The articles in this special issue make a significant contribution to our understanding of global governance by documenting repeated patterns in the international regulation of new communication technologies. The articles focus on the regulation in which national governments have been directly involved through intergovernmental conferences, formal intergovernmental organizations, and quasi-intergovernmental organizations such as Intelsat. This Afterword places those contributions in the context of existing theorizing about global governance and reinforces the contributors’ conclusions by outlining the parallel and related developments in the nongovernmental regulation of international communication through Voluntary Consensus Standard Setting by organizations such as the International Electrotechnical Commission and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Global governance is a relatively new subject of scholarly inquiry, or at least it is a new name for an older subject. The phrase only began being used as an analytical concept about twenty years ago, although prominent scholars in the field argue that some form of global governance has existed for a much longer time.^{Footnote 1} However, most of the empirical studies of the “global” governance that existed before 1995 have been, in fact, studies of “international” or “globalizing” governance. Before then, the world was not so much one place. From 1945 until the 1990s, India, China, and the Soviet sphere stood outside the trading area that linked the capitalist core in Northern America, Western Europe, and Japan to the dependent economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. During the world wars and the Great Depression, the relative economic unity of the Victorian Era was shattered, and even at the height of the “first era of globalization,” great parts of humanity in China, Persia, and other relatively autonomous regions remained outside the Europe-dominated inter-imperial system that had begun to be constructed after the defeat of Napoleon.^{Footnote 2}

Nevertheless, since the early nineteenth century there have been great—perhaps inexorable—pressures to make the industrial economy truly global. In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote of how “the rapid improvement of all instruments of production” and “the immensely facilitated means of communication” allowed the industrial bourgeoisie to use the “cheap prices” of its products as “the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.”^{Footnote 3} The internal logic of the industrial system led the most innovative capitalists to push for the creation of ever-larger “interrelated trading areas,” the unit of analysis that, a century later, W. W. Rostow recommended as the “optimum unit for the study of economic history, the setting within which most important historical problems “must be placed if they are to be fully understood.”^{Footnote 4}

Of course, interrelated trading areas—the geographic space within which specific markets operated—have to be created and they require systems of governance. They need rules for assuring the relatively free flow of goods, rules for what counts as money and credit, standard systems of weights and measures, and more complicated trading-area-wide product standards (in part, to assure that things that are meant to work together really do). Interrelated trading areas also need transportation systems and the rules that make them possible to create the networks within which a division of labor can be created. Perhaps before anything else, they need areawide networks of communication and the rules that govern them.

Historians and political scientists who have studied global governance—and, before them, those who studied “international organization” and “international integration”—have long recognized that such international market-creating activities made up much of the international or globalizing governance before the twenty-first century.^{Footnote 5} Moreover, some analysts of global governance have pointed to successive waves of internationalization, each led by the internationalization of a new set of communication technologies. First came the linking of low-cost postal systems and telegraph lines across national and continental trading areas, then the improvement of intercontinental links for business created by early submarine cables and early radio, and finally the creation of truly global systems through massive expansion of bandwidth by communication satellites and the simultaneous explosion of the submarine network.^{Footnote 6}

The historical studies collected here give us a much deeper insight into these eras—Richard John’s article on how a commitment to the public interest helped create a surprisingly global postal system in an era when the telegraph was being linked internationally, Simone Müller’s study on the early transcontinental submarine cable system setting the stage for Heidi Tworek’s piece on the fundamentally national development of radio, Frank Beyersdorf’s contrast between the post–World War II ambitions for the telecommunications system, with the U.S. vision of a global system (albeit U.S.-dominated) losing out to the narrower scope advocated by the British Empire and Commonwealth, and, finally, Hugh Slotten’s explanation of the origins of a truly global system in Intelsat.

In each case, the authors have demonstrated the centrality of three clusters of actors in shaping the international governance and the communication system that emerged: business interests; government interests; and institutional entrepreneurs.

There were the business interests, but they were certainly not reducible to unified capitalist bourgeoisie interest in ever-expanding interrelated trade areas. Yes, there were the intercontinental business interests that assured that the early submarine cable companies could make a tidy profit even without expanding their business to the global public, but there were always the interests of businesses focused on smaller, national or Commonwealth markets, as well—business consumers of communication services, including local and national newspapers, who might lose in a more global world. In addition, of course, there were the interests of the various firms in the communication sector itself.

