I I V G P a p e r s
Veröffentlichungsreihe des Internationalen Instituts für Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
PV/78-1 9
TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
by
Karl W. Deutsch and
Richard L. Merritt
October 1978
Publication series of the International Institute for Comparative Social Research •
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
by
Karl W. Deutsch Harvard University
and
Richard L. Merritt
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
To what extent has our century’s communications revolution made the world more international? Observable data on the relative share of transnational vs. national transactions in trade, travel, university studies, mail, and telephone calls reveal a common pattern. First, the absolute level of such activities has increased since 1900. Second, in developed countries the international share of these activities remained constant or declined after peaking.
Third, although in such areas as science and technology international
transactions have become a necessity and in other respects an important consumer good, they cannot expand indefinitely. The country just entering the
international arena rapidly increases its international activities before
leveling off— a pattern resembling an S-shaped curve. Limiting factors include social mobilization which increases national preoccupations, communications overloads of all kinds, and greater perceived relevance of and ease of dealing with domestic matters.
The outcome is a paradox: Today’s world is less interdependent and international than it was 50 or 100 years ago, and yet sensitivity in some sectors to the need for international communications has increased. The cross-pressures thus created for many nations and the international system itself mean a heterotropic future, characterized by plural and partly
inconsistent goals and actions. This growing complexity, although possibly frustrating, also permits us to respond with actions of search and acts of
TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
the will.
by
Karl U. Deutsch Harvard University
and
Richard L. Merritt
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In the seven decades since 1910, the world has gone through a revolution in communications. New and far more powerful equipment, new technologies, new patterns of public and private organization, and a greatly increased demand have vastly expanded the flow of messages within countries and across their boundaries.
Has this communications revolution made the world more international? If so, in what sense, to what extent, and within what limits? What have been some of the major changes, what patterns can we discern in then, and what further prospects for the International system do they indicate?
Students of world politics have been well supplied with speculative
answers. Some of these answers have stressed the permanence of nation-states, while others have forecast the steady increase of the weight of international transactions and organizations, leading to the early merging of nation-states into regional or worldwide systems of government. The present study.uses observable data to examine a limited aspect of this problem: the relative shares of transnational v s . national transactions within a range of activities which form the social and economic background against which political behavior takes place.
The shares of transnational activities in the time, attention, manpower, and economic resources of each country should tell us something of the
Interests and bases of political support that could be mobilized for internationalistic or supranational policies. By knowing something about
TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
2
these odds for or against their success, the political performance o f internationalistic statesmen could then perhaps be more adequately judged.
Changes in International Trade
In 1913, international trade amounted to about 30 per cent of the w o r l d ’s gross national product, a proportion which declined in the 1950s and 1960s by about a third to roughly 20 per cent before regaining in the early 1970s its 1913 level once more."'' Interesting in themselves, these changing levels of
international trade have also been used to gauge the changing balance in a country between partisans of nationalism and national self-preoccupation v s .
2
potential adherents of a more international Outlook. Assuming in a rough sense that the weighted share of the outward-looking or even internationalist portion among the elites and mass population corresponds in each country to the ratio of its foreign trade sector (that is, the sum of its imports and
exports) to its gross national product doubtless understates the potential support for nationalism. Persons active in the foreign trade sector also may develop nationalist feelings if they find their living and working conditions unrewarding and frustrating, making it easy for their anger to
become directed against their foreign contacts. In highly developed countries, however, where labor and management are relatively well-paid, .extreme discontent is rare. Indeed, in his mail poll of French businessmen, the sociologist
Daniel Lerner found in the 1950s that those deriving more than half their income from foreign trade were three times as likely to support European integration— that is, to adopt an internationalist stance— than were those who derived.little or no income from foreign trade.3
In these terms, we might ask, has the world system become more
strongly international? Has the ratio of foreign trade to gross national product (the T/GUP ratio) of the world’s countries risen or declined?
3
Table 1 presents long-terra changes in the T/GNP ratio for 13 countries, in [Table 1 about here]
raost cases for the period from 1913 to 1973 but in some cases reaching back into the 19th century.
