Technology Transfer and Economic and Military Strategy: The CoCom Controls and International Rivalry in Advanced Technology 1945-1990
Associate Prof. Jacqueline McGLADE
Monmouth University, USA
Abstract:
From the late 1940s the Western allies, led by the USA, attempted to control the flow of advanced technology from the west to the Soviet Union and its allies. In 1949, under the auspices of Nato, the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) was formed, to compile a list of sensitive technologies - technologies which were either military in nature or which were deemed have the potential to aid military capabilities. Throughout the following decades CoCom sought to define military technology through its lists of sensitive items, and to monitor and restrict exports in embargoed goods. This control of trade was no straightforward matter. The contents of the CoCom lists, and the level to which they were applied was mediated and negotiated through the differing geopolitical and economic ambitions of the Western allies. In effect a hidden or parallel "Cold War" developed encompassing, among others, the USA, Britain, Japan, France, Holland and Italy. Issues revolved around the efficacy and enforceability of the CoCom strategy, suspicions that CoCom was being used to promote US economic supremacy, and that it contributed to the widening of the US-European "technology gap". The debates also reflected fundamental differences of opinion in the West over long-term strategy to contain or undermine the Communist Bloc. Current literature has tended to focus on the economic consequences posed by CoCom on Soviet bloc countries, not the West. However, CoCom trade controls played an essential part in erecting and placing new, unanticipated constraints on the development and distribution of postwar Western civilian as well as military high-tech products, particularly in electronic, computerized, and systems components markets.
Beyond the general geo-political history of post-war technological trade, the history of CoCom controls serves as a unique illumination of many of the processes involved in technology transfer. The definition and delineation of the key elements of particular technologies; the relationship of tacit knowledge to technologies and processes; the methods by which technologies were acquired or substituted; the considerable efforts expended on reverse engineering and the their level of success - all provide examples of the ways in which this history provides an anatomy of technology transfer. The paper is based on a great deal of archival research on newly available sources in Britain, France and the USA.
Key Words:
|