There were also government interests. Sometimes they pushed for internationalization or globalization. For example, Great Britain championed the early submarine cable system in order to link its empire more closely and, from World War II onward, the United States pushed to create global communications in a U.S.-led world. Yet, just as often, government interests were more parochial: maintaining streams of revenue that come from transit fees on the international post, monopolizing the new mass medium of radio to promote a unified “higher” vision of the nation and its culture than the one that might have emerged from the free market, and, of course, always being concerned about enemies, domestic as well as foreign. Interestingly, as was the case with the early submarine cable system, government concerns about national security could create space for the international expansion of the influence of the private sector: that network remained private, in part, because no government wanted another government’s telegraph and telephone company reaching across the seas to touch its border.

Finally, there were institutional entrepreneurs and the kind of transnational communities that sociologists Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack argue have become increasingly common over the last century, communities that often have had a “regulatory impact . . . particularly with respect to economic and business activity.”^{Footnote 7} The entrepreneurs included John A. Kasson relative to the mail and Henniker Heaton relative to cables and telegrams, people who advocated for a public interest in inexpensive, open, and global systems of communication. But there were also the Hans Bredows and John Reiths, whose higher values were more nationally focused and elitist.

The largest subset of the transnational communities that Djelic and Quack have discussed consists of social movements. This special issue refers to typical claims of movements that favor open access to new communication technologies: mail, telegraph and cables, radio, and broadcasts via satellite were all promised to contribute to peace, in part due to the access they would provide to news and public events in distant parts of the world, and in part because that would allow private communication among people who shared particular interests.

The other large subset consists of “epistemic communities”—the science and technology–oriented groups that have used the prestige associated with their knowledge to advance international “technical” cooperation. However, just in the way that (as Frank Beyersdorf has illustrated) the line between “technical” and “political” international cooperation can be quite blurry, the line between epistemic communities and social movements also has often been blurred, as has the line between government official and social movement activist (consider Kasson) and that between social activist and business leader (consider Heaton).

There is an additional distinction that is often made in the study of global governance, that between the kind of largely intergovernmental or “public” global governance that is discussed in the articles and an almost equally large realm of “private” global governance in which the main actors involved have been businesses, social movements, and epistemic communities. Over the last generation, the scope of private global governance has expanded enormously as the global economy has expanded, yet governments have failed to agree on labor, environmental, social, and even accounting standards that would apply across the new global markets.^{Footnote 8}

This “new private global governance” is, however, much less relevant to the history of international communication than is an older form, Voluntary Consensus Standard Setting (VCSS), which is the way that most industrial standards have been set for more than a century. Not only has the oldest, continuing international VCSS body, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC, established in 1906), been central to the development of technical standards of all international communication systems for more than a century, but a new set of private bodies that follow versions of the same process has also played a central role in the establishment and governance of the Internet. Many of the themes illustrated in the articles’ history of the intergovernmental system for establishing regulatory standards for global communication have had parallels in the history of the private realm.

We can summarize the role of VCSS in the development of international communications systems this way. While the Universal Postal Union set the rules for the size, cost, and content of international postage, private committees of engineers set most of the standards for the steamships and later the airplanes that actually carried the mail. While the International Telegraph Union created similar standards for content and the means for linking national telegraph and telephone systems, the generators and lines that provided the power for the system and almost all of the equipment used were standardized by committees under national bodies and professional associations in the global network under the IEC. And while the later International Telecommunications Union and Intelsat allocated the radio spectrum and created rules for the cost and content of international broadcast media (and for the telegrams and phone calls that went through the satellite system), the IEC and other related private bodies needed to avoid radio interference with all senders and receivers (including satellites) and, again, created the industrial standards followed in all the related equipment.^{Footnote 9} Then, more recently, while the management of Internet names and addresses is handled by a company that began as an initiative of the U.S. government (similar, in that sense, to Intelsat), almost every other aspect of the Internet is governed by VCSS committees organized under IEC and its partner global standard-setting body, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), or various other, mostly newer, bodies that follow similar rules.^{Footnote 10} They include the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Society, and the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), a group of five organizations that, in 2012, agreed on principles for “global, open standards,” including a “commitment to technical merit, interoperability, competition, innovation and benefit to humanity.”^{Footnote 11}

