Off the Leash. The European mobile phone standard (GSM) as a transnational telecommunications infrastructure

Abstract

Transnational telecommunications networks seem to be emerging from, as well as main driving forces behind, the processes we generally label globalization. There are various concepts of globalization, but they all refer in one way or another to the diminishing of borders. Since structural changes in information and communications technologies (ICT) challenge or transform existing borders by generating new possibilities for transfer or transactions across them, transnational telecommunications networks such as the Global System of Mobile Communications (GSM) can be observed and described as a concrete form of globalization. Following the theoretical perspective of Marshall McLuhan, who introduced the metaphor of the Global Village, global telecommunications networks can be seen not only as bridging distance between a sender and a receiver, but also as transform-ing borders by enabling communication across them. Historiographical approaches in economic history often stress the ambivalent dimensions of globalization concepts; they have introduced careful delineations of the term ‘global’ as referring to ‘worldwide’ rather than ‘covering the total area of the globe’, for example, and underlined the existence of de-globalization processes in the nineteenth and early twentieth century alongside globalization processes. While the ‘backronym’ GSM now refers to a global or worldwide market, its original meaning in 1982 was Groupe Spécial Mobile, which referred to a visionary group consisting of representatives of national Public Telecommunications Operators (PTOs) in Europe within the structures of the Conférence des Administrations Européenes des Postes et Télécommunications (CEPT).