The Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy

By Robin Mansell and Marc Raboy

The Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy offers insights into the boundaries of this field of study, assesses why it is important, who is affected, and with what political, economic, social and cultural consequences.

• Provides the most up to date and comprehensive collection of essays from top scholars in the field
• Includes contributions from western and eastern Europe, North and Central America, Africa and Asia
• Offers new conceptual frameworks and new methodologies for mapping the contours of emergent global media and communication policy
• Draws on theory and empirical research to offer multiple perspectives on the local, national, regional and global forums in which policy debate occurs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781444395426

Book preview

Part I

Contested Concepts: An Emerging Field

2

The Origins of International Agreements and Global Media: The Post, the Telegraph, and Wireless Communication Before World War I

Ted Magder

Introduction

"May the Atlantic Telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument of Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty and law throughout the world.

    In this view, will not all nations of Christendom spontaneously unite in the declaration that it shall be forever neutral, and that its communication shall be held sacred in passing to their places of destination, even in the midst of hostilities" – President James Buchanan, Letter to Her Majesty Victoria, Queen of England, August 16, 1858. (McClenachan 1863: 24)

It arrived around noon on August 5, 1858. To the Mayor of New York: Sir – The Atlantic Telegraph Cable has been successfully laid. From: Cyrus W. Field (McClenachan 1863: 19). A simple enough message, sent from Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, announcing the completion of the first telegraph line running underwater between Europe and North America. It touched off quite a celebration. In New York, the festivities lasted weeks: a fireman’s torchlight procession down Broadway, building ornamentations and illuminations, at least one 100-gun salute, a municipal dinner to honor Cyrus Field and his fellow telegraph entrepreneurs, and a succession of fireworks displays sponsored by local notables, one of whom, in spite of all precautions, set fire to the cupola of City Hall (McClenachan 1863). During those same weeks, roughly 400 messages made the passage under the Atlantic. At the best of times, the service was uneven and slow. President Buchanan’s salutatory greeting to Queen Victoria took roughly 16 hours to transmit. Early in September, the cable failed completely. England and the Americas had to wait eight more years for a permanent transatlantic link (Dibner 1964; Kieve 1973).

Though the 1866 cable arrived without the same public fanfare, communication by electrical means was still something of a spectacle. Wherever telegraph operators could be found, people would gather not to send or receive a message but to marvel at the workings of the system. Public assemblies outside the post office were far less common. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the mail had become a routine, taken-for-granted component of daily life, so much a necessity in certain countries, such as the United States (US), that postal stations were required by law to open seven days a week, even on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. The telegraph’s connection to everyday life was less direct. Most people never sent one. More than 90 percent of telegraph traffic consisted of commercial messages, whether business-to-business correspondence or wholesale news reports assembled by agencies such as Reuters, Havas, and Associated Press, and delivered to local newspapers. By the 1860s, the mail had become an affordable means of public communication in many countries. Though telegraph prices dropped over time, telegraphy never became an affordable medium for routine interpersonal communication.

Until nearly World War I, these two modes of communication, paper or wire, were the only effective means to send and receive messages across vast distances. Long-distance communication, increasingly routine and widely available, private, and reliable, emerges as a social phenomenon in the second half of the nineteenth century. Technical innovation had much to do with this: railways to move the mail faster, the propagation of electro-magnetic energy, steamships to lay underwater cables. The capital investment required for each of these innovations flowed readily from private sources and, in many cases, from state treasuries. In the building up of global communication networks, mechanical invention, entrepreneurial capital, and public subsidy worked hand-in-hand (Thompson 1947; Headrick 1981; Hills 2002).

This was also a period of administrative and legal innovation on an international scale, arguably as noteworthy as the harnessing of electricity itself. Together, these two techniques for the distribution of messages, the post and the telegraph, became the basis for the first international agreements to structure the flow of communication across the borders of sovereign states and the first two international organizations dedicated to the task of managing the administrative and technical details of a global network (i.e., the International Telegraph Union in 1865 and the General Postal Union in 1875). These organizations, in conjunction with the various conventions and regulatory protocols under their watch, gave legal and political definition to the first era of global communication. Even today, the postal and telegraphic agreements are integral to the vastly more complicated set of instruments that underpin the contemporary system of global communication.

While the elements that factor into the making of the postal and telegraphic accords run the gamut from personal determination to geopolitics, it is no coincidence that the effort to speed the movement of communication across borders coincides with a period of commercial expansion. Economists of all persuasions agree that the world experienced a massive wave of globalization involving capital, trade and migration, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century and lasting until the outbreak of World War I (O’Rourke and Williamson 1999; James 2001). More than is often recognized, this period of globalization was distinguished by extensive human migration, especially noteworthy in an exodus from Europe roughly equal to the US population in 1870 (Baines 1995). Mobility was easier to imagine and easier to do. Train travel became commonplace and steamships offered a dramatic improvement in the speed and safety of transcontinental voyages. Border controls on the movement of people were limited or non-existent. It is only in the aftermath of World War I that the passport becomes a requisite document for international travel, more symptomatic of a backlash against the easy movement of people across the earth than a sign of a new cosmopolitan spirit (Torpey 1999). And, while most people moved to improve their chances of survival, this period also saw a wave of religious missionary activity to save souls in Africa and Asia, mostly all of it Christian-inspired. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Foreign Parts, for example, took its place beside an ever-growing list of international, nongovernmental organizations consisting of individuals from more than one country with an interest in social reform, starting with the abolition of slavery and running through drug trafficking, prostitution, working conditions, public sanitation, and hygiene (Keane 2003: 47). It is sometimes forgotten that the nongovernmental organization is a nineteenth-century phenomenon (Wallace and Singer 1970).

