In 1865, delegates from 20 countries – at the time, a category so broad it included both the Ottoman Empire and the Free City of Hamburg – gathered in Paris to establish what would become the International Telegraph Union. The task before them was as technical as it was consequential: to standardise signalling systems so that messages could cross borders without delay or distortion. Regional agreements had already brought some uniformity to European overland telegraph lines. Now, this infrastructure was to be unified at the scale of the world.
Politics, the participants insisted, had no place at their gathering. Telegraphy was a matter of wires, codes and efficiency: of electrical, not political, power. As the French senator and conference president Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys put it in a speech to the delegates, if ‘war often arises from misunderstandings’, then ‘to facilitate the exchange of ideas between peoples’ along ‘this electrical current on which thought flies through space’ was to remove one of its causes. The work of the ‘elite men’ gathered in Paris, he suggested, might render political strife itself obsolete.
Yet the telegraph lines to be harmonised had already proven their immense worth as instruments of empire, military command and commercial domination. And so, in Paris, decisions about standards favoured certain firms, certain states and certain routes of transit. Claims to technical neutrality did not suspend existing power imbalances. They rearticulated them on regulatory terms.
This logic has become a staple of international relations since. From lending bodies to public health agencies, international organisations continue to use technical experts – whether economists or medical scientists – not just to understand and solve problems, but also to present themselves as havens above the fray of strife and rivalry, residing in a sphere where evidence makes policy. Based on this, they tend to insist on their innocence. When funding pressures arise, geopolitical gridlock looms or populists push back, these forces are almost always referred to as external. Thus, when the former diplomatic chief of the European Union, Josep Borrell, in 2022 referred to non-Europe as a ‘jungle’, he invoked colonial imagery – but also a flattering view of the EU as a shelter from the storm. The price to pay for this kind of denialism is painfully clear today, as the EU is forced to redefine its role in world politics.
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1782 wrote of international law that it would ‘soar above the mists of prejudice’. The same vision underpins international organisations, and claiming this position is a key source of their legitimacy. For some, like the International Committee of the Red Cross, it can be a necessary condition for doing their work. For others, like the International Monetary Fund, the claim is easily discredited once, say, the political side-taking involved in imposing austerity comes into view. Yet in either case, international civil servants do not in fact escape power. They rearticulate it with the help of technical experts.
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