Contemporary regulation of new digital technologies by nation-states unfolds under a darkening shadow of geopolitical competition. Three recent monographs offer illuminating and complementary maps of these geopolitical conflicts. Folding together insights from all three books opens up a new, more perspicacious understanding of geopolitical dynamics. This perspective, informed by all three books under consideration here, suggests grounds for skepticism about the emergence of a deep regulatory equilibrium centered on the emerging slate of European laws. The area of overlap will be strictly limited to less important questions by growing bipolar geostrategic conflict between the United States and China. Ambitions for global regulatory convergence when it comes to new digital technology, therefore, should be modest.
International Law
In the US constitutional system, the executive branch generally conducts foreign relations. But in recent years, the nonexecutive branches—the judiciary and Congress—have challenged the exclusivity of the president’s authority to conduct foreign relations by opening direct channels of communication with foreign governments’ executive branches.
Political sociologist Claus Offe has diagnosed the participatory deficit in North Atlantic democracies as the product of an imbalance in state–market relations. When the market is supreme, public policy can do little to constrain the market’s ever-expanding realms.
The European Union was founded in the 1950s as an experiment in postwar regional integration, in part to help rebuild national economies damaged by World War II through economic integration, and in part to ward off, by means of closer legal and political integration of states, the threat of totalitarianism and Soviet expansion.
In his farewell address, George Washington urged that “[t]he great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is . . . to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
On a December morning in 2015, H.A. left early from his home in central Gaza to tend to his fields of wheat, barley, peas, and fava beans a couple hundred meters from the Israeli border fence. He arrived to find a low-flying Israeli aircraft spewing a thick, white substance over his farmland as it traveled south along the Palestinian side of the divide.