The data suggest a rising trend in the foreign trade ratio during much of the 19th century for raost of the countries for which we have data, attaining a peak around 1913, the eve of World War I, and then declining. The world was indeed becoming more international between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the gathering of warclouds before 1914: World trade and a world economy were growing faster than national economies (with the exceptions of the United States, where the long-terra declining trend in the foreign trade ratio seems to have begun as early as 1799, and Germany, newly united by Bismarck, which reached its highest share of foreign trade in its total economy during the 1870s). The 1920s and 1930s witnessed generally .diminishing foreign trade ratios. Even postwar stabilization and growth within the countries listed in Table 1 did not bring the overall level up to what it had been before the
4 first of the two world wars of our century.
For most European countries the experience of Britain seems to have been most typical; a steep rise in the foreign trade ratio until the 1870s; a much slower rise (or tendency toward stagnation) at this high level until 1913; a substantial decline after World War I merely accelerated by the Great Depression of the 1930s; and a partial recovery in the 1950s followed by more than a
decade of sagging scores (Figure 1). Even making allowances for differential [Figure 1 about here]
estimates of income, Britain’s recent levels of foreign trade to its entire economy have remained substantially below that of 1913. There are to be sure partial exceptions to the British pattern. France and Japan reached their peaks of economic internationalism about 192S; and Norway may have reached its peak
Table 1
CHANGES IN THE FOREIGN TRADE RATIO, 1830-1973
Trade/National Income* Trade/Gross National Product?
1830s 1870s 1913 1928 1938 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1973
exited States3 17 16 11 11 8 7 8 9 9 11 U
ermany1* 28 45 35 36 15 15 24 33 39 50 M
nited Kingdom5 21 56 66 46 33 46 45 42 38 43 A 1
.ussia/USSR6 - - M - - - 0 2 ) - -
taly - 30 3 1 17 25 23 29 31 38
Sweden - - 52= 42 35 43 46 47 45 49 5 5
)enmark7 - 47 M 50 34 58 65 68 62 62 5 1
•'inland - - 75 67 57 39 42 48 45 57 5 Z
Switzerland - - 84 50 34 51 54 59 60 70 64
Japan8 - 15 33 40 38 14 21 Z2 20 21 20
France 16 33 43 46 21 30 28 28 27 32 36
Argentina - - - - 36 18 12 2 2 14 17 15
Norway9 - - 51 40 34 83 85 85 81 83 52=
Average10 (21) (35) 52 42 30 37 40 43 42 47 50
Note: For both the 1830-1938 and 1950-1973 periods, the highest shown ratio for each country is underscored.
^Source: From data in Karl W. Deutsch and Alexander Eckstein, "National Industri
alization and the Declining Share of the International Economic Sector, 1890- 1959," World Politics, 13:2 (January 1961), 267-299.
^Source: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Tables 1978, (Baltimore, M d . : The Johns Hopkins Press, 1977), passim. To approximate roughly the set of data for the 1830-1938 period, it is necessary to increase each ratio in the 1950-1973 period by 15±5 per cent.
3Dates are 1839, 1879, 1909, 1929, and 1939.
'♦Dates are 1802-1830 and 1900-1909. Data for 1950-1973 are from West Germany.
5Dates are 1910-1913, 1927-1929, and 1923-1928.
6Figure for 1965 is estimated.
7Earliest date is for 1870.
8Dates are 1885-1889, 1910-1914, and 1925-1929..
9Data for 1913-1938 are ratios of trade to gross domestic product.
10Average excludes figures for Russia/USSR and Argentina.
F ig u r e 1
RATIO OF.FOREIGN TRADE TO NATIONAL INCOME: UNITED KINGDOM, 1805-1973
Source: Schlote/Quittner-Bertolasi and League/UN/Prest series from Karl W. Deutsch and Alexander Eckstein, "National Industrialization and the Declining Share of the International Economic Sec
tor, 1890-1959," World Politics, 13:2 (January 1961), p. 277, with references; World Bank series from International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Tables 1976 (Baltimore, M d . : The Jo h n s Hopkins P r e s s , 1 9 7 7 ), pp. 280-281.
