Connectivity and Geopolitics: Beware the “New Wine in Old Bottles” Approach

Connectivity, Geopolitics, and the Future of International Order

The practice of connectivity itself is as old as human interactions. What is novel is the emergence of connectivity as a strategy with geopolitical implications. Yet, the nature of these geopolitical outcomes needs to be assessed in a context of transition where the liberal international order that predominately shaped global cooperation during the last decades is being increasingly contested. Even before the Covid-19 pan­demic, debates about the liberal international order’s future were dominated by a growing disorientation in politics, economics, as well as academia, creating a confusion that was displayed by a lack of words, concepts, and ideas to describe the ongoing transformation in world politics. The Covid-19 crisis has amplified the per­ception that the inter­national order has indubitably entered an “interregnum” where­by, in Antonio Gram­sci’s words, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

The global health crisis has furthermore illuminated paradoxes that had been con­cealed by some commonly shared assumptions about the liberal international order, globalization, and connectedness. All bor­der controls, travel and mobility restric­tions, as well as digital tracing systems were implemented by democratic and non-demo­cratic governments alike; when global trade and supply chains were radically disrupted, it became strikingly clear that international liberalism does not promote unconditional globalization. Rather, it has been shown that globalization can trigger simultaneously hyper-connectivity and outright dis-connec­tivity. Hence, what governments and organi­­zations with potentially diverging agendas mean by connectivity matters more than ever. Analyzing those various meanings of connectivity is crucial for making sense of the strategies that sustain them and shape the geopolitical dynamics at play in the emerging new world order. The Covid-19 shock has triggered debates about whether we are facing a cycle of rapid de-globaliza­tion and how a possible new Cold War be­tween the US and China might affect it. Such speculation is, in our view, mislead­ing. Connectedness is unavoidable. What should be asked, then, is how one defines it – and more importantly, whether one defines it normatively or not, and how exact­ly it impacts geopolitics. Furthermore, whether one considers connectivity to be a common good or not, these are key ques­tions for the future of international order.

From Random Connections to Meaningful Connectivity

The term connectivity, as we have been using it since the late 20th century, comes from the field of computing. It was at first – and for some still is – a basic notion that simply describes a state or a capacity of being connected. It has pro­gressively encompassed various meanings of connected­ness in diverse sectors, such as manage­ment, finance, trade, energy, urbanism, and education. Yet, from the meta-perspective of human activity, the idea of connectivity is above all a fundamental condition. So what exactly is new?

Firstly, and obviously, the intensity, scale, and impact of connectivity in the early 21st century make it qualitatively dif­ferent from previous states of connectedness. The digital revolution in particular entails a hyper-connectivity that is almost of a different nature. It generates an accel­eration of life and an erosion of known boundaries, as the rapidity of high-tech in­no­vation processes constantly tests existing understandings of power structures, sov­ereignty, and order. Digital connectivity chal­lenges our modes of regulation and governance at all levels, and it radically reshapes the relation between public space and private spheres. In other words, it trans­forms the conditions in which politics takes place.

Secondly, the way we are connected today has led to what Henry Farrel and Abraham L. Newman call “weaponized interdependence.” It describes how actors, mainly states, make strategic use of eco­nomic interdependencies and networks over which they have control. They also share the view that – in a world in which everything can become a matter of war – global networks (financial, commercial, infrastructural, digital, etc.), by increasing interdependencies among states, are actually enhancing the risk of security issues. They point in particular at the possibility to use “asymmetric network structures and create the potential for ‘weaponized interdependence,’ in which some states are able to leverage inter­dependent relations to coerce others.”

The notion of interdependence – very similar to connectivity – is twofold in meaning. Firstly, referring to the actual origin of the term, interdependence was introduced by Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye as a conceptual response to neorealism, in which hard power deter­mines the structure of international rela­tions. Representatives of interdependence, however, underline that more connections also create more security between states. A condition of interdependence is that all involved actors accept the overarching liberal international order. Secondly, in recent years, interdependence has become a political term that policy-makers use to high­light strategic dependences between states. So, it instead emerges as a form of friction. “Weaponized interdependence” is an academic response to that latter ten­dency, pointing to the strategic control of key linkages and connections by key actors.

