Toward an Ethnography of Grand Visions

Zane Cooper is one of the ten 2017 Milton Wolf Emerging Scholar Fellows, an accomplished group of law, doctoral and advanced MA candidates selected to attend the 2017 Milton Wolf Seminar. Their posts highlight the critical themes and on-going debates raised during the 2017 Seminar discussions.

On April 26th, the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy convened for a two-day discussion on the myth, reality, legacy, and future of the European Recovery Program (a.k.a. The Marshall Plan). Often cited as the one of the greatest foreign policy successes in U.S. history (Ellwood, 2006), the Marshall Plan has become a benchmark from which to assess and prescribe international economic development endeavors. Ever since the Marshall Plan helped resurrect Europe from the ashes of world war, there have been myriad subsequent calls for analogical efforts in other distressed regions of the globe. However, these plans often come up short, and eventually wither into dust. Africa has weathered a number of these. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher proposed an unrealistic “Marshall Plan for southern Africa” (Plaut, 2016), and in 2016, seemingly in conflict with the more molecular endeavors of the burgeoning African Union, Germany proposed its own Marshall Plan for Africa – an apparent effort to expand trade and collaboration, but whose ulterior motives seem to be to decrease migrations to Europe (Pham, 2017). China has also adopted the architecture of the Marshall Plan’s “grand vision” to erect its One Belt and One Road (OBOR) initiative – an ambitious plan to subsidize the modernization and connection of most of the world through massive media and transportation infrastructure projects. Over sixty countries have become involved in this plan since 2015 (Jinchen, 2016), and, unlike the Marshall Plan’s explicit Soviet exclusion, China invites any interested nation to take part in this endeavor. Moreover, OBOR has also inherited the propagandistic legacy of the Marshall Plan, releasing online video campaigns targeted to the English-speaking world.  

While OBOR drew initial inspiration from the Marshall Plan, important differences exist between the two. OBOR represents, by far, the most ambitious attempt at global infrastructural transformation in modern history, its total estimated investment far exceeding that of the original Marshall Plan (Jinchen, 2016). However, where OBOR differs most is in its self-awareness as a grand vision. While the success of the Marshall Plan was predicated on faith in specific ideas of western (mostly American) progress, there never existed a discrete or fully realized plan of any kind (Ellwood, 2006); instead, as David Ellwood discussed during the seminar, the Marshall Plan began simply as a “balance adjustment exercise”, its status as a comprehensive “plan” imposed on it only in hindsight. The program itself was relatively short-lived – conceived, implemented, and ended within four short years (1947-1950) (Ellwood, 2006). The memory and legacy of the Marshall Plan have far outlasted its actual economic impact, and the mimetic reconstruction and appropriation of this legacy to other frames elides key complexities and contingencies that made it a success in the first place.  

In the first session of the Milton Wolf Seminar (Legacies of the Marshall Plan), Ben O’Loughlin discussed how states often have differing and non-congruent visions of world order, and that complex cultural milieus do not lend themselves easily to consolidation within hegemonic grand narratives of progress. The post-World-War-II world had fairly rigidly defined spheres of influence, and the Marshall Plan was decidedly anti-Soviet. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bi-polar alliances that helped the Marshall Plan achieve ideological legitimacy have disintegrated into a complicated, multi-hub “variable geometry” (Burke-White, 2015, p. 6) of shifting and adaptive political and economic orders. This geopolitical reality makes grand narratives like the Marshall Plan hard to sustain for two reasons: 1. Faith in specific visions of the future is more widely distributed, these visions often conflicting with expectations of western hegemony, and 2. The needs and voices of the molecular constituencies of these competing visions are being obscured by overwhelming, self-aware “plans” that try to impose narratives on the unwilling. More attention must be paid to the molecular forces in these political-economic assemblages.  

Narratives are powerful tools that have the potential to “tip conflicts” and, with the rise of social media, individuals increasingly have the power to erode long-standing institutional narratives (Kaspersen, 2016). Social media provides unprecedented voice to individuals, but also makes defining narrative legitimacy incredibly difficult. There is an increasing need to translate narratives between different scales of community. To do this, we have to first ask ourselves, what is the utility of a grand vision? Moreover, is a vision still grand if it only materializes in hindsight out of a loose aggregate of improvised actions (like the Marshall Plan)? Can a single vision even exist in a “multi-hub system” of world power (Burke-White, 2015)? In this regard, is China’s OBOR initiative overburdened by vision? Does it seek to be too transformative? If the Marshall Plan allowed Europe, after centuries of infighting, to finally begin thinking as a functional unit, it only did so incidentally. Conversely, through ideologies of soft power, China seeks to transcend the East-West dichotomy of the Marshall Plan to very intentionally build a truly connected global infrastructure. How does one even begin to parse the moral, political, and economic effectiveness of such a monumentally large undertaking, most of which has only been abstractly realized?  

