Transforming the International System: Geoffrey L. Herrera's Technology and International Transformation

For many years historians of technology have been arguing that technology needs to be understood in a contextual and historical framework, situated within ongoing social and political processes; above all, that it is not to be understood as an exogenous force with outside impacts. This message is beginning to seep into mainstream historical discourse. Geoffrey Herrera's bold and appealing Technology and International Transformation¹ suggests that it is resonating as well with international relations and political science.

Herrera starts with a solid understanding of the similarities and differences of "constructivism" in recent work in international relations and in technology studies, and he has a promising plan to bring them together. He clearly summarizes the key insights of constructivist approaches in technology studies, with their emphasis on the social forces that shape the emergence of technology and their relative disregard of the social effects of technologies. Here he is drawing on the basic insights of the contextual history of technology with appropriate citations to key works in the debates on technological determinism (including awareness of the critical literature surrounding Langdon Winner's well-cited article on Robert Moses's bus-blocking Long Island bridges). Constructivism in international relations, by comparison, focuses on the construction and evolution of social identities and the dynamic interplay between such identities and the process of institutional change. (This point is best elaborated on page 23, and on page 217, note 45). As such it differs sharply from the prevailing "neorealist" and "neoliberal" traditions in international relations, traditions that each take the identities and interests of social actors as pretheoretic givens, that presume rational actors, and that typically prefer quasi-static or schematic models in accounting for change. Leading authors in each of these traditions affirm some version of a technological-determinist stance which posits that "the underlying technological environment determines the nature of political authority" and that "alterations in the material forces of destruction . . . largely lie outside the control of humans" (p. 29).

Mounting his own critique of technological determinism, Herrera convincingly shows the strengths of constructivist approaches in international relations and argues that they can be augmented by "moving technology inside our theoretical conception of the international system" (p. 26). Through his extended case studies on the railroad and the atom bomb, he observes that certain technologies—mature, large technical systems in Tom Hughes's sense—will have direct consequences for the international system, and yet that these are also products of the international system and therefore do not have one-way impacts on it. His is a flexible, interactive, contextualized, and fundamentally historical approach. "The best studies of the history of technology show how technology and politics are mutually constitutive," he writes. "Technology is both a social product and an important independent force because it confronts actors as a real resource or impediment" (p. 7). There is obviously a lot to like here.

Herrera clearly specifies a two-part argument and carefully builds his two case studies around it. His first aim is to show that technologies developed into complex large-scale technological systems in a transnational setting, not just a local or national one, while his second aim is to show that the resulting complex technological systems "significantly altered" what he terms the "interaction capacity" of the international system. Interaction capacity is a widely used concept in international relations. The key point is that in all social systems the capacity of social actors to interact with one another, through technologies or other means, is a capacity of the system as a whole (not solely of the individual actors) and that such interaction can and does shape the nature and evolution of sociotechnical systems. Herrera suggests the (hypothetical) example of two otherwise identical international systems differing only in that communication in one depends on horses and sailing vessels and in the other on global computer networks; obviously the two international systems as well as their respective interaction capacities would differ dramatically. Since technologies are involved in altering the available means for communications, trading, transportation, and violence, they have consequences for the international system.

This...