What should then be stressed here is that connectivity as strategy is different from con­nections that are built randomly or opportunistically. The absence of dis­tinction between the two often hinders the debate about why and how connectivity affects international politics.

Connectivity As Such

Connectivity as such is represented through the operative dimensions of relations – the connections – between human communi­ties by making possible the circulation of people and “things” such as goods, diseases, knowledge, ideas, beliefs, practices. That means that connections do not predefine relations between human communities, but they can shape them. Building a bridge over a river is not a priori a recipe for cooperation, or reversely for conflict, between the communities that are connected, but it will have an impact on their relations. Likewise, the Internet does not, as such, create soli­dar­ity or violence, but it gives form to soli­dary or violent relations. The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing borrows the term “friction” from physics to describe the effects of interconnection whose quali­ties are not fixed but unstable, unequal, and generally unpredictable. To maintain con­nections and keep them inclusive, it takes work. Since societies cannot survive with­out some degree of anticipation and regu­lation, connections, at some point, en­coun­ter policy.

Connectivity Policies

Connectivity policies are almost as old as connections themselves. From urban planning in ancient cities to the infrastructural development of empires, history has shown that organizing and regulating connectivity constitute an intrinsic feature of governing. Ordering connections is there­fore a matter of both efficiency and power. Yet, for a long time, connectivity policies were instead seen as being free from poli­tics, and mostly as affirmative. Two exam­ples: First, connectivity policies are clearly linked to any type of infrastructure policy. Debates about infrastructure projects and related standards are usually depoliticized and mostly looked at from technical view­points.

This leads to the second example. Undoubtedly, standardization processes en­tailed in connectivity policies could be de­fined as mostly politics-free by being deter­mined via technical criteria and moti­vated by a consensual understanding of progress.

Obviously, this affirmative perspective of connectivity policies has been questioned from time to time, and then clearly politi­cized – if we just think of the many protest movements related to huge infrastructure projects – but seldom, and only in recent years, are these places of connectivity seen as a crucial matter of geopolitics. Today, the spatial aspects of infrastructure and stand­ards, among other things, are fundamental for understanding the new realities of the current interregnum of world politics. Archi­tect Keller Easterling boils it down to the essence: “[I]nfrastructure space becomes a medium of what might be called extra­statecraft – a portmanteau describing the often undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in part­ner­ship with statecraft” (emphasis in original). In other words, this will transform con­nec­ted­ness as a basic feature of human activity into connectivity with purpose or connec­tivity (geo)politics.

Three Stages toward the Geopoliticization of Connectivity

Competing Connectivity Meanings

The fact that China’s connectivity politics has prompted Japan, the EU, and also others to design alternative strategies could initially be interpreted along the lines of classic geopolitics “textbook” considerations: the decades of diverging views be­tween Japan and China on regionalism; competition between Europe and China for eco­nomic influence in third countries; and the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a political moniker, which, in Beijing at least, is regarded as a US-led containment strategy against China, but in academic contexts is also discussed as yet another interregional response to the BRI.

These alternative strategies could further be understood, especially from a European or Western point of view, as the expression of a pervasive dread of the actual impact of China’s “rise,” and consequently of what the future world order might look like. Although it looks highly unlikely that the reach of the BRI will encompass Europe all the way to the Atlantic, its materialization through a few projects with some eastern and southern European countries is politi­cally significant. It concurs with a growing euro-skepticism, doubts about the robust­ness of democracy, and distrust about what the EU actually or supposedly represents, and the subsequent opportunistic search for alternatives. The complex dynamics of fear vs. attraction for the “Chinese way” – and distrust vs. faith in the European project and its underlying norms – is similar to a hall of mirrors where one tends to lose sight of the issues at stake.