Much of the increased movement of capital, goods, and people was tied to the commercial and political expansion of certain European countries (Hobsbawm 1989). This was not just an age of globalization. It was an age of empire, very much aided and abetted by faster and more reliable means of transportation and communication. Just how far to stretch the connection between imperial ambition and the development of global communication networks is the subject of debate among media historians (Kennedy 1971; Headrick 1991; Hills 2002; Winseck and Pike 2007). Certainly the link seems fairly intimate, especially if we generalize from the example of the submarine telegraph and its relationship to the vast holdings of the British Empire. At the start of the twentieth century, British firms controlled close to two-thirds of the world’s submarine cables (Headrick and Griset 2001: 571). The British advantage rested on three pillars: first, the unparalleled strength of the British Navy and commercial shipping industry, earned over a few centuries of European wars. Laying submarine cables across an ocean floor required a vessel large enough to carry thousands of miles of cable and engineered to do the job quickly, since cable insulation deteriorates in the open air. Up until World War I, most of those ships were British; one, the Great Eastern, became the undisputed king of submarine cable trawlers. After much trial and error, the preferred form of insulation was identified as gutta percha, natural latex derived from tropical trees by the same name, abundant in the Malay Archipelago, most of which had been colonized by the British. As a result, the British controlled virtually the whole of the world’s supply of gutta percha. For a time, it was more expensive than copper. These advantages were linked to a third: the volume and flow of private venture capital in the city of London, some of it subsidized or guaranteed by Her Majesty’s Government (Brown 1927; Headrick and Griset 2001; Hills 2002).

Yet even in the case of the telegraph, as Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike have argued, the evidence sometimes points as much toward interimperial collaboration as it does toward imperial rivalry (Winseck and Pike 2007: xvii). The British, for example, became quite comfortable with the idea that many of the transatlantic cables were owned and operated by American capital, with the last United Kingdom (UK)-owned cable passing into American hands in 1911. Likewise, the effort to ring the world with a submarine cable that would run exclusively through British territorial holdings – England, Canada, Fanning Island, Australia, Hong Kong, Aden, Suez, Gibraltar – met with less enthusiasm than might be expected from the British state and its navy¹ (Bright 1911; Barty-King 1979: Chapter 5; Boyce 2000). As Winseck and Pike conclude, it seems better to characterize this period as one of both rivalry and collaboration, with shifting alliances and interests along the way. One constant feature of the period is explosive growth in intercontinental investment and trade, and a globalization of the economy, under the sway of new multinational financial and corporate institutions in the private sector. The communication networks served as infrastructure to this period of rapid capital accumulation, with plentiful economic benefits accruing to telegraph companies and international news agencies themselves.

As we shall see, the early international agreements for the post and telegraph were drafted with the interests of the leading political powers and general interests of private capital very much in mind. But the agreements also reflect the maturing form of the modern state – a territorially bounded unit, with authoritative and monopolistic command over legal, administrative and military resources. Many of the states we take for granted as sovereign entities – Germany, Italy, Australia, and China, to name a few – were newly founded during this period (Tilly 1975; Poggi 1978). Participation in the various international meetings and conferences and ratification or accession to the final protocols or conventions was and remains an important symbolic act in the establishment of statehood and a legitimate claim to sovereignty in international relations.

While the legitimacy of the modern state is partly expressed through the capacity to enter into international agreements, the postal and telegraphic accords did more than reinforce the idea (and practice) of sovereignty. Alongside the commercial and political interests that underpinned the internationalization of communication, the political environment was charged with universalisms of many strands – some socialist, some liberal, some scientific, some messianic (Mattelart 2000; Keane 2003: 44–57). The spirit of universalism was evident in the various efforts to standardize the measurements of weight, distance, time, and money, in the push for a worldwide common language (such as Esperanto), in the expositions and fairs trumpeting technological innovation, and in the adoption of the gold standard to ease the international flow of capital. It was also evident in the advancement of international law as a basis for managing the affairs between states, especially the civilized states of Europe, and the proliferation of international organizations. The first of these were bilateral or regional entities, such as the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (1815), and the Superior Council of Health, created in 1838 to reduce the spread of cholera from Asia to Europe via ports in the Ottoman Empire. A flurry of more fully multilateral and international organizations followed the establishment of the General Postal Union in 1875, including the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (1875), the International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1896), the International Geodetic Association and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (1902).² This "esprit d’internationalité " was also embodied in the formation of the Institute of International Law in 1873, a learned society of jurists and scholars with a liberal internationalist orientation, one of whom, Louis Renault, would play a formative role in international law governing submarine cables (Renault 1880; Koskenniemi 2001). The postal, telegraph, and wireless agreements of this period reflect some of this liberal internationalist sentiment. They also reveal a myriad of tensions: some involving nationalist and imperialist aspirations, some involving the nature and pace of capital accumulation, and some involving unease about the value of liberal ideals in relation to the possibilities of communication across frontiers.

The Post

The organized movement of messages across frontiers is as old as the coordinated practice of politics and empire. The words inscribed on the main branch pediment of the New York Post Office – neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds – are those of Herodotus describing the Persian postal system in the sixth century BC (Codding 1964). They could just as easily apply to the Roman cursus publicus or the messenger system of the Mohammedan Caliphs (Eliot 1955). That empires would require a system for the efficient transportation of messages is obvious. But in Europe, after the fall of Rome, the delivery of mail was decentralized and privatized. Monasteries and notable trading cities, like Venice and Genoa, maintained their own networks of couriers toward the end of the Middle Ages. In France, the petits messagers of the University of the Sorbonne in Paris carried the mail for 150 years before a Royal Postal Service was established in the late fifteenth century (Barnard 1955). The most efficient and far-reaching system was a private network operated by the Thurn and Taxis family between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire. In Europe, the demise of these private services is concomitant with the emergence of the modern state. By the time the last Thurn and Taxis operation was nationalized by the Prussian government in the 1860s, most postal systems had become state monopolies. For most states, the added revenue of carrying private letters proved a boon to treasuries. Some treated the post more like a tax than a public service. Of course, carrying private letters also made it possible for the state to keep a watchful eye on the correspondence of its citizens and its enemies when the need arose. In all cases, a postal system that operated as a government monopoly was a formative institution of what was becoming the modern state, an embodiment of the state’s claim to territorial integrity and the management of public life.