As this open-standards declaration suggests, many of the people and the groups involved in the private regulation of international communication have sounded like some of the activists involved in the intergovernmental governance of the increasingly global system. Nevertheless, in this private system, almost all of the individuals involved are engineers, and in that sense they form a complex epistemic community, a group that shares knowledge about the technical merit of the various parts of communication systems, the conditions for interoperability, and the like. Yet, at times, as is illustrated by the declaration of the Internet standards setters, this epistemic community has acted as if it were a transnational social movement, convinced not only that the global technical systems that it supports, but also its own process of decision-making, provide a major contribution to the global social good. For example, Ian Stewart, who began a long career with Standards Association of Australia in 1935, described the VCSS process as more than a means to achieve optimal industrial standards. It was also a form of democratic civic education: “The dialogues associated with standardization are a liberal education for all who participate in them. They involve an exchange of experience and of expertise of people who may not otherwise get together. They involve possibly conflicting interests who otherwise would stand in isolation from one another. All who emerge from such dialogues are wiser because mutual understanding has been strengthened.”^{Footnote 12}

In the same vein, in 1913, Charles Le Maistre, a British electrical engineer who was the most prominent institutional entrepreneur in the VCSS movement throughout its first half-century, told IEC delegates, “These regular international gatherings, at which many lasting friendships are made between electricians of different nationalities, must undoubtedly be a not unimportant factor in furthering the peace of the World.”^{Footnote 13}

The process Le Maistre and Stewart praised involved deliberation among experts, engineers, representing what we would now call the “stakeholders” in the outcome of the specific standard-setting process. These included the companies that produced the product or process in question as well as those that were its primary purchasers. In that way, the interests of both would come into play. Government departments might, in fact, be represented if they were significant purchasers. In addition, there would be engineers unaffiliated with either group of companies—usually from universities—whose role was to represent the public or “general” interest.^{Footnote 14} This provided a different, and quite explicit, way to balance the various forces whose powers and interests have had such a major influence on outcomes in the realm of intergovernmental standard setting.

It is perhaps curious that two such parallel systems with much the same purpose would have developed at the same time. We know to be suspicious of the simple explanation that one group of organizations, the private ones, were more “technical,” while the public ones were more “political.” Not only have “political” decisions sometimes been made more palatable by calling them “technical,” but democratic legislatures have also had a long history of avoiding decisions on “technical” standards—even something as simple as (in the United States) a standard length of the “inch”—because they disliked harming constituents, including businesses that would have had to absorb the costs of changing to newly instituted standards. Hence, when a private system that could provide needed standards has existed, governments often have deferred to it.^{Footnote 15}

In addition, at the international level at least, the systems were not so separate when they began. Mark Mazower considered the origins of both systems in a chapter of his history of world government entitled “Science the Unifier.”^{Footnote 16} Certainly both systems began with the practice of holding specialized conferences or “congresses” alongside the nineteenth-century European diplomatic conferences (beginning in 1815) and the international exhibitions or world’s fairs beginning in 1851, where, as Richard John points out, the (private) International Postal Association first met. Before World War I, both organizations that eventually became public and those that eventually became private sought sponsors and benefactors among government agencies, European monarchs, private business leaders, and occasionally even labor unions and socialist parties. The secretariat of the (public and post–World War I) International Labour Organization began as the nineteenth-century (private) International Labour Office^{Footnote 17} and the IEC, conceived of at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and negotiated among representatives of private national associations of electrical engineers in London, became definitively private on the insistence of the German engineers.^{Footnote 18}

The real question may be, when did governments insist on being at the table even if the issues being discussed were (seemingly) merely technical? The articles in this special issue suggest some answers: governments insisted when parts of the infrastructure needed to create a larger international system lay in government hands (as was the case with the postal system and most telegraph and telephone systems) and, especially, when linking systems had serious implications for government revenue, as was the case for all but the most civically oriented postal systems and for the adoption of a civic purpose for the global system linked by submarine cables. In the past, governments also seem to have insisted when their own investment would be central to the establishment of the new technology, as appeared to be the case with broadcast radio, and was certainly the case with the early communication satellite system.

It is not yet clear whether these patterns have held with the establishment and regulation of the Internet, where the global system and most of the various national systems have grown in tandem. Certainly the governments of most major Internet-using countries have put relatively small investments in their own Internet infrastructure, and they have derived relatively little revenue from those investments they have made. Not surprisingly, then, John Mathiason, an international civil servant and public policy professor who has written one of the clearest studies of Internet governance, argues that VCSS organizations and “the multi-stakeholder approach to solving problems of Internet governance” have become the norm, which suggests that, in this arena at least, “much of international relations theory, based on realist models, will have to be reviewed.”^{Footnote 19} That may be the case. However, the trends and patterns evident in this special issue’s deep histories of critical events in the globalization of communication suggest that historians of public policy may be developing an alternative and better understanding of the emergence of global governance in this realm.