Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance

10. NEGOTIATING REGIME CHANGE: THE WEAK, THE STRONG AND THE WTO TELECOM ACCORD

CHAPTER TEN NEGOTIATING REGIME CHANGE: THE WEAK, THE STRONG AND THE WTO TELECOM ACCORD J. P. SINGH The WTO telecommunications accord signed on 15th February, 1997 formalizes the new regime in telecommunications.1 This regime, signed by 69 countries including 40 less developed countries (LDCs), accounts for over 90 percent of the world’s telecommunications revenues.2 Historically, telecommunications sectors were controlled or operated according to domestic priorities. The new regime, effective since January 1, 1998, allows this sector to be governed by global rules underlying WTO processes. Among other things, cross-national investments in telecommunications are allowed (or hastened given that this process precedes 1997), and trade in basic and many value-added telecommunications services are governed by free trade norms, both features backed by WTO rules of transparency and Most Favored Nation.3 Sixty-three of the 69 governments will also introduce ‘regulatory disciplines’ to observe the WTO rules. An examination of the North-South negotiations included in the WTO Telecom accord is important for many reasons in the context of this volume. First, in the so-called information age, governance issues in telecommunications are themselves reflective of the emerging patterns of governance in other issueareas . They allow us to see how businesses, states, international organizations and other transnational groups come together. Second, telecommunications infrastructures are crucial to the global political economy. Zacher (chapter 8) and McDowell (chapter 9) also underscore the importance of examining telecommunications governance. Third, telecommunications serve as a crucial case for investigating the claim that developing countries stand to gain very little in their negotiations with the developed world in the emerging global economy, especially in high-tech issue 239 areas.4 If it can be shown that developing countries effected concessions in least likely issue areas such as telecommunications, then we may conjecture that they would perhaps gain even more significant concessions in such low-tech issue areas such as agriculture and textiles. Either way, the issue is more complicated than popular wisdom regarding these negotiations which presents the developing countries as having struck a Faustian bargain when they purportedly sacrificed something in issue areas such as telecommunications to get concessions in textiles and agriculture at the Uruguay Round. Fourth, if international negotiations allow developing countries to effect changes in global rule formation, then they deserve attention as we analyze the emerging global information economy and the dynamics on which it rests. Analyses of international negotiations, as Aronson (chapter 2) also shows, illustrate important components of the direction and shape of the global information economy. Taken together, the four points made above, allow us to re-examine notions of instrumental and structural power as they affect the developing world. Not only do negotiations allow developing countries to influence the structure, but also open possibilities for the exercise of instrumental power which were unavailable to them earlier. This chapter examines two sets of questions and related answers to examine the claims noted above. 1. Do the WTO telecom rules only reflect the preferences of great powers? This chapter shows that the increased availability of alternatives and strategies allows developing countries to get their interests articulated in global rule formation. 2. Do these rules contradict domestic preferences of developing countries? It is shown here that, in most cases, the commitments made by the developing countries at the international level are consistent with their domestic agendas. This chapter thus shows that developing countries are not so badly off in terms of the emerging global rules in telecommunications. The denouement of the story is as follows: the WTO telecommunications accord also reflects the negotiating strategies and domestic preferences of developing countries. While domestic actor involvement in shaping state preferences varies according to the degree of pluralism reflected in state’s decision-making, it is not so minuscule as to rule out micro pressures completely. Although a few of the domestic pressures may themselves be international in as much as they come from international actors such as multinational corporations, they are nonetheless arbitrated by states in LDCs, often with stiff opposition from various groups, and thus they are presented as domestic here. The telecom accord also reflects preferences of all kind of user groups from the developing world including business users and urban/rural residential users.5 240 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND GLOBAL POLITICS The arguments made here allow us to arbitrate among two bold claims about the developing world in the information age. One claim contends...