In the US, the Post Office Act of 1792 committed the debt-ridden new republic to spend lavishly on a continental network of roads, depots, offices, and local postmasters. By the 1830s, no federal institution, not even the military, employed more full-time employees than the US Postal Service (Roper 1917; Starr 2004). The peculiar feature of this service was that it was less a post of the people and for the people, and more a post of the press and for the press (Kielbowicz 1989). For one thing, publishers and printers were granted the privilege of exchanging their newspapers among themselves free of charge. Newspapers would comprise up to one-third of the mail’s total weight, with each publisher receiving on average more than ten exchange papers a day (John 1995: 37). For another, the cost of mailing a newspaper was much less than the cost of mailing personal correspondence. By design, personal letters subsidized the circulation of newspapers. In 1844, for example, postage on a single-sheet letter traveling 400 miles cost about 25 cents, while newspaper delivery through the mail cost one and a half cents for distances of more than 100 miles, and one cent to travel less than that (John 1995: 36; Henkin 2006: 18, 44). The difference in price was significant enough to encourage subterfuge, marking the margins of newspapers with private correspondence, or underscoring letters or words to avoid the price of private correspondence. The practice was also illegal. Any writing that conveyed an idea to the person to whom the paper was sent, or informed him of a distinct fact, was subject to letter postage, according to the Postmaster General (John 1995: 48). But in spite of legislative attempts to suppress the habit by imposing a fine on the sender and requiring the addressee to pay the (extra) letter postage upon receipt, the subterfuge was widespread (Henkin 2006: 47).

Advocates of postal reform concentrated their efforts on lowering the costs for regular mail and improving delivery time. The British led the way on both fronts, primarily through the dogged efforts of Sir Rowland Hill (Hill and Hill 1880; Coase 1939; Campbell Jr. 1991). Based on a meticulous reading of postal office accounts, Hill concluded that a substantial reduction in the price of posting a letter coupled with the elimination of variable rates based on distance traveled would increase revenues faster than costs. The reforms were introduced in 1840 when Britain issued what is widely regarded as the first postage stamp. Bearing a profile of the 18-year-old Queen Victoria, the Penny Black could be used for any inland letter in the UK. The stamp was one-eighth the price of the previous standard letter rate: one penny for each half-ounce. The surge in mail traffic might have overwhelmed the British Post Office but for a third innovation: prepaid postage. Until 1838, postage was paid upon delivery. Letter carriers had to make personal contact with each addressee, carry cash, make change, and keep a ledger. Hill showed that the postal system would cost less to operate, and operate more swiftly, with a uniform, prepaid stamp, purchased and affixed by the sender. Self-adhesive stamps, front-door mail slots, and sidewalk drop-boxes helped complete the transition. The self-adhesive, penny blacks were mass produced at a cost of 1/260th of a penny on a machine that could make more than two hundred a minute. In the first year, roughly 68 million letters bore the stamp (Robinson 1948: 303–320).

When it is considered how much the religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the people would be accelerated by the unobstructed circulation of letters, wrote Sir Rowland Hill, the post office assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization (Campbell Jr. 1991:17). For Hill, a committed liberal in the Manchester mold, the post office was a means to extend commerce, trade, and rational, public debate. His language was also aligned with the view that European countries had a civilizing role to play in the management of world affairs, a view that underwrote the imperial adventures of Britain (and other states), as well as the efforts of his postal counterparts in Europe and the US, who quickly adopted most of the British innovations in their home territories. The momentum for reform was carried over into the international arena.

While it was certainly possible to use the mail for international correspondence by the mid-nineteenth century, it was not easy. To send a letter from somewhere in the US to somewhere like Moscow, four rates would apply: a domestic rate for passage through the US; sea postage for the Atlantic crossing; transit rates for passage through intermediate countries – France, Prussia, and Poland, in all likelihood; and, finally, the domestic rate for Russia. To communicate with Australia, there were six different routes with six different rates (Hargest 1971). Not surprisingly, the British did have a uniform rate of six pennies per half-ounce for destinations within the Empire. But otherwise a similar patchwork of rates applied: six different letter rates to Constantinople alone; four pennies to France per quarter ounce; and eight pennies to Germany and Holland, in some cases per half ounce, in other cases per quarter ounce. The table of Foreign and Colonial Rates took up 16 pages in the British Postal Guide of 1856 (Williamson 1930: 69–70). Postmasters also faced a dizzying array of weights and measures in the assessment of rates. The gramme in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands; the zolloth in Germany and Austria; and the ounce in Great Britain and its colonies and the US. Maximum dimensions varied as well. In Denmark, no piece of mail could be thicker than two and five-eighths centimeters. In Great Britain, no foreign letter could be thicker than a foot. The whole system was bogged down further by the need to settle accounts country by country, with the mail being sorted and weighed at each border crossing.

The effort to overhaul this patchwork system began in earnest when 15 countries met in Paris in 1863. That only 12 of them still exist – Austria, Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Spain, the US, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland – is a reminder that borders are not static; that recognized states come and go. Of the three that no longer exist, Prussia would become part of Germany, the Sandwich Islands would adopt the name Hawaii and would become part of the US in 1959, and the Hanseatic Towns (places like Lübeck, Deventer, Danzig, and Riga) were on the brink of being absorbed by larger territorial entities. Of the delegates, all but one came from the ranks of foreign affairs or the diplomatic corps. The exception was Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General of the US. The year before, Blair had sent a letter to those countries with which the US shared postal relations, summarizing the byzantine complexity of international mail and urging a meeting.

Many embarrassments to foreign correspondence exist in this and probably in other postal departments which can be remedied only by international concert of action. … Without entering into details, it is evident that the international adjustment of a common basis for direct correspondence, and for intermediate land and ocean transit, and for an international registry system, and for the exchange of printed mail matter, is clearly of the first importance to the commercial and social intercourse between this and other nations. (cited in US 1894: 39–40)

It was another decade before an agreement could be reached: delayed by the Franco-Prussian War; propelled forward by the successful example of regional arrangements (e.g., the Austro-German Postal Union encompassed 16 separate postal administrations); and given final diplomatic momentum when France declared its willingness to proceed with the idea, in spite of the expected burden the country would bear as a main thoroughfare for international mail. The Treaty of Berne was negotiated in 1874 and came into force on July 1, 1875. Because of the speed with which countries signed on, the agreement’s name was changed from the General Postal Union to the Universal Postal Union within three years.

