Lunch Hour Lecture with Professor Blayne Haggart

‘Our trading partners may call it protectionism’: The global political economy of knowledge and the emergence of digital economic nationalism

Currently, the conventional wisdom regarding digital governance, held by tech companies and many digital-rights advocates, emphasizes the need for and desirability of free cross-border data flows, free markets and minimal state regulation.

However, this approach is increasingly being challenged by (often non-American) companies and states on the grounds that such policies invite American dominance. In its place they advocate for digital economic nationalism, which emphasizes the need for domestic control over data and intellectual property, backed by greater government economic intervention. This approach stands in contrast to the neoliberalism that has dominated digital economic policy and the wider global political economy since the 1980s.

Drawing on Robert W. Cox’s notions of hegemony and the state-society complex and Susan Strange’s conception of structural power, Dr. Haggart explores the origins of digital economic nationalism, its potential as a counterhegemonic ideology, and its implications for the exercise of power in the global political economy. Specifically, it examines policy interventions by the Council of Canadian Innovators, a business-led technology association that has been active in Canadian tech debates. Its approach offers a useful articulation of a policy that stands in contrast both to what French President Emmanuel Macron refers to as the free-market “California internet” and the authoritarian “Chinese internet” models.