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.
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Power and Interdependence in the Information Age
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