Article 1 of the Treaty, which remains in force to this day, is a simple yet bold declaration. The countries adopting this Constitution shall comprise, under the title of the General Postal Union, a single postal territory for the reciprocal exchange of correspondence between their Post Offices (Treaty 1875: 1). What follows is one of the most remarkable agreements in the history of international relations, without question a major triumph of technical and administrative reform. Since the introduction of the Penny Black in the UK, Rowland Hill’s approach to postal reform had been adopted widely. Convention delegates well understood the importance of paying attention to such details as the collection, sorting, and delivery of the mail. Each step of the way the goal was to reduce transaction costs and standardize protocols. It helped tremendously that the delegates to the second conference were drawn from the ranks of acting postal administrators instead of the diplomatic core. All contracting parties agreed that prepaid postage would become an international norm. More specifically, the sender would pay the full price for international delivery to the originating postal administration in local currency, using a single rate system based on weight but not distance traveled. The gramme was set as the official weight standard; the centime became the baseline currency for postage and accounting purposes.³ Letters less than 15 grammes in weight would be assessed at the general rate of 25 centimes, though as a measure of conversion countries had the option to charge the equivalent of as little as 20 centimes or as much as 35 centimes (Sly 1927: 33).

The movement of mail involves three stages: collection, transportation, and delivery to its final destination. Postal authorities in a number of countries had documented a basic reciprocity in the flow of international mail between countries: letters sent generally receive a reply. Based on this evidence, the contracting parties agreed to deliver each other’s mail to its final destination without charging additional fees.⁴ But as the mail moved from source to destination it often passed through intermediate countries, especially before air transportation became a viable option. The reciprocal exchange of correspondence in the words of Article 1 of the Berne Treaty meant that each nation was obligated to transport mail across its territory sent from one foreign county and destined for another. Mail from the Netherlands destined for Italy would normally travel through France. British mail destined for Japan might arrive in New York for transportation by rail to San Francisco and then by steamer to Yokohama. Countries on the geographic perimeter, such as Britain, were far less likely to carry other people’s mail than countries in the middle of densely populated regions or trade routes, such as France. For transit countries, as they came to be known, the burden of processing and transporting other people’s mail would prove very costly. They insisted on some form of compensation. The right of transit, as laid out in Article 10, bound each country to carry one another’s mail without prejudice or discrimination, using the same routes and schedules as it would for its own mail. International transit of the mail was guaranteed – it was a right – but it was not free.

Transit fees became the focus of considerable debate at Berne. Set too high, they had the potential to spoil the principle of a single worldwide postal territory. Set too low, high-transit countries would not sign the Convention, as France intimated on more than one occasion. The Berne Treaty included detailed provisions for the assessment of transit fees under Article X:

The dispatching office shall pay to the Office of the territory providing the transit the sum of two francs per kilogramme for letters and twenty-five centimes per kilogramme for the several articles specified in Article 4 [i.e., commercial documents, newspapers, books, pamphlets, music, visiting cards, catalogs, etc.] … This payment may be increased to 4 francs for letters and to 50 centimes for the articles specified in Article 4, when a transit is provided of more than 750 kilometres in length over the territory of one Office. (Treaty 1875: 7)

Mail crossing a frontier would have to be classified and weighed. The applicable fee would reflect the distance traveled and the means of conveyance by land or sea. The introduction of a standard scale of measurement and currency would help simplify matters, but the border still presented a bottleneck problem: since the mail is in constant motion, the routine assessment of transit fees would certainly slow things down and raise transaction costs. The solution was an early and elegant example of periodic statistical averaging: twice each year, for seven consecutive days, postal employees would weigh transit mail at border crossings, estimate routings, and calculate the relevant transit fees (Sly 1927: 420, 434; Campbell 1991).

The transit fee solution was a political compromise. The Berne Treaty and subsequent postal agreements contain a number of provisions that are both diplomatically shrewd and legally dexterous. In the first place, membership was made easy. Until it fell under the scope of the United Nations as a specialized agency after World War II, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) was an open union. Member-ship was automatically bestowed once a country declared its intention to abide by the Convention and its regulations. Doing just so became one of the earliest practical and symbolic acts for new states (see Williamson 1930: 71). Growth was rapid – from 22 countries in 1875, to 37 in 1878, to 71 members in time for the 1906 meeting in Rome. On the eve of World War I, membership was universal, except for a few small island states in the Indian and Pacific oceans (Williamson 1930: 71; Codding 1964: 80–81). The UPU also adopted provisions to give non-independent entities – colonies and protectorates – membership status, though their votes generally were controlled by the imperial power. To this day, one of the more notable provisions of the postal Convention is the recognition that members can band together to create regional or restrictive unions, provided that such unions do not reduce the benefits that can be obtained under the basic Convention. One of the first and largest of these is the Pan-American Union founded in 1911. By 1931, it included Spain, the US, Canada, and all the countries of South and Central America. One of its first acts was to eliminate transit fees for mail circulating between Member States (Brauns-Packenius 1962; Codding 1964: 229–31; Menon 1965: chapter 5).⁵

The UPU’s prudence is also evident in its arbitration procedures for disputes and openness toward optional clauses and exceptions under certain circumstances. One example will have to suffice. Shortly after joining the Postal Union, the kingdom of Persia raised a substantive objection to the axiomatic assumption that no country should be compensated for delivering mail to its final destination, since the flow of mail between any two countries is roughly equal in volume over time. The episode is retold by Leonard Woolf in a work commissioned by the British Fabian Society: But now it is found, recounts Woolf:

that the kingdom of Persia stands in a curious relation to the kingdom of Great Britain and the Republic of the United States. The former is inhabited by Mohammedans, the two latter by Christians. British and American Christians have a passion for sending Bibles to the Persian Mohammedans, while the Persian never sends his Koran to Britain or America. Moreover, in Persia there are no railways, and transport is by camel, and extremely expensive. … The British and American Administrations retain all the postage on hundreds of Bibles dispatched by their Christian subjects. All the year round the Persian Administration has to provide at great costs strings of camels to convey the stream of foreign Bibles to its subjects. For doing this it gets no return, and meanwhile the Persians neglect to send letters or Korans to foreigners, the postage on which would be retained by their own Administration. (Woolf 1916: 204)

