Internet, Globalisation and Political Crisis: State Hegemony, Subsidiarity and Supersidiarity

Digital technologies have spurred radical changes in society, mostly due to the deployment of the Internet as a global communication network transcending national boundaries. In this paper, we analyze how the internationalization of telecommunications is leading to the dissolution of traditional state hegemony, characterized by highly centralized and hierarchical authority structures - and how governments are trying to counteract this trend. Despite political doctrine, states have little real incentive to actively practice subsidiarity (a principle demanding that any matter be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized authority capable of addressing that matter effectively). Given that political power ultimately resides with the states, they can choose to move decision making downwards or simply enact decisions and executive actions themselves. Thus, subsidiarity often becomes a question of political motives such as appearance of equitability, populism or redirection of contentious issues, rather than of effectiveness or democracy. The Internet, as a globalized, decentralized community, has a tendency to naturally behave supersidiarily: as opposed to subsidiarity, based on a top-level entity deciding whether to push the decision-making down to the lowest appropriate authority, supersidiarity consists in individuals pushing the decision-making up to larger entities, until the point where the decision can actually be made. Indeed, individuals may not have requisite variety (Ashby) to make decisions, but a sufficiently large group of individuals may. This should provide incentives for the States to implement regulation through subsidiarity, delegating the decision-making powers to smaller entities along the line. What is happening instead is that States are attempting to enforce their former hegemony, and thereby counteract supersidiarity, by using ex-ante regulatory mechanisms, such as surveillance, censorship and filtering technologies. While these are easier to implement than ex-post regulatory mechanisms, binding international treaties and effective enforcement mechanisms, they nonetheless raise serious concerns about proportionality and due process.