Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
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Citizenship and surveillance
The foregoing underlined the contribution of the nation state’s concern for war
to the build-up of surveillance, though paradoxical consequences of globalisation
and the spread of information war have also been noted. There is, however,
another way in which the nation state has impelled the expansion of surveillance,
one that has links with military enterprise, but which carries fewer of the chilling
associations. This is the concern of the state with its citizens, notably how people
have come to attain rights and duties, and how these are delivered and enforced.
Integral to the development of citizenship rights and duties has been the spread,
in the nation state, of democratic forms of governance.
To understand this better, one needs to return to the foundation of the nation
state. Forged in warfare, often of an internecine and drawn-out kind, a priority
of any sovereign power which intended to rule a given territory was what Giddens
calls ‘internal pacification’. Bluntly, order and stability must be achieved within
one’s borders as a prerequisite of securing one’s external frontiers. No doubt, in
the early days, ‘internal pacification’ could take the form of compulsion by force
of arms, but much more than this was required of a state which had ambitions
for long-term survival. Minimally, the state must know its subjects – who they
are, their ages, gender and location – not least because it may well require some
of them to be conscripted to fight off foreign attackers. Further, each nation state
needs knowledge of its subjects so that it might effectively administer taxation.
And both of these needs mean that some form of census was a requisite of all
nation states – hence surveillance was a priority from the outset.
It is possible to trace the extension of ways of monitoring the internal population.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially there
was an extraordinary expansion of official statistics, meticulously gathered by
increasingly sophisticated techniques, ranging from regular census materials to
figures on anything from educational performance to employment patterns in
particular areas of the UK (Hacking, 1990). Undeniably, the information thus
collected is fascinating as a means of comprehending the changing character of
society, but it is also, and crucially, a requirement of the nation state which must
take responsibility for matters such as taxation, usually determines educational
provision, and may even have a regional economic strategy. As Giddens (1985)
puts it: ‘The administrative power generated by the nation-state could not exist
without the information base that is the means of its reflexive self-regulation’
(p. 180).
However, this may be to jump ahead of the argument. A resonant theme of
the development of the nation state is, as we have seen, the need to defend militarily
its borders and, to this end, a census, however rudimentary, is essential
since the state must be able to levy taxes and to call upon its male subjects to
withstand invaders and even to take part in expansionist gambits. But something
else is required. In order to get young men to fight on a state’s behalf, a good
deal more than knowledge of their abode and occupation is necessary. The nation
state must offer them something more tangible.
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