The response to Persia’s concerns came in the form of an appended service regulation to the 1906 Rome Convention permitting Persia to levy a 5 centimes tax on each packet distributed to a final destination within its territory. The 1906 Convention is also noteworthy for the provision to allow free correspondence for prisoners of war. Switzerland, which together with Sweden was given the task of fulfilling this provision, handled over 500 million letters and 92 million packages during World War 1 (Codding 1964: 46). After a life of over 40 years, Woolf wrote in 1916, the UPU remains the most complete and important example of international administration (Woolf 1916: 205).

The Telegraph

Multilateral and regional agreements to manage cross-border transmission by electric telegraph were almost coincident with its first uses in mainland Europe. By the time the Dover to Calais cable under the English Channel became operative in 1851, Prussia, Austria, Saxony and Bavaria had created the Austro-German Telegraph Union. Over the next three years, France signed bilateral accords with Belgium, Switzerland, Sardinia and Spain, respectively. These countries, together with The Netherlands and Portugal, created the Western European Telegraph Union in 1858 (Codding 1952: 13–20). As was the case with international mail, the borders between states posed a challenge, in part, because telegraph systems on the European continent were financed and operated as state enterprises from the start. Frontier border stations were staffed by government operators from each country: telegraphs from Paris, for example, would be received at Strasbourg by a French telegraph operator, handed to a German telegraph operator conveniently housed in the same location, who would translate the message into German, turn it back into Morse code, and send it along to Berlin (Codding 1952: 14 fn 56). Similar human relay systems at other border crossings slowed the speed of a telegraph message, its most valuable attribute. The European unions of the 1850s addressed this problem head-on by requiring each contracting party to provide telegraph lines designed exclusively for international correspondence, eliminating the necessity for frontier operators. These agreements also established standard administrative procedures for classifying and pricing international telegraphs and outlined technical details for interconnection, many of which informed the meeting in Paris that culminated in the creation of the International Telegraph Union.

British and American delegates were notably absent from the 1865 Paris meeting because in both countries, unlike the post office, the telegraph system was in private hands. International agreements were understood to be affairs of state. Private individuals, no matter their social status or corporate wealth, had no right to participate in the proceedings. In the continental US, Western Union was already hard at work securing its monopoly status, warding off multiple efforts to have the telegraph come under the arm of the federal government, and negotiating attractive partnerships with other emerging corporate entities such as the Associated Press (Thompson 1947; Czitrom 1982; Blondheim 1994). In the UK, Parliament nationalized the domestic telegraph system in 1870 and handed it over to the British Post Office. Much of the public money paid in compensation to private operators was poured into submarine cables. Worldwide, most domestic telegraph systems were operated by governments, but the trans-oceanic and transcontinental cables that connected these domestic systems were in private hands. It was hard to imagine a viable set of international rules and standards without their participation. As a result, from the 1870s onward private companies were given observer status at all conventions and were included as discussants at all administrative and technical meetings. They could also pledge adherence to the conventions and their accompanying service regulations.⁶ Needless to say, private operators became keen participants in all proceedings, working effectively to establish a standardized system for international telegraph traffic that increased overall traffic without any significant restrictions on rates. Unlike the relatively low cost for international mail, the telegraph agreements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did next to nothing to make telegraphy more affordable, except for those governments that negotiated reduced rates for government correspondence in exchange for cable-landing rights and monopoly privileges.

The core principles of the International Telegraphic Union received their fullest expression in the St. Petersburg Convention of 1875, which remained in place for the next five decades.⁷ The first two articles read as follows:

Article 1

The High Contracting Parties recognise the right of all persons to correspond by means of the international telegraphs.

Article 2

They undertake to adopt all the necessary measures to ensure the secrecy and prompt dispatch of telegrams’. (Nelson 1913: 54)⁸

The St. Petersburg Convention marks the first occasion that the phrase "droit de correspondre" appears in an international document. A cynic might claim that Article 1 reflects a well-worn tradition in international law of proposing an individual or social right that then goes unheeded and unmet. Even at the turn of the century, the telegraph’s pricing regime was such that this right to correspond was beyond the means of the vast majority of the population and was used only in cases of dire emergency or personal tragedy. Still, in the longue durée of international law, the "droit de correspondre" is the first effort to articulate something approximating a right to communication across borders.

The Convention’s commitment to the privacy of correspondence is equally noteworthy and similarly subject to practical and political considerations. In postal matters, the sanctity of private correspondence was a well-earned, though not inviolate, social value and political right. In the US, postal regulations have treated unauthorized letter opening as a criminal offence from the time of the very first Postal Act. By 1800 postal workers in the UK could only detain and open private correspondence under an explicit warrant from a government minister. The practice was uncommon, as indicated by a parliamentary review in the 1840s following revelations that the Home Secretary was reviewing the private correspondence of Giuseppe Mazzini, a leader of the Italian nationalist movement then exiled in London (Turner 1918; Seipp 1983). In the mid-nineteenth century, two more innovations contributed to the privacy of postal correspondence: the elimination of an extra charge for letters placed in a sealed envelope, and the introduction of pre-gummed envelopes that could be sealed without the use of wax (Robinson 1948: 299–300).

The logistics of telegraph communication posed a special challenge to private correspondence because of the unavoidable moment when telegraph operators read and transcribed each message before handing it off – and often sealing it – for delivery. For telegraph users, the only option comparable to a sealed postal envelope was the use of some secret code that telegraph operators could not decipher. None of the delegates at St. Petersburg was prepared to embrace an absolute right to privacy or secrecy. The Convention had this to say on the matter:

Article 6

Government and service telegrams may be sent between all countries in secret language. Private telegrams may be exchanged in secret language between two States which admit that class correspondence.