6
in the 1950s or may still prove to be one of a few countries with a rising foreign trade ratio. But, for most of the world, the level of relative economic interdependence that prevailed on the eve of World War I has yet to be regained. In the late 1970s, with protectionist national currency and trade manipulations on the rise, the outlook for more economic internationalism
seems doubtful indeed.
Over the whole period from the 1820s to date, the share of foreign trade seems to have grown in the pattern of an S-curve— at first slowly, then
accelerating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then slowing down again, approaching a plateau. This slowing down occurred despite the fact that the number of sovereign states grew from less than 50 in 1913 to about
150 in the late 1970s. Periods of war, depression, or prosperity produced deviations from this trend without destroying its basic pattern. Particular countries have followed their own S-curves sooner or later, depending on their own level of industrialization. Thus many developing countries with “middle- level" incomes (in the World Bank’s terminology) may be entering only now upon the steep part of their S-curves.
Though the shares of foreign trade sectors seem to have approached a
plateau, the absolute amounts of foreign trade have grown strongly, as have the populations and gross national products of most countries. Also, the
composition of foreign trade within its limited sector has shifted in many countries toward greater technical specialization. Furthermore, data from a forthcoming study of trade flows among nations show some increase in regional interdependence— which need not be identical with integration— over the period from 1938 to 1967 for 21 of 23 supranational regional associations. The world may not yet become one in trade but some clustering may well be going on.^
7
International Travel
If political conditions and their finances permit, travelers can now reach by regularly scheduled commercial flights within about one day any major city in the world. In highly developed countries the amount of international
travel has increased faster than total population and even faster than domestic travel. Sample surveys of the United States population revealed that, in 1963, Americans took 257 million trips of 100 miles or more, five million of them
(2.0%) outside the United States: in 1972 they took 453 million such trips, and 18 million (3.9%) were international. The percentage of the total
American population traveling overseas grew steadily, from 0.3 per cent in 1920 and 0.5 per cent in 1930 to 0.9 per cent in 1960, 2.6 per cent a decade later, and 3.2 per cent in 1976. Whereas only one in 353 American residents went abroad in 1920, by 1976 one in 31 did so.^
As Figures 2 and 3 suggest, however, there may be an upper limit to the [Figure 2 about here]
ratio of foreign to domestic travel. The number of paying international passengers as a percentage of total passengers on United States airlines, for instance, rose from seven per cent in 1930 to more than ten per cent in the early 1960s before dropping off to about nine per cent a decade later.
Scheduled British airways revealed a somewhat different pattern from 1950 to 1976 but, again, the relative share of international passengers was fairly stable around the 60 per cent mark. Adding non-scheduled flights and the effects of changes in ticket prices or currency values may raise or lower the ceiling effect but seems unlikely to abolish it. Similarly, once the Federal Republic of Germany had recovered from its wartime losses, both the foreign
[Figure 3 about here]
share of registered guests at hotels and other inns and the foreign share of nights spent in these establishments remained rather constant, although declining somewhat in the early 1970s.
F ig u re 2
PERCENTAGE OF INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES PASSENGERS (SCHEDULED A IR L IN E S ), 1950-1976
Source: Central Statistical Office, Annual Abstract o f Statistics (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), various volumes; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office), various volumes.
o
F ig u re 3
PERCENTAGE OF FOREIGN GUESTS IN WEST GERMAN HOTELS, 1950-1976
Source: Statistisches Bundesamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart and Mainz: Verlag W. Kohlhammer GmbH), various volumes.
10
In the less developed countries, a somewhat different process may be found. At first, much of the travelling was undertaken by a small number of people living in the country’s port city, and most of this travel was abroad.
