Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 1Techno-Nationalism

This book is about how governments pursue technology as a power multiplier and how tech-competition between nations is reshaping global affairs in the twenty-first century.

Call it ‘techno-nationalism;’ a mindset that equates the technological prowess of a state’s chosen actors with the strength of its national security, its economic prosperity and its social stability. Techno-nationalism seeks to attain competitive advantage for its stakeholders, on a local and global scale, and to leverage this advantage for geopolitical gain.

This is not a new phenomenon. As long as there have been nation-states, especially with the evolution of modern states in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, governments have sought to harness the power of technology to advance their interests.

It was the French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who famously wrote: ‘Every nation is selfish, and every nation considers its selfishness sacred’.

The twentieth century saw firsthand the effects of techno-nationalism with two of the bloodiest, most definitive wars in history, a forty-year Cold War between America and the former Soviet Union, a race in space and to the Moon, a nuclear arms race, the rise of computers and artificial intelligence, and the beginnings of geopolitical competition linked to the semiconductor.

Robert Reich used the term ‘techno-nationalism’ in a piece for The Atlantic in 1987, in which he reflected on its paradoxical nature. At the time, the U.S. ...