First and foremost, it is important to re­member that all governments and regional organizations that have been rethinking connectivity policies since the beginning of the millennium share one basic view: Con­nectedness, whether national, regional, or global, needs to be improved in order to address the general problem of growing in­equalities. Building infrastructure has, for decades, been considered a central feature of national as well as global development policies. But it has not resulted in equal development, and there is a greater dis­crepancy now between those who are con­nected and those who are not. The expres­sion “the left-behinds of globalization” is the realization that, in developed and developing countries alike, connectedness has not been evenly distributed.

Beyond the shared understanding of the socio-economic purpose of improved con­nectivity as an instrument for better inclu­siveness, the point of divergence between China and Japan – and more generally between China and liberal powers such as the EU and it political allies – is the matter of implementation. This, in turn, reflects a difference in international projection, and eventually the meaning of connectivity. This difference is twofold: the space of action, and the normative significance of the action.

Conclusion

The geopolitics of connectivity is taking place in an international scene that is notably different from both the Cold War and post–Cold War periods.

Whereas those periods were characterized by either bipolarization or an optimis­tic “End of History” brand of globalization, the present period is marked by a lasting uncertainty, leading not to “a lack of order but rather a semi-ordered system.” The lat­ter defines our current interregnum, which, in turn, has become the primary condition of international politics. Hence, the com­petition of connectivity strategies does not place us, again, in a “new wine in old bottles” situation. Although connectedness is fundamental to human interaction, we somehow have not, in the West, formulated connectivity in political terms. In that sense, the Chinese politicization of connectivity is an important challenge, all the more so because it is unfolding in a global space that the interregnum has rendered remark­ably malleable.

This challenge takes further salience in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, which underpins the need for universal access to today’s means of connectedness, and there­fore a much more inclusive connectivity on a multiplicity of scales. Achieving such in­clusiveness entails a reformulation of con­nectivity as a political value. Liberal powers, and the EU in particular, have a decisive role to play here.

The EU has entered rather recently the new geopolitical scene of competing con­nectivity strategies by making a normative pledge that distinguishes it from the Chi­nese approach and that of China’s partners. The content of this pledge is drawn from a well-established repertoire that has in­formed European development strategies and foreign policy thus far. Breaking with its traditional soft – and not always vocal – approach to normative power, the EU is now making its values and rules-based stance explicit. This move bespeaks several challenges pertaining to Europe’s place in the world – and, beyond, to the way glob­ali­zation is articulated with international order. Although the connectivity strategy is not yet equipped with the appropriate financial resources – for instance, it is not said how (and if) the strategy will be inte­grated in the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2021–2027) – it represents a much needed European rules- and values-based perspective of connectivity. Besides the question of financing, the success of the EU connectivity strategy lies in its ability to proactively shape a new, productive under­standing of the “liberal” in the liberal inter­national order. Shaping connectivity as a po­litical value of Europe – similar to free­dom, democracy, solidarity, rule of law, and mi­nority rights – is thus a necessary first step.

However, this needs a place of exchange where various European perspectives on connectivity can be discussed, an understanding of connectivity as a political value can be formed, and concrete steps for im­plementation are decided. The installation of an Ambassador at Large for Connectivity in the European External Action Service is more of a representative gesture than a clear resource-rich commitment. At this point, two agencies need to be created: firstly, a decision-making body with a solid financial basis that is embedded in the EU bureaucratic framework, similar to a “Coun­cil for Connectivity Affairs”; second­ly, a professional and permanent advisory body such as a “Virtual Hub on Connectivity Politics” that brings together scholars, think tanks, entrepreneurs, workers, industry associations, and political bureaucrats from various European countries. The Virtual Hub would entail at least two layers: one permanent expert platform and a broader network of advisors in which existing EU-financed networks of expertise can be inte­grated (e.g., the EU’s Asia-Pacific Research and Advice Network).

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