To probe this question, I turn to Susan Leigh Star and her careful ethnographies of infrastructure, and treatments of them as living discourses of both human and non-human will (Clarke & Star, 2008; Star, 2016). In order to truly understand contemporary grand visions like China’s OBOR, and how they operate in a “multi-hub system” of “variable geometry” and “permeable sovereignty” (Burke-White, 2015), we need to understand how incremental movements translate into large socio-technical systems. Infrastructure is often viewed as large, complex, and invisible, but its size and effectiveness is rarely (if ever) a product of a singular vision. For Star, infrastructure is never “changed from above”, but rather produced locally, in modular increments (Star, 2016, p. 478). During the years of the Marshall Plan, local changes in inter-European trade produced sustainable trade structures for which the ERP had not necessarily envisioned or planned. The flexibility of the plan and its attention to the needs of its molecular constituents is part of what made the Marshall Plan a long-term success. China will need to become similarly adaptive if it wants OBOR’s infrastructural vision to succeed. However, China and its neighbors in Central Asia have a history of privileging grand societal visions over the needs of communities. In the last year, Chinese authorities have ramped up surveillance and repression of Xinjiang Province’s Uighur population, who are seen as potential impediments to OBOR plans (Richardson & Williamson, 2017).  

The uses and purposes of infrastructures do not always match how they are actually used in everyday practice (Star, 2016, p. 481). The success of OBOR will likely be measured by the needs it fulfills in individual communities, yet China cannot necessarily impose these needs. Infrastructure, like policy, requires participation – otherwise it is useless. Odugbemi & Lee argue that necessary political will on the community level is necessary for any reform to succeed (Odugbemi & Lee, 2011), and that, likewise, reforms must be constituency-creating. Since transformative visions like OBOR are often imposed on communities from outside technocrats, they tend to lack the ability to muster political will and create necessary constituencies of supporters. For example, one cornerstone of OBOR is the erection of an African “information superhighway”, which entails the laying of 150,000 km of optical cable through forty-eight African nations (EY, 2016, p. 13). However, the utility of this type of connection has been variously contested at local scales. Parks (2015) discovered through her field work in rural Zambia that a combination of precarious electricity (due primarily to water access) and local lifeways rendered a great number of residents disinterested in connectivity, and reluctant to adopt and use new infrastructures. This seems to indicate that, even if China builds this information highway, it will not necessarily manifest a constituency of dedicated users, in part because of the precarity of other crucial infrastructures.  

For this highway to be successful, China’s OBOR visionaries must attend closely to local needs, and adapt infrastructures for local practices. Simply giving people the internet will not do much. Internet infrastructures are heavily dependent on reliable electricity and access to regular maintenance and updated tools. One can wire a village for internet access, but if no one has electricity, those cables will go unused and harden in the dirt. And who’s to say enough people would use those cables anyway, even if electricity were not an issue? The internet is not the world. It is a representation of a very specific vision of the world, whose standards and practices have been informed and sculpted by powerful actors (Star, 2016). All too often, ICT is considered a net positive in development discourse, when it should be analyzed more as a negotiated relationship to imposed standards. Star (2016) perceives infrastructure as an inherently relational concept, as humans coming into contact with and negotiating sets of “organized practices” (476). Grand political and economic visions are similarly relational in nature. The Marshall Plan succeeded because it was never a plan at all, but a relationship that adeptly adapted to different needs. China would be wise to follow this model more closely in its implementation of OBOR. Instead of repressing the Uighurs in its Northwestern provinces, it should instead adapt their plans and investments to fit their needs, therein bringing them further into the fold. Its infrastructure projects in Africa (some resounding successes, and others consumed in controversy) should likewise adopt the ethnographic methods purported by Star to build more cohesive consensus. Grand visions are never implemented or enacted; they are negotiated and built, incrementally and individually, into living, discursive, socio-technical systems of meaning. Perhaps thinking of these visions in more relational terms will bring more equitable and representative inclusion into the systems they realize.  

Works Cited 

Burke-White, W. W. (2015). Power Shifts in International Law: Structural Realignment and Substantive Pluralism . Harvard International Law Journal, 56(1), 1-79. 

Clarke, A. E., & Star, S. L. (2008). The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package. In E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (pp. 113-137). Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Ellwood, D. (2006, April). The Marshall Plan: A Strategy that Worked. Foreign Policy Agenda. 

EY (2016).Key connectivity improvements along the Belt and Road in telecommunications & aviation sectors.China Go Abroad. 

Jinchen, T. (2016, July). ‘One Belt and One Road’: Connecting China and the World. 

Kaspersen, A. (2016, July 8). The global war of narratives and the role of social media. 

Odugbemi, S., & Lee, T. (2011). Accountability Through Public Opinion: From Inertia to Public Action. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. 

Parks, L. (2015). Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia. In L. Parks, & N. Starosielski, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (pp. 115-136). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Pham, J. P. (2017, January 23). Germany’s ‘Marshall Plan’ for Africa. 

Plaut, M. (2016, December 30). Revealed: Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Marshall Plan for southern Africa’. 

Richardson, S., & Williamson, H. (2017, May 12). China: One Belt, One Road, Lots of Obligations. 

Star, S. L. (2016). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. In G. C. Bowker, S. Timmermans, A. E. Clarke, & E. Balka (Eds.), Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. Cambridge: MIT Press. 

About the Author

Zane Cooper is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the political economy of media infrastructures, with a focus on the materiality of digital networks, specifically raw material supply chains. His current research investigates how rare earth supply and the structure of the permanent magnet industry has influenced the development of the hard disk drive industry. This line of inquiry seeks a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of how rare earth metals move and function within the greater ecology of information networks, and how these relationships will come to shape social, political, and technological futures. Zane holds an M.A. in History from California State University San Marcos, and a B.F.A. in Film Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Email: zane.cooper [AT] asc.upenn.edu