Later, as the interior of the country became more modern and new strata of the native population could afford to take trips, total travel rose fast but most of it was domestic. By this time domestic travelers heavily outweighed those who had ever been abroad. National awareness from firsthand visits outgrew the volume of cosmopolitan contacts— a situation contributing to increased potential backing for nationalism and nationalist symbols, slogans, policies, and parties. If the experience of the industrialized countries may be a guide, however, then we can anticipate a future rise in international travel on the part of residents of developing countries, followed by a period when the relative euphoria for overseas travel subsides and the ratio of foreign to domestic travel remains constant.
International Focus of Universities
An important reason why some people travel is to study overseas. The reasons for this may vary from the desire to have some foreign experience to learning skills that one cannot learn at home, to collecting information for further studies in the home country. But, whatever the motivation,? it takes
someone who is international-minded to undertake such an adventure at all.
UNESCO reports that the number of university students studying in foreign countries almost tripled between 1960 (11.7 million) and 1974 (33.3 million),
v
but the total number of university students in the world more than tripled g
during the same period. The worldwide proportion of foreign students thus dropped from 4.9 per cent of all university students in 1960 to 4.4 per cent in 1974. In the latter year, three quarters of them were studying at universities in developed countries (44 per cent of these in North America alone).
11
Turning to two major recipients of foreign students, Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany, we find a pattern familiar to us from our
examination of international travel (Figure 4). In both cases the percentage (Figure 4 about here]
of foreign students at institutions of higher learning rose during the period of postwar reconstruction, reached a plateau at the end of the 1950s, and then began to drop off. Britain, however, seems to have reversed the declining trend beginning in the early 1970s. Over the course of the last two decades, about every tenth student at a British university and every thirteenth in West Germany came from a foreign country.
Another indicator of the extent to which university students are mindful of foreign cultures is the percentage of them who have as their major field of concentration either modern foreign languages or comparative literature.
(Available data do not show the number studying ’’international relations’’ or nonlinguistic foreign area studies.) As Figure 5 shows, over the course of
[Figure 5 about here]
the two dozen years from 1952 to 1975 an average of two per cent of American bachelors’ degrees were awarded in the field of foreign languages and literature, whereas 6.4 per cent of West German university students reported concentrating in either that field or foreign-language interpreting. Once again we find the pattern of slow growth leading up to a peak (1961 in Germany, 1968 in the United States) before declining.
Before proceeding, another word of caution is necessary for a proper understanding of the findings. Studying abroad or focusing in o n e ’s studies upon a foreign culture by no means ensures that the student has a positive attitude toward the foreign country or its people. Indeed, distasteful personal encounters or frustrations in one's studies could lead to precisely the opposite result. The point is more that the initial willingness to
F ig u r e 4
PERCENTAGE OF FOREIGN STUDENTS IN BRITISH AND WEST GERMAN U N IV E R SIT IE S, 1950-1976
Source: Central Statistical Office, Annual Abstract o f Statistics (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office), various volumes; and Statistisches Bundesamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch fur die Bundesrepublik
Deutschland (Stuttgart and Mainz: Verlag W. Kohlhammer GmbH), various volumes. m
F ig u r e 5
PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE, 1952-1975
Source: For West German students enrolled in foreign languages and literature as well as interpreting, Statistisches Bundesamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart and Mainz: Verlag W. Kohlhammer GmbH), various volumes; and for bachelors' degrees in foreign languages and literature awarded by American universities, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract o f the United States (Washington, D . C . : United States Government Printing Office), various volumes.
14
undertake such studies implies an openness toward the international environment on the part of the student. Moreover, it is most assuredly true that not all international-minded students take up such courses of studies or have the opportunity to pursue their interests in the university of another country.
The longterm trends are nonetheless indicative of the student subcultures’
changing orientation toward the international arena.