Article 7

The High Contracting Parties reserve to themselves the right of stopping the transmission of any private telegram which may appear dangerous to the safety of the State, or which may be contrary to the laws of the country, to public order, or decency. (Nelson 1913: 55)⁹

These two articles make it abundantly clear that national security and the authority of the state to preserve order and morality take priority over the rights of any private individual or corporation. Any lingering doubt about the state’s paramountcy is resolved by additional regulations requiring that all code books and private ciphers be placed on deposit with a designated government office. While telegraph operators themselves would not necessarily have access to the original codebooks, all messages – whatever their purpose or place of origin – are potentially subject to government oversight. In this regard, the St. Petersburg Convention provides shadowy confirmation of the nineteenth and early twentieth century cabinets noirs (or black chambers) where political operatives worked in secret, monitoring both personal and diplomatic correspondence (Yardley 1931; Kahn 1996). National security issues, or the safety of the state as it is phrased in Article 7, are far more evident in international negotiations concerning the telegraph than the mail. Notably, the St. Petersburg Convention provides the first enunciation of the principles that can be invoked by contracting parties to limit their legal commitment to a seamless network of private, international communication. The safety of the state provides one justification. Public order, good morals, and the laws of the country are others. These phrases, mutatis mutandis, became part of the basic lexicon of international treaties and agreements.¹⁰

The telegraph brought the tension between security and networked communication into the open in part because of its speed, but also because the use of code became commonplace. Code, in this case, does not refer to Morse’s system of dots and dashes, but to plain words or uncommon combinations of letters that have to be deciphered to be comprehensible. Given its expense, and because the price of a telegraph message was calculated not by time or weight but by the word, code was used as much for economy as for secrecy (US 1929; Codding 1952: 65–75). Over time it spawned a booming side-business in the publication of codebooks such as The Adams Cable Codex or Bentley’s Complete Phrase Code (nearly 1,000 million combinations with at least 2 letters difference between each half-code word, according to its preface).¹¹ In an effort to boost traffic among the general public, the Eastern Telegraph Company published a social code book (Barty-King 1979: 147). The increasingly common use of coded messages became a major preoccupation of telegraph conventions, conferences, and special committees. Until 1875, telegraph operators would accept messages in any of the major European languages, with a minimum price for all messages up to twenty words and with no word to exceed seven syllables. At St. Petersburg, delegates pointed out that certain languages, like German, easily accommodate long and elaborate compound words, creating international inequities in the labor required to translate plain words into transmission code. After much debate, the St. Petersburg delegates agreed to define words according to a character limit: 15 characters for inter-European communication and ten characters for extra-European messages (US Foreign Relations 1875: vol. II, 1070–1074; US 1929). Later, ten characters became the maximum allotted per word. Added service regulations providing details about the use of vowels and consonants, the pronounceability of the words, and a list of the eight languages that could be used to determine pronounceability: German, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin.¹²

The St. Petersburg Convention was silent on one other issue of considerable importance to governments and commercial operators: the treatment of submarine cables on the high seas, outside the territorial jurisdiction of any one state.¹³ There were two main concerns: first, accidental damage caused to cables by fishing trawlers and other vessels; second, the status of cables in the event of war. The US was an early advocate for a treaty that would guarantee the neutrality of submarine cables during wartime. Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Telegraph Company had financed the first transtlantic cables, broached the idea at the 1871 Rome conference, with a written endorsement from Samuel Morse expressing the hope that in war as in peace the telegraph in the air and in the sea should be considered a thing sacred, protected by universal agreement against all attack and damage (Clark 1931: 127). Facing the possibility of financial ruin if cables were damaged or seized, either by accident or on purpose, private companies rallied behind the need for a convention. The Institute of International Law endorsed the position that destruction or injury of a cable on the high seas should be an offense against the law of nations, similar to piracy, but remained silent on the treatment of submarine cables during wartime. When an agreement was finally reached, it included provisions for compensation in the event of accidental or intentional damage, and details on the search and policing procedures to be used on the high seas. But the rules regarding compensation were only applicable during peacetime (Woolsey 1905; Higgins 1922). Blanket neutrality was decidedly unpopular among the core European powers – Britain, France, and Germany. When the International Convention for the Protection of Submarine Cables came into effect in 1888, after more than twenty years of discussion, Article 15 was unambiguous on the issue: It is understood that the stipulations of this convention shall in no wise affect the liberty of action of belligerents (Malloy 1910: 1954, Volume II).¹⁴

There would be no shortage of test cases, beginning with the Spanish–American War. Shortly after the start of hostilities, the US Navy severed all cables running to and from Cuba, as well as the main cable lines connecting the Philippines to Hong Kong. Most of the lines were owned by British companies, which sued unsuccessfully for compensation (US Foreign Relations 1883; Benton 1908; Higgins 1922: 30). Cable cutting was also one of the first significant – and pre-planned – acts of World War I. The British and French cut the German cables in the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea on August 4, 1914, the very first day of the war, including those running from Germany to the US. One of the German cables was towed to Penzance on the south coast of England; the French attached their spoil of war to a telegraph station in Brest. In both cases, the western end was still connected to the US. The only means of direct and speedy communication between Germany and the US was provided by two still radiotelegraphic stations on the eastern coast of the US – one in Saville, Long Island, the other in Tuckerton, New Jersey – both owned and operated by German firms and capable of communication with wireless stations on the German mainland or ships at sea (Wilke 2004). Heated diplomatic correspondence with the British, French, and Germans convinced President Wilson to issue a series of Executive Orders putting those stations under US control with Navy censors on the watch for messages of an unneutral nature (US Foreign Relations Supplement 1914: 667–681; Howeth 1963: espec. Chapters 16–20).

