Information to users

The United States and International Information Relations Historically, there has always been tension within the
US policy-making community between the desire to be involved in world affairs and the need to take care of things at home. This debate between 'independence" and
'interdependence"4 was manifest early in the Monroe Doctrine credo of discouraging European involvement in the Western hemisphere and continued into the 20th century with
discussions about the advantages and disadvantages to US entry into both world wars.5 Of those arguing for greater isolationism, the rationale was not that the United States did not want to be involved in the world's affairs, but more
4 These ideas are also known as 'isolationism" and
'internationalism." This does not mean that the United States was primarily either at any one time; only that there were continuous discussions about when and where to be more of one or the other. See, for example, Daniela Rossini, ed. From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy
(Keele University, England: Ryburn Publishing, 1995) ; and Justus D. Doenecke. 'Isolationists of the 1930s and 1940s: An
Historiographical Essay," West Georgia College Studies in the
Social Sciences 13 (June 1974):5-39.
5 The United States eventually entered the wars after being
attacked, but policy makers raged in debate on the level of
involvement before those defining moments with the German attack on the Lusitania during World War I and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942. Robert Schulzinger calls these camps
internationalists and noninterventionists. See his American.
Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 62-81, 144-145, and 167-169.
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that they believed *in America's unilateral freedom of
action."6 In other words, it was a not a lack of desire for interdependence, but a desire for the primacy of
sovereignty, a tension that would continue throughout the 20th century. After World War II, the global environment - as well as the US position in the world - changed. The
United States became a world leader militarily and
economically. This was also a defining time for the global information and communications environment.
During this historical evolution, two sets of general
assumptions about the nature of information and politics emerged. The first suggests that information is free
flowing, even if there are innumerable ways to affect its content and interpretation. That is, information flows
cannot be hindered, let alone stopped, by external
(political, economic) means. The second set of assumptions indicate the seemingly contradictory fact that attempts to control information are a de facto part of politics, global interactions and simply living in the world. It is the
tensions between these 'free" flows of information and those who desire to control it that characterize what has come to be known as the global information debate. It is within
6 Doenecke, 'Isolationists of the 1930s and 1940s," p. 5.
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these tensions that US government actions surrounding
information issues have developed.