Scott Malcomson - How Russia and China Are Cooperating to Dismantle America’s Dominance of the Internet
Did the Cold War even
end?
Moscow and Beijing,
deeply resentful of American power, are again finding ideological common cause,
jointly aiming at two pillars of the post-Cold War dispensation: a borderless
Internet and international civil society. They are doing so on the declared
basis of national sovereignty.
Modern nationalism has
proved much sturdier than Communist internationalism; besides, the jaded, if
not cynical, Sino-Russian approach to globalization has more than an echo of
resurgent nationalism in the West itself, not least with regard to the
Internet. If this is not quite a Cold War, it is hard to see how such trends
can lead, in any way, to peace or to prosperity.
Last Wednesday, the
first China-Russia forum on Internet sovereignty took place in Moscow
under the auspices of Russia’s government-endorsed Safe Internet League. The
next day, China’s legislature passed a law mandating
tight management by security organs of international non-governmental
organizations. The timing of the events was coincidental but the ideological
ties between them were not.
Nationalizing civil
society
Russia has long
advocated national control of international NGOs. For post-Soviet Russians, the
notion that international NGOs could be, in effect, agents of destabilization
should probably be dated to the late 1990s and the opposition to Serbian
president Slobodan Milosevic. NGOs played an especially prominent rolein the overthrow of Milosevic, a Russian
ally.
There was even a theory loosely adopted by some of them: “nonviolent
action,” as pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi, refracted through the mind of an
American, Gene Sharp, and advocated by, among others, Sharp’s student Peter Ackerman. (Sharp had been to Tiananmen Square in
1989 and co-wrote an account of the last days of the protest there.)
But with or without a
theory, the U.S. did indeed see international and many domestic NGOs as
advancing its own goals of democratization of authoritarian regimes, free
speech and market economics. NGOs might also help the U.S. in the not-so-soft
power politics of nation building. In late October 2001, as the U.S. and its
allies were ousting Al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, Secretary of State
Colin Powell said to a conference of NGO leaders, “I have made it
clear to my staff here and to all of our ambassadors around the world that I am
serious about making sure we have the best relationship with the NGOs who are
such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.”.. read
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