As a final indicator of intellectual internationalism we may turn to book publishing. Books cross frontiers by the millions, sometimes in their original language and often in translations. UNESCO counted 47,038 titles translated
Q
in 1973. In the United States from 1961 to 1976, of some 462,000 new books and editions published, one in 21 (4.7Z) was a translation from a foreign language and another one in eight (12.6Z) was an import from a b r o a d . T h e trend during the 15 years once more parallels those examined earlier, with the high point of both translations occurring in 1964 (6.6Z) and imports in 1966 (21.1Z). In 1975 percentages had fallen to 3.9 and 10.6, respectively.
Postal Messages
A useful indicator of a wide range of human relations is the flow of mail, either of letters and postcards (termed "first-class mail” in the United States) or the larger flow comprising these plus printed matter, commercial circulars, and samples of merchandise, excluding only parcel post
(to conform to the C P U ’s statistical reporting procedures). It has been estimated that about 80 per cent of this larger flow of mail is related to business transactions, and nearly 20 per cent to personal correspondence, of social, political, and religious organizations making up most of the small remainder.
How much of this flow crosses the boundaries of nation states? The ratio of domestic mail to foreign mail (including, in the latter case, both
that sent plus that received) can give us an answer. Observing differences in one and the same year among such ratios for several countries of different size and at different levels of development can tell us something about possible developmental trends toward greater national self-preoccupation or greater openness toward the world beyond the national borders.
Studies of this kind have been m a d e , ^ and some recent data are shown in Table 2. They suggest that national self-preoccupation in many highly developed
[Table 2 about here]
countries, so far as the evidence of mail flows is concerned, rose from 1913 to 1928, and perhaps somewhat further to 1953 before levelling off. By this time only one in nine letters handled by the national postal systems listed in Table 2 either came from or was sent abroad. Throughout the following years, despite a contrary trend from 1953 to 1967, national self-preoccupation was substantially greater than in 1913.
. For some developing countries, such as Argentina (and to some extent Mexico), by contrast, the isolating effects of geographic distance seem to have declined at a greater rate, and their foreign mail seems to have grown faster than the rate of growth of their domestic mail, even after the bulk of their population had already become literate. Consistent with this
reasoning, the foreign share of Argentina’s total mail ought to have increased between 1913 and 1975, and it did. The evidence is not sufficient, however, to show that the increase occurred for the reasons indicated by our hypothesis.
Other conditions may have been more important, and data from more countries
f
will be needed to permit a better founded judgment.
Finally, in many far less developed countries where mass literacy is only now beginning to spread, the increase in domestic mail can be expected to be larger— often starting from a very low level per capita— than the increase in foreign mail. Hence, in many of the less developed countries the ratio of
ib
16 Table 2
•rCREIGN MAIL AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL MAIL f o r 22 S e l e c t e d C o u n t r i e s , 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 7 5 1
19132 19283 * 1953 1963 1967 1970 1973 1975
United States 3.94 3.54 2.26 3.30 2.33 2.78 2.53 -
Japan 3.85 5.56 1.21. 1.54 1.83 2.01 1.46 1.48
France 10.83 5.88 10.07 8.98 8.53 7.16 7.53 6.58
United Kingdom 9.18 8.23 7.85 8.25 9.27 9.49 10.36 10.93
Geraany/Fed. Rep. “ 10.31 8.10 8.75 9.36 9.29 9.73 10.22 8.65
India 7.03 6.51 5.51 3.71 2.56 4.31 3.99 4.53
Italy 11.09 6.67 8.23 10.94 12.49 13.32 11.48 12.37
Spain 23.17 14.78 9.92 17.98 14.94 15.41 15.88 15.76
Netherlands 16.94 14.55 8.96 11.43 14.93 13.54 11.71 11.66
Australia5 * 14.15 12.44 8.75 11.75 12.78 10.90 10.63 11.45
Belgium 18.56 14.41 7.96 14.43 15.18 16.27 13.99 12.10
Switzerland 32.40 23.95 16.58 17.88 20.55 20.08 18.68 18.38s
Sweden 15.36 12.35 9.51 10.85 11.13 11.59 9.47 8.27
Austria 29.37 32.71 19.24 25.01 20.49 21.39 21.81 -
Mexico 14.85 33.70 29.33 30.79 30.94 33.78 35.68 2 4 .837 *
South Africa 19.19 13.50 - 13.41 16.52 11.14 11.49 11.60
Serbia/Yugoslavia0 20.05 13.65 8.74 8.47 11.50 13.56 15.13 —
Hungary 20.91 14.48 - 14.15 11.51 11.38 11.37 5.96
Argentina 6.61 8.15 4.07 12.69 20.47 17.68 12.89 15.51
Denmark 19.71 17.36 11.97 13.78 13.31 13.89 13.77 9.39
Finland 15.74 15.60 15.82 14.95 15.53 12.89 12.77 13.31
Portugal 23.48 21.33 19.20 29.02 30.86 28.29 28.75 17.70
Average9 15.76 13.98 10.98 13.30 13.95 13.66 13.25 11.82
Countries were selected according to two c r ite r ia : ranking among the top iicuntries in terms of to ta l mail flow in 1974/1975, and a v a ila b ility of data for at le a st seven or the eight years.
