The world today is a geopolitical hot mess. One source of that messiness is a lack of consensus among scholars and policymakers about the global distribution of power. Do we still live in a world of US hegemony? Is it a bipolar or multipolar world? Or are states no longer the globe’s key actors, and do we instead live in an age of “technopolarity,” where corporate titans such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and billionaire Elon Musk are the new great powers?
The academic cacophony is disturbing. Uncertainty about the distribution of power is not merely a matter of debate; when actors disagree about the distribution of power, wars can start.
Two books published last year offer divergent takes on these questions. In Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman posit that the United States still wields a considerable amount of structural power in the global system. Anu Bradford’s Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, however, argues that the surprising superpower is neither the United States nor China but the European Union.
Both books examine the exercise of power and governance in the digital sphere. Their contrasting evaluations help explain why it is so difficult for even the sharpest observers of global affairs to agree about the current state of the world—particularly when technology is involved.
Farrell and Newman’s Underground Empire builds on the pair’s pathbreaking 2019 article in International Security, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.”
In that paper, Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Newman, a professor at Georgetown University, posited that, across many economic sectors, globalisation generated a network structure that concentrated power in a few central nodes. States that controlled those nodes—such as the United States—could exercise considerable global influence.
Underground Empire reminds readers of the article’s core argument. In their introduction, the authors write, “The global economy relied on a preconstructed system of tunnels and conduits that the United States could move into and adapt, nearly as easily as if they had been custom-designed by a military engineer for that purpose. By seizing control of key intersections, the US government could secretly listen to what adversaries were saying to each other or freeze them out of the global financial system.”
Underground Empire expands far beyond this point, however. There is an interesting discussion, for one, of how the private sector helped create this centralised world and the conditions under which multinational corporations have been willing extensions of federal power: “Entrepreneur after entrepreneur discovered that the best way to turn a profit in a decentralised economy was to figure out ways to centralise parts of it again.”
Bradford’s Digital Empires similarly builds on earlier work. Bradford draws from her 2020 book, The Brussels Effect, which argues that the EU’s combination of market power and technocratic capacity made it a superpower in issue areas where Europeans preferred stringent regulatory standards.
Key discussion on regulating technology in times of geostrategic tectonic shifts with Anu Bradford on the back of her book on „Digital Empires“ - main message: tech needs to be regulated, not all regulation is beneficial but neither is all innovation -needs to chart the path pic.twitter.com/Up3VI5zIHT
— Marc Reinhardt (@MR_GlobalPS) November 29, 2023
In Digital Empires, Bradford, a professor at Columbia Law School, contends that there are three great powers when it comes to online technology—and each of them offers a different variety of digital capitalism. As she describes it, “The US has pioneered a largely market-driven model, China a state-driven model, and the EU a rights-driven model.”
These varying approaches lead to horizontal clashes between the United States, China, and the EU on regulatory and technological issues such as data privacy and content moderation. Divergent digital preferences also create vertical clashes between these governments and the tech companies supplying digital infrastructure and services. The Chinese state cowed its firms into greater compliance with government dictates; US firms have been more willing to fight the federal government on questions of data privacy.
Both Underground Empire and Digital Empires are analytically sharp and worth reading. Farrell and Newman pepper their narrative with entertaining anecdotes—such as the fact that the US National Security Agency (NSA) labelled the internet’s international choke points after ski resorts. Bradford’s book is encyclopedic in its range; her discussion of global online policy disputes on issues including antitrust and artificial intelligence is comprehensive and useful for anyone wishing to read up on the subject matter.
Comparing and contrasting the authors’ arguments—as I am about to do—elides where they are in agreement. Both Underground Empire and Digital Empires stress the importance of institutional capacity as a means that states use to exercise power; some of Bradford’s arguments resemble those that Farrell and Newman made in their 2019 book, Of Privacy and Power. The new books also suggest that the concept of technopolarity does not have legs. After reading both books, one is likely to conclude that state power will be able to pressure the private sector into compliance on core national interests.
Nonetheless, what makes these books such interesting reading is where they diverge: the sources of state power in cyberspace.
For Farrell and Newman, Washington retains considerable structural power because so much of the digital world originated in the United States. This network centrality endows the United States with the ability to surveil, influence, and—if necessary—coerce other actors across multiple realms.
At least some of this was by design: The authors write that, during the early days of the internet, “according to a former NSA employee, the US government ‘quietly encourage[d] the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches’ to make it easier to spy on the world.”
With China-US tech competition heating up, Washington has employed unconventional measures to pressure China. These include the foreign direct product rule, which allows the United States to ban the export of products from other countries if those products rely on US-made components or technology.
