Allende’s Workshop: Technological Diplomacy and the Stakes of Solidarity
by Anna Saunders
Published on 20 December 2023
In the wake of mid-century decolonisation, many newly independent states sought ways to structure their economic relations so as to avoid new forms of exploitation. At the same time, the complex interrelationship between technology and society made it essential for these states to avoid replicating the technological patterns of their former colonisers. Although efforts to address the technological question were necessarily joint ones, perhaps no single government did more to centre the question of technological cooperation on the international stage than the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973).
At his address before the third UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Santiago de Chile, Allende sought to ‘promote the reformulation of an international division of labour’ that enabled the exploitation of the poorer nations by wealthy states, as well as hardening deep class divides within those nations. The alteration of the basis on which technological research, development and commercialisation took place was a crucial plank in efforts toward what he termed ‘solidarity in the world economy’. Legal initiatives to that end in which the Chilean government played a major role proceeded across three scales: the national, the regional, and the international. In this sense, Latin America was not only a workshop for US diplomatic and military power, but also a place in which a new technological politics could emerge.
In this post I sketch these initiatives and consider what they tell us about the possibilities of technological diplomacy. By ‘technological diplomacy’ I describe here two interrelated dimensions of these initiatives. The first is efforts by states to expand the field of what could be achieved through diplomatic negotiation into the realm of what they termed the technological. The second is the use of both national strategies and regional cooperation to concretise, or provide a political and material basis for, the new forms of law sought through negotiations at the conference level. This strategy challenges the realist image of international law that Simpson has described as split between functional order and utopian aspiration. Instead, I suggest, this was a vision of international law that understood changes in concrete relations as a pathway toward more radical reordering.
Within Chile, broader transformations in the post-war decades had seen foreign investment and technical changes across many industries, along with significant rises in industrial wages relative to agricultural work, and the movement of Chilean workers to urban centres. Not only was the licensing of foreign technology in these industries often not accompanied by any real transfer of knowledge, it was frequently joined with onerous contractual measures. These included the mandatory purchase of inputs from the licensor, grant-back clauses preventing the conduct of independent research and development on the basis of the licensed technology, as well as the consistent undervaluation of exports and overvaluation of imports, particularly within the parent-subsidiary corporate structure. These gave rise to, among other things, heavy foreign exchange liabilities, tripling annual foreign debt repayments between 1960 and 1970. The problem as the Chilean government perceived it was therefore not only the lack of transfer promised as part of this ‘development decade’ but a lack of transfer in the context of ‘considerable control’ over the commercial situation by foreign companies, which was apt to lead to structural exploitation.
Many of the national measures centred on the copper industry, which represented the bulk of Chilean exports flowing to a concentrated set of markets. From as early as 1964 there had been negotiation with foreign investors to secure mixed ownership of the major foreign-owned copper mining operations or gran minería, responding to stockpiling by foreign companies as well as worker strikes. The lack of meaningful change produced by these measures led in 1971 to a constitutional amendment providing for permanent sovereignty over the nation’s resources and the nationalisation of the gran minería, enabling the institution of forms of labour participation. This amendment was part of a broader transformation of the economy that included the creation of ‘áreas de propiedad social y mixta’ (social property and mixed property areas) instituting partial or full social ownership and reaching into many technology-intensive industries. One aim of these measures was to combine forms of technological planning with a consideration of natural resources.
Although the Chilean experiment in nationalisation is often remembered as isolated example, it should be read against the background of technological cooperation between the original five Andean states party to the Cartagena Agreement of 1969 (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru). The objective of the Cartagena group during this time was to differentiate technology from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and to show that while the former was mostly developed under commercially oriented conditions, it was necessarily understood as having a social component. Private contracts instituting forms of technological order that were in conflict with social interests gave rise, in the view of the Board of the Cartagena Agreement, to significant questions of law, to which the countries of the South had yet to formulate a concerted response. The predominantly commercial setting of technological research and development also gave rise, in the view of dependency theorists and scholars of technology in society, to a broader set of questions around the place of technology in international relations. These scholars argued that the development of local technical capacity was key not only in order to respond to social priorities, but also to avoid the use of technology as a means of political influence.
The regional development of a set of legal measures to grapple with this situation included legislation limiting the terms that could be included in technology contracts, as well as new government agencies overseeing their regulation. Supplementing this, the Andean states established a system for the exchange of information about technological imports. Decision No 24 prevented the exchange of know-how or trade secrets for equity participation on the basis that these were sufficiently compensated through royalties and profits. This was coupled with laws providing that the choice of law and forum should be that of the host state and limiting the subrogation by states of these national causes of action. Critically, these measures were understood not only as cooperative but as iterative, in terms of the political horizons they opened up in the medium to long-term. These included planned future consideration of the relationship of technological development and use to questions of employment and extraction. The greater independence afforded by a common market and common technological planning would also, in the view of the Andean states, allow for a reconsideration of technological relations with states outside the region.