21913 or 1912/1913, except for A ustralia, Belgium , South A frica, and Serbia (a ll 1912), India (1913/1914), and Finland (1919, a fter independence).
31928 or 1927/1928, except for Australia (1927).
“Germany in 1913 and 1928; Federal Republic of Germany from 1953 to 1975.
SFor 1912 and 1927, figures represent a composite of data for New South Wales, Western A ustralia, Southern Australia, V ictoria, Queensland, and Tasmania.
''Figure for 1975 i s based on incomplete reports.
7l »tio lis te d for 1975 represents mail d eliv eries in 1974.
’’Serbia in 1912; Yugoslavia from 1928 to 1975. "x
9Where a figure for a particular year was missing for a country, the future for the nearest year with available data was used in i t s place.
S o » « ,: IM t.d » . t i c . S ' . ' l . ' l C . l M i l . . . S t . H . t i c . l V » . <»«" » ' » • g s t j i . 2nd S tatlstiq ue complete des services postaux, various annual issu es.
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domestic to foreign mail, and perhaps national self-preoccupation, should be rising for a time. Only later, in a more distant future, we might surmise, will this ratio decline in these countries and their relative attention to foreign mail and foreign contacts rise.
I
For the international system as a whole, however, the evidence of mail transactions suggests at least up to the mid-1970s a continuing and relatively high level of domestic preoccupation and a commensurately low level of
international involvement. A substantially more internationalist world, on this showing, is even at best still some decades in the future.
Telephone Calls
If the United States may serve as an example of trends in (if not levels of) telephone usage, then two clear facts emerge with respect to international communication. The first is that the number of international calls is
increasing. In 1930 Americans made 30,000 overseas telephone calls, one for every 4,103 people in the country, or one out of every million total calls. This ratio has dropped steadily and rather dramatically since then.
In 1940 one in 1,894 made such a call and ten years later it was one in 152 people (for a total of 1.6 million overseas telephone calls). It dropped by 1960 still further to one in 49 people, by 1970 to one in eight, and by 1975 to one in 3.4, or one overseas call per year for each average family. In this last year Americans telephoned abroad 67.2 million times.12
Second, however, although the number and ratio of overseas telephone calls placed by Americans have been increasing, they continue to pale in significance next to the number of domestic calls. In 1976, the figure was 236 billion calls, or more than three per day for every man, woman, and child living in the country. If the "average" family (of 3.4 people) can be said to make a single overseas call yearly, it must also be said that the same family makes 3,727 calls within the United States during the same time. Or,
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viewed another way, for every million domestic telephone calls in 1975 there were only 272 overseas calls. (This figure, of less than three out of
10,000 calls, is roughly the proportion of persons listed in Who's Who in
America to the total population of the United States.) The telephone has simply not become a widely used medium for international communication on the part of the broad citizenry.
Conclusion: The Paradox of the Communications Revolution
The absolute magnitude of transnational communications has grown by
leaps and bounds, and so have the speed and accuracy with which it is possible to transmit messages to all parts of the globe. But to what extent have these developments changed people's outlooks and behavior vis-a-vis the international environment ?