Wireless

Eventually cable’s monopoly on fast, long-distance communication would be challenged by wireless communication. In the pre-war period, radio was still very much an experimental technology: the Sayville and Tuckerton stations, for example, were unable to send voice transmissions and could send only about fifty words an hour. But radio’s potential for mobile, long-distance communication had already captured the attention of commercial and military interests, especially as a means of point-to-point communication between shore stations and ships at sea. Only two years separated the first successful transatlantic signaling by the Marconi Company and the first International Radiotelegraphic Conference, held in Berlin in 1903.

Nearly synonymous with the early uses of radio, the Marconi Company moved quickly to negotiate exclusive contracts with the British and Italian navies, the Cunard line of passenger ships, and Lloyd’s of London, the world’s most prominent maritime insurance company. The Lloyd’s contract included the stipulation that Marconi operators would neither transmit nor receive messages from any other radio apparatus (Douglas 1987: 70). Marconi claimed that exclusive contracts were necessary to cover his exorbitant research and development costs; he also claimed that his radio apparatuses would not work properly with other machines or systems, a claim that was most certainly false. Marconi was trying to corner the market for wireless telegraphy and his company’s policy of exclusivity put the issue of monopoly firmly on the international agenda. Even by 1903, the Marconi Company had become the focus of suspicion and criticism from high-ranking public officials, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and senior US naval officers, as well as a long list of would-be competitors in the market for radio communication.

At the Berlin conferences of 1903 and 1906, German and US delegates insisted on the principle of interoperability. All other issues were secondary. The 1903 conference revolved around a German proposal that radiotelegrams coming from and sent to ships shall be received and transmitted without regard to the system employed (Tomlinson 1945: 14). At the 1906 Berlin meeting, the US pushed to extend the principle of interconnection to include ship-to-ship as well as ship-to-shore communication. The British pushed back at every opportunity. When it became apparent that ship-to-shore communication would be adopted at the 1906 meeting, the British pressured delegates to table the language on ship-to-ship communication.

Though Marconi’s business practices made interconnection a commercial issue, it was also widely regarded as a humanitarian issue. The 1906 International Wireless Telegraph Convention is notable for the inclusion of language concerning safety at sea and the humanitarian uses of radio communication. In the midst of growing hostility among the leading European powers, Article XVI of the service regulation was a poignant reminder of a lingering "esprit d’internationalité." It reads:

XVI

Ships in distress shall use the following signal:

… _ _ _ …

repeated at brief intervals.

As soon as a station perceives the signal of distress it shall cease all correspondence and not resume it until it has made sure that the correspondence to which the calls for assistance has given rise is terminated. In case the ship in distress adds at the end of the series of her calls the call letters of a particular station the answer to the call shall be incumbent on that station alone. If the call for assistance does not specify any particular station, every station perceiving such call shall be bound to answer it. (Malloy 1913: 2907, Volume III)¹⁵

For those schooled in the arcane language of telegraph regulations the intent was clear enough. Once an S-O-S signal was received, shore stations were to focus all their attention on the ship in distress, without regard to nationality or cargo. Article XVI was given added force when the British withdrew their objection to ship-to-ship communication after the Titanic disaster of 1912. By then, the British were inching ever closer to endorsing a blanket principle of interoperability. That two nearby ships did not communicate with the Titanic, one because it did not have a wireless set, the other because its only wireless operator was asleep, made it hard to argue with the humanitarian value of interconnection (Tomlinson 1945: 27–46; Douglas 1987: 227–228).

The early radiotelegraphic conventions are noteworthy for one more foundational feature of global communication: spectrum management. German and American delegates took the lead in the decision to allocate the wavelengths of the electro-magnetic spectrum to different services, proposing to reserve the largest – and best – part of the spectrum for government and military uses, which were also exempt from the interconnection requirements. After the war, wavelength allocation would become the main preoccupation of international negotiations, as the uses of radio multiplied in the twenties to include aeronautical communication, meteorological services and broadcasting.

The Horizon

A little more than a year after the end of World War I, US newspapers carried some curious headlines: U.S. Navy Bars Western Union, Sub-Chaser’s Shot Stops Cable Ship: Crew Are Arrested (Atlanta Constitution 1920; New York Times 1921). Five US warships patrolling the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay were under orders to prevent the connection of a submarine cable linking Western Union’s coastal station in Miami, Florida with stations in the Caribbean. This was no trifling matter. The US State Department was concerned that Western Union, with a monopoly on domestic telegraph traffic in the US, was entering into an alliance with the British-owned Western Cable Company to control telegraph traffic between North and South America. The standoff in Biscayne Bay lasted almost a year. In Washington, the incident led to a major Congressional hearing that culminated in legislation confirming the President’s sole authority to grant (or revoke) cable-landing rights (US 1921; Wilson 1922). It was just one dramatic sign that the politics and regulation of international communication were not yet settled matters. There were others: At Versailles, the Allies were at odds over how to divvy-up the German cables, with the US and Japan engaged in a drawn-out dispute over the island of Yap, virtually uninhabited and therefore quite useful as a cable landing station in the Pacific Ocean. One of the US negotiators at Versailles was Walter Rogers, who also served as technical advisor on communications to President Wilson and the State Department. Rogers pushed for the idea of a conference to create a Universal Electrical Communications Union. The time had come, said Rogers at the Congressional hearings into cable licenses, for a world-wide survey of communications in all aspects of the problem (US 1921: 361; Rogers 1922). The Council of Five – Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the US – agreed to meet in Washington to consider all international aspects for communication by land telegraphs, cables, and wireless telegraphy, … with a view to providing the entire world with adequate facilities … on a fair and equitable basis (US 1919: 2).