Although this technological solidarity had been formed in Latin America, aspects of it extended internationally. The work of UNCTAD’s Technological Division had shown, on the basis of information provided by national governments, how Ethiopia had in the post-war period made far-reaching concessions to foreign investors in exchange for transfer, particularly in the areas of tax relief, equity participation, tariff privileges, and monopolies for the sale of out-of-patent goods. These concessions produced a structural divide between the new industries and other areas of Ethiopian economic life. Without international cooperation, there seemed little possibility of subordinating technology to social concerns, a problem that in the words of the UNCTAD secretariat showed the ‘limitations of the market’ as a frame through which to understand technological relations. For those peoples that bore the brunt of the extractive and polluting practices of many forms of technological relations, the implications of this were especially urgent: the social promise of technological change could not come at the expense of turning the Third World into a site of ecological destruction. The Algerian international lawyer and later Judge Mohammed Bedjaoui described this challenge as one of finding forms of organisation ‘which will not exhaust non-renewable resources, pollute the environment or endanger life on our planet’ without first following the path of the industrialised states in order to do so.
Resolution 39(III) of UNCTAD III sought, accordingly, to join regional and national strategies with international ones. The resolution led to the eventual drafting of the Code of Conduct on the Transfer of Technology under the auspices of the UN General Assembly from 1978–85, an initiative informed by the work of many political economists and scholars of technology in society. That drafting sought to validate, on a global scale, the policies of the Cartagena group, but also to create spaces where new forms of law could emerge. This included new international institutional machinery charged with periodically reviewing the Code’s provisions, as well as proposals that this forum might consider new forms of law building on what had been achieved. Parallel to the Code’s drafting, the G77 sought revisions to the Paris Convention on the Protection of Industrial Property, securing agreement to new provisions on licensing and forfeiture from all states except the US, who reportedly threatened to withdraw from the negotiations if they were implemented.
Lastly, the draft Code would place significant emphasis on regional research and information centres as well as mechanisms for technological cooperation between states in the Global South. This emphasis on the locus of research recognised, as had Allende’s address, that the provenance of technological change might determine whether it was apt to lead to social liberation or to new forms of oppression. This meant that regional and national measures, by themselves, were insufficient, but had to be joined with international cooperation in order to reimagine the direction of technological change and to subject that direction to democratic control. As Pamela D’Onofrio-Flores had put it, ‘in the absence of new forms of constructive social, economic, and technological relations, the New International Economic Order only offers the opportunity for more women and poor people to be marginalized labour in the modern sectors of the free world economy or to continue as rural landless labour’.
Following the military coup and the replacement of Allende’s democratically elected government with the Pinochet dictatorship, most of these measures within Chile itself were wound back. Public agencies responsible for formulating technological policies were abolished, and many companies that had been progressively collectivised were placed under foreign ownership. The existing constitution, including the amendment that had permitted the gran minería nationalisations, was suspended and eventually replaced with the 1980 dictatorial constitution, entrenching an exploitative social order that endures into the present. By 1985 many contentious issues in the drafting of the Code remained outstanding and the negotiations were abandoned, and never successfully restarted. The end to this effort at collective law-making came just as the connection between technological change and ecological concerns that Bedjaoui had highlighted drew more concerted attention from scholars and policymakers.
From Allende’s time until today, the ecological dimensions of the technological question have only become more pressing. In 2013, Ecuador proposed a declaration on intellectual property rights that might establish a firmer basis for international cooperation and thereby facilitate a technological ‘revolution’ to address climatic change. More recently, the International Law Association’s White Paper on the Anthropocene has argued that ‘without the participation of Southern countries and vulnerable populations in determining future technological choices, the ecological transition will maintain/aggravate existing inequalities both between and within States’. At the same time, many international lawyers have remained rightly critical of forms of transfer that favour technological solutions and deepened extraction over comprehensive decarbonisation as a means of addressing the climate crisis. While both new obligations of transfer as well as continuing institutional efforts to realise them are currently taking place under the Paris Agreement, there remains a need for a more wholesale rethinking of existing structures of technological research, development, and commercialisation. Tracing past strategies of technological diplomacy suggests how reorganisation at the multilateral level might be joined to regional and local initiatives, and shows the significant role of political economists, critical technologists, and social and labour movements.
Finally, revisiting the struggles over the Code illustrates how legal scholars might contribute to this collective effort. This includes research engaging with the frameworks within which technologies become not only profitable but power-conferring, enabling new forms of exploitation as well as ecological destruction. Borrowing from Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah, we might understand this as a ‘worm’s view’ of technology: one that attends to the webs of legal relations, practices and doctrines that have formalised a situation in which the politics of technological direction serves the interests of the few over those of peoples both in the South and, increasingly, the North as well. At such a conjuncture, there is much to be gained from the vision of technological diplomacy and of solidarity that Allende offered.
I wish to thank Megan Donaldson, and the editors of this symposium, Wanshu Cong and Francisco-José Quintana, for their readings and comments on the piece. Particular thanks are due to Natalia Morales Cerda for thoughtful comments as well as her authoring of a translation of the piece in Spanish.