A large supply of transnational transactions and communications has
become in many respects a necessity. It is now a condition for the production and reproduction of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge which all are now to a large degree international. The same holds for much of modern administrative and business practices.
At the same time, international communication has become an important consumer good. Like many other consumer goods, moreover, it is now experienced as a source of a sense of well-bfeing, freedom, and motivation for further
efforts. People increasingly demand a chance to read, hear, and view messages from abroad, to keep up with international news, science, art, life styles, and fashions, to travel, to visit, to correspond, to telephone with possible partners in other countries— and to feel deprived and frustrated when those opportunities are denied to them. Further, foreign experiences and information from abroad have become intellectual and emotional resources for growing numbers of people who have come to need and expect the greater combinatorial richness,
19
subtlety, and power which these additional inputs permit them to attain.
How these resources are used for new insights of conscience, forms of art, or inquiries in science— or for new vices, crimes, and acts of terrorism— is, of course, another matter.
These developments were visible as early as a half century ago among the professional, managerial, and intellectual middle classes and strata of many countries. Now, as broader strata reach middle-class capacities, education, and status, or at least claim them, the demand for international information grows correspondingly.
But trees do not grow into the sky. Three countervailing processes limit the process of internationalization. The first is the equally rapid or even faster growth of the flow of internal messages in each country and society.
This process, in the course of a country’s social mobilization, implies an expanding flow of internal messages, particularly from its middle and lower strata and from its formerly peripheral regions and populations. The second countervailing process results from the first. It is the overloading of communication channels and the exhaustion of the limited amounts of time
available for attention to, receiving, and decoding messages, and for responding to them. The third is the overloading and exhaustion of time and material
resources available for acting on messages from abroad, the absence or decline of quick positive or negative rewards from such responses, and hence the
decline of the perceived relevance of much of this international communication.
These three countervailing processes work to a large extent automatically.
Together, they usually suffice to limit the long-term growth of transnational communications to the S-curve pattern we have observed. For most people, they limit the perceived relevance of such transnational communications to the level of seeming triviality. Populations of many highly industrialized
zu
countries remain in effect sealed off from any dramatic impact of messages from abroad— and this would be the case even if national governments made no effort to interfere in the process.
In fact, most governments do interfere. They do it subtly in democracies by lending or denying respectability and prestige to certain categories of messages, more heavy-handedly in dictatorships by preventing or prohibiting access or attention to foreign messages of which they disapprove. The net effect of such intervention by national governments is to make the top of the S-curve somewhat flatter.
The outcome is a. paradox. Today’s world is less interdependent and international than it was 50 or 100 years ago in terms of commodity trade, mail flows, and still other variables not discussed here, such as foreign investments as a proportion of total savings and international migration as a proportion of total population. A wide variety of other internationalist trends reached a plateau decades ago and have not made much progress since then. Workers and their unions, small businessmen, farmers, whitecollar workers, many politicians and their parties, and many members of public or private bureaucracies may have become more preoccupied with domestic matters.
Yet, at the same time, the.sensitivity of governments and nations to seme kinds of information from abroad appears to have increased in some sectors of opinion and activity. Despite the countervailing trends noted earlier, it seems that scientists, intellectuals, students, newsmen, bankers, strategists and soldiers, investors and revolutionaries all may have become more attentive and responsive to developments abroad. The world is more interdependent than ever before with respect t o knowledge, science, mass culture, and military strategy. It is more united in hopes of technological abundance, resentments at economic and social inequality, concerns about our common environment, and fears of mass destruction.
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As a result, many nations and the international system itself are under cross-pressure. Many kinds of interdependence have decreased below their peaks in former years. People most often look to the national economy and the
nation-state for employment, social security and welfare, public health and education, public works, and national development. And they are looking to their national language and culture for most of the symbols of personal and group identity, as well as most of their sources of meaning and motivation.
