THE THIRD WAVE
Tightened economic linkages between nations make it virtually impossible for any individual national government today to manage its own economy independently or to quarantine inflation. The ever- swelling bubble of Euromoney, for example, as suggested earlier, is beyond the power of any individual nation to regulate. National politicians who claim their domestic policies can “halt inflation” or “wipe out unemployment” are either naive or lying, since most economic infections are now communicable across national boundaries. The economic shell of the nation-state is now increasingly permeable.
Furthermore, national borders that can no longer contain economic flows are even less defensible against environmental forces. If Swiss chemical plants dump wastes into the Rhine, the pollution flows through Germany, through Holland, and ultimately into the North Sea. Neither Holland nor Germany can, by itself, guarantee the quality of its own waterways. Oil tanker spills, air pollution, inadvertent weather modification, the destruction of forests, and other activities often involve side effects that sweep across national borders. Frontiers are now porous.
The new global communications system further opens each nation to penetration from the outside. Canadians have long resented the fact that some 70 U.S. television stations along the border telecast, programs to Canadian audiences. But this Second Wave form of cultural penetration is minor compared with that made possible by Third Wave communications systems based on satellites, computers, teleprinters, interactive cable systems, and dirt cheap ground stations.
“One way to ‘attack’ a nation,” writes United States Senator George S. McGovern, “is to restrain the flow of information—cutting off contact between the headquarters and overseas branches of a multinational firm . . . building information walls around a nation… A new phrase isentering the international lexicon—’infonnation sovereignty.'”
Yet it is questionable how effectively national borders can be sealed off—or for how long. For the shift toward a Third Wave industrial base requires the development of a highly ramified, sensitive, wide open “neural network” or information system, and attempts by individual nations to dam up data flows may interfere with, rather than accelerate, their own economic development. Moreover, each technological breakthrough provides yet another way to penetrate the nation’s outer shell.
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