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77 Foreign Aff. 81 (1998)
Power and Interdependence in the Information Age

handle is hein.journals/fora77 and id is 805 raw text is: Power and Interdependence in the Information Age Robert 0. Keohane and 7oseph S. Nye, Yr. THE RESILIENCE OF STATES THROUGHOUT THE twentieth century, modernists have been pro- claiming that technology would transform world politics. In 191o Norman Angell declared that economic interdependence rendered wars irrational and looked forward to the day when they would become obsolete. Modernists in the 1970s saw telecommunications and jet travel as creating a global village, and believed that the territorial state, which has dominated world politics since the feudal age, was being eclipsed by nonterritorial actors such as multinational corporations, transnational social movements, and international organizations. Likewise, prophets such as Peter Drucker, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and Esther Dyson argue that today's information revolution is ending hierarchical bureaucracies and leading to a new electronic feudalism with overlapping communities and jurisdictions laying claim to multiple layers of citizens' identities and loyalties. The modernists of past generations were partly right. Angell's understanding of the impact of war on interdependence was insightful: World War I wrought unprecedented destruction, not only on the battlefield but also on the social and political systems that had thrived during the relatively peaceful years since 1815. As the modernists of the 1970S predicted, multinational corporations, nongovernmental ROBERT O. KEOHANE is James B. Duke Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Program on Democracy, Institutions, and Polit- ical Economy at Duke University. JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., is Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. [81]