Loyalties of language and ethnicity increasingly are overriding the supranational ties of religion. As they gradually came to do so in past centuries among Protestants and Roman Catholics in Germany, France, Britain, Ireland, and Switzerland, so they have done more recently among Muslims and Christians in many Arab and African countries. In 1947 religion split Bengal between India and Pakistan; almost a quarter century later, in 1971, language, territoriality, and ethnicity split Bangladesh from Pakistan. Differences between the national states, parties, and cultures of such communist nations as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, and Albania are overriding the ties of international communist ideology. Nationalism, still represents one of the w o rld’s most
powerful patterns of political alignment.
The world is now too international to permit a naive nationalism to flourish without limit. But it is too national to permit a supranational government, a common currency, a common electorate, or a supranational tax
system at the world level, or even at the level of any substantial international bloc or region. For the next several decades the international system will remain pluralistic, divided into an uneasy multitude of nation-states. And yet it will also remain fitfully internationalistic, with mounting concerns about world affairs and about the tasks and dangers that transcend the capabilities of nation-states.
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The world of the near future vill be heterotropic: It will tend to
teach us plural and partly Inconsistent goals and actions. In such a situation it will be easy to respond with bewilderment, fear, or passivity. But this same heterotropic situation also permits us to respond with actions of search and acts of the will. We can decide much about our fate, and about the
meaning of our lives, by choosing to work for the world we want.
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Footnotes
1. Data from personal communication from Professor Simon Kuznets of Harvard University, 6 January 1972; and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Tables 1976 (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins
Press, 1977), p. 409.
2. See Karl W. Deutsch and Alexander Eckstein, "National Industrialization and the Declining Share of the International Economic Sector, 1890-1959,"
World Politics, 13:2 (January 1961), 267-299.
3. Daniel Lerner, "French Business Leaders Look at EDC: A Preliminary Report,"
The Public Opinion Quarterly, 20:1 (Spring 1956), p. 220. A thorough study in the 1950s showed that the attitudes of American businessmen on inter
national trade and tariff negotiations were strongly influenced by their perceived economic interests (that is, the interests of their firms), and that their own perceptions seemed fairly accurate when correlated with independent estimates by outside economists. See Raymond A. Bauer,
Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Lewis Anthony Dexter, American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade (New York: Atherton Press, 1963), pp. 124-126, 152-153, and 194-195.
4. To account for the discrepancy between the foreign trade to national income ratio (T/Y) used for the 1830-1938 period and the foreign trade to gross national product ratio (T/GNP) used after World War II, we might adjust the . latter ratios-upward by perhaps” 15j?5 percents Even so, only five of the
13 countries would record a higher score after 1950 than before 1938 (as opposed to four countries if we use the data as shown in Table 1).
5. See Karl W. Deutsch and Richard L. Merritt, "The Technological Revolution in Communications and the Transformation of the International System,"
in Technocracy and Its Controls, ed. Candido Mendes (publication forthcoming).
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6. Data in this paragraph are from various volumes of Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States. The sample surveys evidently included all forms of overseas travel; the other indicators, however, actually underestimate such travel since trips to Mexico and Canada are excluded, as are cruises originating and terminating in the United States and the travel of military and other governmental personnel.
7. For some research on this and related problems, see Richard L. Merritt,
"Effects of International Student Exchange," in Communication in . International Politics, ed. Richard L. Merritt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 64-94; and the annotated bibliography by Seth Spaulding and Michael Flack, The World's Students in the United States: A Review and Evaluation of Research on Foreign Students (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1976).
8. Data from UNESCO, Statistical Yearbook 1976 (Paris: UNESCO, 1977), pp.
91-94 and 114.
9. UNESCO, Statistical Yearbook 1976, p. 390.
10. Data from Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, various volumes.
11. See Karl W. Deutsch, "Shifts in the Balance of Communication Flows: A Problem of Measurement in International Relations," The Public Opinion Quarterly, 20:1 (Spring 1956), 143-160.
12. Data in this and the following paragraph are from Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, various volumes.
