Technology and Nationalism (review)

Canadian traditions of philosophy and political economy have tracked the connections among national identity, technology and communication, extending back at least to Harold Innis; related ideas come down to us through George Grant, Marshall McLuhan, Ursula Franklin, Arthur Kroker and Maurice Charland. Canadian communication studies thought is characterized by ontological concerns of the place of individuals within the whole, as well as a dialectic between metropolis and margin, within an ongoing focus on nature and space born of a preoccupation with mediation over distances. Although scholarship on technological nationalism has declined since the 1990s, a growing interest in media ecology points to the continuing relevance of understanding the ways that technologies nurture and support social environments and broad changes in patterns of social action.

Marco Adria’s Technology and Nationalism is grounded in the premise that the technologies and institutions of the modern nation state mediate experience and social relations. Since technology is not a given entity but a complex process of thought and action by users, its design and adoption demand critical deliberation about the kind of society and nation we are or wish to be. The central contribution of this book is its investigation into how practices and discourses on technology actually work to encode and decode social experience in specific context. It offers a detailed account of historical and contemporary nationalist projects that shaped the place of mediating technology in Canadian society, with an important focus on the dimensions of local and regional cultures as equal players in the development of national policy and identity.

Adria situates his analysis in related modernist concepts of the construction of nationalism and nationality, drawing on the ideas of core thinkers who have proposed that a national, homogeneous culture provides the shared discursive practices and subjective individual relationships that are the basis for industrialization and thus nationalism. If communication is a process mitigated by economic, political and social practices, the social meaning and application of technology, like iterations of social identity, come to be naturalized through discursive and other practices linking social experience with formal institutions. Adria thus refines the modernist concept of nationalism through the argument that the modernist idea of nationalism does not account for the negotiation of social identities and the role of culture and social actors in widely variable conditions and contexts. In Canada, the “mediating and demonstrational uses of technology” have supported a broadly instrumentalist approach suited to commercial, corporate and bureaucratic logics. Adria argues that the logic of nationalist organization in practice seeks the “symbiosis of nation and state in local, regional and national spaces.” (94)

The Canadian state’s historical adoption of technology as a nationalist project frames the book’s case studies. An account of the 1962 Missile Crisis details the controversy over Canada’s partnership with the United States in a cold war Ballistic Missile Defence program. As part of the contemporary American military buildup, Canada received a request to station jets and nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. The reluctance of Prime Minister Diefenbaker to assent led to a debate that developed a discursive framework of national autonomy during which symbols of imported technology became entwined with the question of Canadian self determination and critical argument that technological development in Canada was shaped by economic and military dependency. Issues of national autonomy and self-determination served the discourse of subsequent cultural programs to define a national social identity. Among critics of the 1960s and 1970s, the destabilization of nationalism by technology inspired both idealism, in the case of George Grant, and pragmatism, in Ramsay Cook. Where Grant lamented the threat of imported technologies to cultural cohesion and democratic citizenship, Cook felt that technological development was justified by the positive effects of advanced industrialization on social equality.

While Cook’s view has guided Canadian policy, Adria suggests that Grant’s work represents important unexamined questions about national autonomy. Though the missile episode and its fallout fueled a growing nationalism, it presented no real challenge to the legitimacy of the state’s participation in technology importation and use...