to be justified and in line with the idea that a country should have sole control of any medium, physical or virtual, that can potentially dwindle the extent of a country’s control over its territory.
This “power” or “control” is of course, not only political but also legal, that is to say “a recognized and effective power” to impose any sanction that the state sees fit onto the controlled territory and the population. However, this legal side of the state’s power does not originate from thin air. There are different views as to where it comes from, but the some of the voices in humanitarian science nowadays propose, in line with the classical idea, that the power to make decisions that affect the whole population of a country has been conferred onto the state by the population itself. According to the social contract theory, the people essentially came together and created a new entity on a basis of universal consensus, a “mortal god’ to rule over them for everyone’s benefit – causing the State to come into being.[5] To maintain order and ensure everyone’s safety from the capriciousness of the other, people have agreed to abandon some of their rights – namely the right to impose sanctions for wrongful behavior onto each other directly and conferred this power onto the State with the idea that it has to use it for specific purpose above – to guarantee safety from outside threats and to guarantee safety from within through law. If the State ceases to fulfill those objectives, then the contract becomes void, loses its legal power, and the people no longer have to follow the State’s commands.[6]
This shows that the source of a State’s sovereignty according to this model lies with the people. Moreover, to take this idea further, the State depends on the people’s recognition of the State, and its precise form and place on the political spectrum (autocracy, monarchy, theocracy etc.) is defined by the people too. Important is also that the people, being the ultimate source of State’s sovereignty, are free to re-invent and alter the exact form of what the State is according to political, cultural and social necessity. Unrestricted access to information, and by extension, access to the Internet, is a crucial condition that enables this process of constant analysis. When a State seeks to restrict this access, then it could be said that it seeks to establish a permanence of a certain form of itself, hindering its gradual improvement or alteration based on the needs of the population. By doing so, it goes beyond its power to preserve itself insofar as it is necessary for preservation of its population and fulfillment of its security obligations to them, and instead preserves itself for its own sake without the regard to what is best for the population. This, however, is a clear violation of the State’s power.
When seen from this perspective, if access to information and the ability to express oneself politically based on the access to that information is hindered through nationalizing parts of the Internet, then there can be no talk about a state attempting to maintain its sovereignty in its fullest sense. Indeed, its geopolitical sovereignty might remain intact, but its legal sovereignty must be considered compromised.
Report Question: In which ways do the two scholars explain the move towards nationalizing the Internet? Does nationalizing the Internet truly protect the [authoritarian] state’s sovereignty?
Cover image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan
[1] P.129, Nocetti
[2] Deibert, p.65
[3] Nocetti, p.129
[4] Definition employed (or assumed) by Nocetti, see p.111-112
[5] See Leviathan, T. Hobbes
[6] ibid
