For at least fifteen years, an effort has been under way to create a new international regime for technology—for its diffusion and development, its costs and its consequences. The regime itself exists only in vague outline, but it seems already bent on acquiring a character uncongenial to the American technological enterprise and American political values.

In 1963, the United Nations convened a Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less Developed States. The tangible legacy of that meeting was a plethora of United Nations committees and, later, similar conferences on the environment, on deserts, on urban living. The intellectual legacy was to introduce the issue of the worldwide distribution of technological capabilities into the debate over the so-called New International Economic Order. The rhetorical legacy was a call for a New Scientific and Technological Order.

Indeed, the objectives of the first order would appear chimerical without the second. In 1976, the developing countries declared that they wanted 25 per cent of world manufacturing output to be in their hands by the year 2000. As Daniel Bell has noted, achieving this so-called “Lima Target” without disruption would require a steady annual growth of 11 per cent in world industrial output between now and then, or more than twice the 5 per-cent annual growth rates of the unprecedentedly prosperous pre-OPEC years from 1947 to 1973. An alternative to such seemingly impossible growth is for the developing countries, between now and the end of the century, to achieve the political power necessary to bring about a radical redistribution of world manufacturing capabilities. In any event, their predicament is urgent. One measure of it is the forecast by the International Labor Organization that one and a quarter billion people—more than a billion of them in the Third World—will join the world’s work force between now and 2000. Each year, fifty million job seekers—equal to the population of Britain—may need to be accommodated. Any New Scientific and Technological Order should seek to contribute something to the solution of double-digit unemployment.

Meanwhile, however, the new order remains a bureacucratic endeavor, not a productive economic one. The international bureaucracies of the United Nations, and the bureaucracies of the dozens of member states which “interact” with the UN’s widely-scattered secretariats in New York, Nairobi, Paris, Geneva, and Rome, continue their planning in behalf of the technological order in all its aspects. Out of this planning has come the United Nations Conference on Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries, held in Buenos Aires this past September, with more than one hundred states represented. The working documents prepared by the conference’s secretariat assert a connection between the developing world’s inability to generate the technological-industrial base to absorb its future unemployed and the fact of its technological dependence on the Western world. Unhappily, “the present world order has provided no satisfactory solution to these problems . . . [yet] there are relatively few instruments for bringing about change in the present system.”

Interestingly, one encounters no discussion of the real prospects for technological advance and innovation in the developing world. “Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries” becomes instead a framework for a certain kind of political cooperation, designed to strengthen the diplomatic negotiationg power of the states involved, not their scientific and technological bases as such. Thus, in hundreds of paragraphs of the conference’s preparatory materials, one finds no consideration of the political, institutional, or conceptual barriers to economic advance in the Third World itself, save perhaps the offhand observation that “it is vitally important to restructure the legal environment, to recast archaic national laws which impede progress. . . .”

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The meeting in Buenos Aires was but a prelude to a grand United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development, scheduled to convene in Vienna in August 1979. By then, the conference will have been four years in the making, preceded not only by the Buenos Aires gathering but by meetings of the UN regional commissions in Bucharest, Bangkok, and Beirut. “Panels of experts” and preparatory committees will be convened around the world. The American delegation, to be led by Father Theodore Hesburgh, will be supported by special research and studies involving the National Science Foundation, various federal agencies, trade associations, chambers of commerce, and universities; and the White House proposes to launch a new Foundation for International Technological Cooperation (with $50 million).

The American approach is just that—exuberantly American, influenced by the history of “foreign aid” and “technical assistance,” and hence by the assumption that these are what the conference is really about. Thus, one finds no indication that American technological resources can be used to advance important political objectives—even though it is frequently argued that our technological superiority is a trump card that can be played against almost any form of external pressure. Instead, Under Secretary of State Lucy Wilson Benson told a Senate subcommittee last December that the purpose of the conference is “to explore how best to harness science and technology to the process of socioeconomic development.” Father Hesburgh himself has put it that “in simple terms, the goal of the conference is to improve poor people’s lives by finding the best way of bringing the benefits of science and technology to them.”

