How about that techno-democratic coalition?
Europe’s recoil from US tech as a sign of the geo-technological times
In Foreign Affairs,
and Abraham Newman argue that large US tech firms, by throwing in their lot with Trump, stand to lose out in Europe’s large and profitable market as the region gets less and less comfortable relying on the United States. They note that the politicization of Ukraine’s access to Starlink, not to mention overt US hostility to NATO, is leading Europeans to consider developing an independent satellite connectivity service. In the platform economy, they anticipate the Rube Goldberg machine of assurances that allow data to legally flow between Europe and the United States might break down, barring US platforms and cloud providers from Europe or, at minimum, requiring expensive and still legally tenuous reengineering of their systems.They frame the essay in a way that pushes my buttons, arguing this “may mark the end of the dream of a global Internet, in which everyone shares the same services.” The Internet, of course, is a constellation of computer systems connected by specific protocols—not the dominance of specific companies. As they acknowledge, there can still be a global Internet without satisfying a CEO’s dream of global revenue and market share. This pet peeve of mine aside, they describe well a shift among CEOs from portraying their dream in terms of the liberating power of technology to embracing geopolitical competition or nationalism.
Reading the essay made me think of another dream under threat.
The dream of a coalition of techno-democracies
Mainly during the Biden era, strategists advocated for a coalition of techno-democracies to counterbalance China and a potential bloc of techno-autocracies. At Foreign Affairs in 2021, Justin Sherman and I wrote skeptically of this idea and in support of a techno-globalism we already believed was under threat: “Embracing a trend toward politically delineated technological ecosystems,” we wrote, “will undermine the open ethos that fuels and benefits freer societies—and bolster the top-down, controlling ethos favored by repressive regimes.” We rather idealistically (dreamily?) argued that the global reach of US firms led to a global responsibility: “Cyber-utopians once dreamed of liberation spreading from an Ethernet cable; now Washington must ensure that its companies don’t spread exploitation and insecurity instead.” In our view, the US government needed to rein in its own tech firms in alignment with democracy and human rights to avoid bad outcomes both at home and abroad. The context would be inescapably global.
The Biden administration pushed hard to foster democratic solidarity, including leading “The Declaration for the Future of the Internet,” which had global ambitions but was announced with 60+ exclusively democratic partners. The declaration contained some laudable principles, but they were never seriously applied to discipline US firms in the way Justin and I would have hoped. The Biden administration never resolved a tension between reining in big tech and unleashing it to beat China.
Now the world is also trending away from the vision of a techno-democratic coalition, which although never achieving its highest ideals was not without strategic importance. As the US government turned decisively to “weaponize interdependence” (in Farrell and Newman’s memorable coinage) it became more important to the United States to bring some allies along, and it became more likely China would further its own weaponization of supply chains, which was once mostly a matter of what-ifs. Some key allies were crucial in reaching what may end up marking the high point of this techno-democratic alignment, when the Biden administration successfully put the screws to Japanese and Dutch officials to deny China access to semiconductor manufacturing equipment after unilateral US controls introduced in 2022. US strategists believed it was so important to hold China back in advanced computing and artificial intelligence that they pushed through ground-breaking export controls. Nearly everyone believed the effort would be self-defeating without others’ help, but the United States got that help—for now.
Could an unreliable United States have created a more determined Chinese competitor, one that can make more credible assurances to erstwhile US allies?
Going forward, it is reasonable to expect that China’s government will leverage its position in ways that will require even more coordination to withstand. So the big question is not just whether Meta and Alphabet get hosed in the European market—potentially a rather small economic or political matter compared to the effects of tariffs announced this week. The question is whether countries that, due to their regime type, are putatively natural US allies will be less likely to lend a hand in the future. Thinking pragmatically, could an unreliable United States have created for itself a more determined Chinese competitor, one that can make more credible assurances to erstwhile US allies? Thinking from a stance of democratic solidarity, will governments view a US government that increasingly sides with Russia against Ukraine and thrashes rule of law as a member of the democratic club, an enabler of autocratic power, or something else entirely?
No one can reliably predict macro geopolitical events at this stage, so the take-away has to be uncertainty. But the uncertainty can be a reminder of frames to question when they come back around. When policy advocates talk about democracy vs. autocracy, it cannot be assumed where the United States as a country or the political regime controlling its government stands. When people call for the development of “democratic AI,” it cannot be assumed that systems from the United States or controlled by US actors are in any meaningful sense democratic. If a self-styled coalition of “democracies” includes the United States, it behooves us to ask what actually is the commonality unifying the group.
About Here It Comes
Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.