The postal and telegraph conventions and administrative protocols dating from the mid-nineteenth century had established a series of principles and precedents to build on. It was obvious that international communication required an international legal and regulatory framework; it was equally obvious that this quasi-juridical infrastructure would reflect the conflicting, sometimes incompatible, interests of imperial rivalry, national self-interest, commercial ambition, and human rights. Foundational to all these agreements was the idea of interconnectivity and the creation of a common set of technical and administrative standards to ease the movement of messages across borders. These standards ran the gamut from weights and measures in the case of the postal agreements, to the currency of exchange on which transit fees and pricing would be based, to the technical details of the apparatuses used to connect the terminal points of telegraphy, whether line-based or wireless. Of course, behind each of these practical measures, the commercial interests of private capital jockeyed for position alongside the imperial ambitions of certain states and the security concerns of virtually all states. There was nothing in these agreements that profoundly negated the ambitions of the modern, sovereign state. If anything, the reluctance to offer blanket protection to submarine cables during wartime, and provisions which allowed states to police incoming and outgoing messages in the interests of morality, order, and security were unambiguous enunciations of the prerogatives of sovereignty. Still, we would be unwise to interpret these agreements solely as instruments of dominance and power, whether in the form of sovereignty or of global capital. The St. Petersburg Convention, for example, went so far as to declare a general right to correspondence. Early wireless agreements revolved – in part – around the importance of protecting human life at sea. While international instruments enable the modern state and global markets, they also limit the capacity of states and capital to act without regard for others.

Any optimism that a new spirit of internationalism would prevail in the 1920s was quickly dashed. Between the two world wars, nationalism became virulent, states became more isolationist, and global trade slowed to a trickle. The prospects for any sort of universal electrical communications union were bleak. Even as it was taking place, the scuffle between Western Union and the US government over submarine cables was becoming something of an anachronism. Radio was swiftly emerging as an instrument of international communication, not only for point-to-point communication but also as a mechanism for broadcasting to the general public. And radio, far more than the post or the telegraph, would challenge the capacity of states to police their communication frontiers. We are confronted with an entirely new situation of radio between countries, Walter Rogers explained at the Congressional cable landing hearings, and if the basic reason for requiring permits to a cable company is to control communication between two countries … we cannot dodge the fact that we are heading for trouble here because we have no laws dealing with the international radio traffic (US 1921: 45). Radio became the focus of attention and the draft proposal for a Universal Electrical Communications Union was put aside.

Notes

1 The Pacific Cable was completed in 1902. Except for a short detour through the US, it circled the rest of the world via territory belonging to the British Empire.

2 Just before the outbreak of World War I, there were 49 intergovernmental organizations in operation (Jacobson 1984). To these should be added over 400 international voluntary, or nongovernmental associations, including the International Association for the Suppression of Useless Noises and an International Association for the Rational Destruction of Rats (Woolf 1916: 165–167).

3 Use of the gramme and the centime represented a small triumph for the adoption of a worldwide metric system based on revolutionary ideals. It is worth noting that French was also the official language of discussion and record at Berne and at early meetings of the International Telegraphic Union. English had not yet become the lingua franca of international affairs.

4 Article IX of the Berne Treaty states: Each Administration shall keep the whole of the sums which it collects … Consequently, there will be no necessity for any accounts between the several Administrations of the Union (Treaty of Berne 1875). Terminal dues, as they are known in the lexicon of postal administration, did not become a feature of international mail until 1969. James Campbell reports that actual local delivery costs differ by as much as a factor of 16 (Campbell Jr. 1991: 12; 2002).

5 It is now referred to as Postal Union of the Americas, Spain and Portugal (PUASP); members include: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Suriname, the US, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The Arab Postal Union, created in 1954, also abolished transit fees among its members. At the time of writing, there are 17 such restricted unions.

6 Ten private companies participated at the Vienna meeting of 1868, including the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, the Great Northern China and Japan Extension Telegraph Company, and the British Indian Extension Telegraph Company (Codding 1952: 26 fn. 117).

7 Returning Delegates included: Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Persia, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. Great Britain – having nationalized its domestic system – was represented for the first time. Egypt was given standing independent of Turkey. Romania, Luxembourg, and Serbia were absent but later ratified the Convention. Japan and the US sent observers (Codding 1952: 27 fn. 124). By 1908, membership had grown to 52 countries and 25 private companies. In 1885 Western Union became the first US company to participate in ITU deliberations. By 1925, all the major US companies were active participants – including AT&T and RCA – though the US itself was not a member of the Union.

8 Article 1 in the original French reads: Les Hautes Parties contractantes reconnaissent à toutes personnes le droit de correspondre au moyen des télégraphes internationaux. Article 2 reads: Elles s’engagent à prendre toutes les dispositions nécessaires pour assurer le secret des correspondances et leur bonne expédition (see Nelson 1913: 54).

9 In the original French document the last phrase of Article 7 reads: ou qui serait contraire aux lois du pays, à l’ordre public ou aux bonnes mœurs. Bonnes mœurs is rendered as good morals in most translations.

10 For example, Article XIV, the General Exceptions clause of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), includes the following language: Subject to the requirement that such measures are not applied in a manner which would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where like conditions prevail, or a disguised restriction on trade in services, nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to prevent the adoption or enforcement by any Member of measures: (a) necessary to protect public morals or to maintain public order; (World Trade Organization 1994).

11 Using Bentley’s Complete Phrase Code, the 13-word message, referring to your telegram of 20th avoid legal proceedings settle on best terms could be sent as two words: ugtobattof japnarebug, with each word consisting of two five-letter code words (ugtob = referring to your telegram of the 20th + attof = avoid). In accordance with the rules concerning the use of coded messages, the title page notes that this code includes the Telegraph Cyphers entered according to the Act of Congress in the year 1906, by E. L. Bentley, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington D.C. (see Bentley’s Complete Phrase Code 1906).

12 The eight languages were fixed at the London Conference in 1879, but only for extra-European regimes. Inter-European communication could be in any recognized European language until 1885. During that six-year period, senders of messages in extra-European regimes could use any of the eight languages in the same message. The effort to simplify matters led to a decade-long effort to produce a standard code dictionary in four volumes and consisting of more than one million words from all eight languages. The work was abandoned in 1903; see: Explanations by the Belgian Delegation: Report of the Subcommittee on Tariffs to the Telegraph Conference of Paris, 1925 in US (1929: 35–40).

13 International telephone service received very little attention prior to World War I, primarily because