But the conference secretariat, reflecting the views of its effective employers, lays out a different, more profound, and intensely political agenda. Its statements speak of new concepts about “finite earth,” concepts

distinctly different from human experience of the past—on which the present structure of nations and governments, of trade and commerce, of property rights, of production and growth and of international cooperation and world order are based. . . . There will be a need for wise decisions, radical actions, and the creation of new structures in human relationships. . . . The United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development should bring to the fore the need for new inspired solutions to these fundamental questions. . . .

There is more than a rhetorical gap between the official American understanding of the enterprise and the straightforward presentation of the objectives of the developing world. If the purpose were only to bring the “benefits of science and technology” to poor people, the UN could well have pointed to clear precedents of development in both the “North” and the “South.” Aside from the model of the industrial democracies of Europe and North America, there is the experience of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil. But these cases embody precisely those “older” concepts of “trade and commerce . . . property rights . . . structure of nations and governments” for which the new technological order is offered as a substitute.

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Of all economic institutions, the multinational corporation has had perhaps a decisive hand in “unifying” the world economy and is therefore central to the economic prospects of the developing world. Indeed, as Henry Kissinger once put it, “no country can hope for real, long-term growth if it isolates itself from or systematically attacks an instrument so well suited to deal with the commercial, financial, and technological tasks of the modern world.” Yet an inverse relationship has grown up between the technological productivity of these multinational enterprises and the willingness of the international community to promote them. In recent years, for example, the United Nations has shown an obsessively hostile interest in the activities of Western and Japanese-owned multinational corporations. (Not, however, in Soviet-owned ones, even though the number of such firms in the free world is growing rapidly. There are now almost one hundred, mostly in banking, insurance, shipping, and fishing; they operate as instruments of the Soviet government, but never seem open to suspicion on grounds of “economic penetration for political purposes.”)

In 1972, the Secretary General convened something called the Group of Eminent Persons to study the impact of the multinationals. Their deliberations led to the establishment of the United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations and its research arm, the Center on Transnational Corporations. Proceeding from the premise that “tensions and even conflicts between host countries and transnational corporations are part of the background to the call for a New International Economic Order,” the center has energetically pursued, studied, catalogued, itemized, and computerized the economic activities of the companies. At best, the corporations are viewed as an evil that must be tolerated—at least for a certain period of time—until “host countries” devise ways of generating the technology, expertise, and networks of distribution that the multinationals now provide.

The multinationals, powerful and dynamic, offer a conspicuously successful alternative to the New Economic-Technological Order of things. They also exemplify those qualities of enterprise and individualism identified with the liberal Western order. No wonder, then, that such mainstays of the current technological regime are pursued and harassed. The Center on Transnational Corporations has assumed the task of training officials of “host countries” to confront the companies. During 1977, about 150 officials from more than 30 countries attended center “workshops” held around the world; even Rumania plans to host one. And the center will dispatch its experts on an ad hoc basis upon request—a kind of United Nations business consulting firm in reverse.

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At the heart of this anti-corporate activity is the conviction that technology is spontaneously generated and spontaneously improved, that it can be made available internationally without regard to patent rights, licenses, and the like, and also without regard to the Western values and instincts which produced the great technological growth of the past century. But the truth is that poor countries, which require unprecedented rates of technological and industrial advance, are flirting with disaster when they flirt with a new global “regime” for technological diffusion. A transition from the world of multinational enterprise to a world of globally regulated industry threatens both economic and political progress.

One might reasonably expect American spokesmen to make precisely this point. Instead, others have had to make it for them, and in the most unlikely places. This past November, in Peking, in the midst of growing agitation over China’s future, one wall poster complained, “Why can’t the national economy catch up with the one on Taiwan?” But while the Chinese regime is showing signs of a remarkable open-mindedness, the United States still seems inclined to apologize for taking the “capitalist road.”

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Writing fifteen years ago, the historian William H. McNeill observed that the drastic changes in the relations among the world’s great civilizations had “depended upon the propitious environment offered by a particular set of European institutions and attitudes, without which communications, technology, and science could not have acquired their world-transforming force.” With such honorable and enlightened origins, the technological revolution in our time should point toward freedom and abundance, not to mass pauperization and/or authoritarianism. Unhappily, technology, once the spearhead in the global advance of European values, has become increasingly—even in the place of their birth—an excuse for their abandonment.