In recent years, various governments have been trying to subordinate the Internet to the system of the Westphalian state order. This article seeks to add a new layer to the analysis of this conflict over state sovereignty and the global digital order. It draws on network theory as an alternative analytical lens to study the reconfiguration of power relations that define the Internet as a technical, social and economic network, and its governance. We review key conflicts and developments that shaped the Internet's history, from the Internet exceptionalists' visions in the 1990s to states' recent pursuits of digital sovereignty and trace how states, as well as private companies, seek to fundamentally reconfigure the dominant logic of the Internet and its sub‐networks to expand and institutionalise their power position. We thus highlight a deeper layer of conflict: the current struggles over the techno‐political configuration of the Internet are not only influenced by the conflict between liberal and authoritarian visions of the Internet; they are also the result of continuous tensions between processes of centralisation and decentralisation of the Internet's technical foundations and its governance. As an effect of these dynamics, we currently witness a pluralisation of power while, at the same time, new points of centralised control emerge.
ZusammenfassungBis heute birgt das Internet das Versprechen, alle Menschen in einem globalen Kommunikationsnetz horizontal zu vereinen. Doch seit einigen Jahren gibt es Bemühungen autoritärer wie demokratischer Staaten, sowohl digitale Anwendungen als auch die physischen und technischen Infrastrukturen des Internets ihrem souveränen Zugriff zu unterwerfen. Und auch die „Big Tech“-Unternehmen versuchen zunehmend, „ihren“ digitalen Raum exklusiv zu kontrollieren. In der Folge mehren sich die Warnungen vor einer möglichen Fragmentierung des Internets. Um diese Warnungen einzuordnen, bedient sich der Beitrag der Netzwerktheorie und zeichnet die Konflikte und Entwicklungen nach, die das Internet seit den frühen Visionen der Internet-Exzeptionalisten in den 1990er-Jahren bis zu aktuellen Souveränitätsbestrebungen geprägt haben. Es wird sichtbar, dass sowohl Staaten als auch Unternehmen seit einiger Zeit eine fundamentale Rekonfiguration der globalen digitalen Ordnung herbeizuführen versuchen. Ihr Bemühen, die Macht über Teilnetze zu festigen, verändert dabei auch die Strukturen des globalen Netzes und geht mit einer Stärkung autoritärer Ordnungsvorstellungen einher. Vor der Kontrastfolie der kosmopolitisch-liberalen Vision eines global geeinten Netzes stellt sich dies zwar als Fragmentierung dar. Der netzwerktheoretische Zugriff macht jedoch deutlich, warum die Pluralisierung des Internets noch nicht mit dessen Fragmentierung gleichzusetzen ist.
Traditionally, states were widely believed to be the only institutions claiming political authority. More recently, though, a number of authors have argued that we find various instances of political authority on the international level. We discuss three prominent proposals for conceptualizing international authority: Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore’s account of the authority of international bureaucracies, David Lake’s extension of ‘relational’ authority to the international realm, and Michael Zürn’s recent proposal for ‘reflexive’ authority. These authors provide a nuanced and empirically rich picture of hitherto mostly overlooked forms of power in world politics. Yet, we argue that in doing so they lose sight of the distinctly normative character of political authority relations: these relations are built on the explicit normative claim to the right to rule. When such a claim is considered to be justified, authority relations generate content-independent reasons for compliance. Thus understood, authority serves an important function, namely, to facilitate broadly accepted and normatively justified forms of hierarchical coordination. From a normative perspective, therefore, broadening the concept of authority to include various other forms of power deprives us of a critical yardstick against which international organizations should be evaluated. Moreover, it creates a distorted picture of the scope of international authority. Our world is shaped by highly problematic power relations. Yet, in order to meet current challenges of global governance, we need more, not less authority. To illustrate this argument we examine the case of the World Bank, an organization that exercises considerable power while explicitly avoiding any claim to political authority.
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