“Global” Relationships, International Agreements, and Satellite Communications

As the chair of the session, Dr. Slotten will first discuss the four major perspectives that will be explored during the presentations and then discuss how his own work relates especially to the theme of looking at the world as a whole. Largely driven by the United States as a cold war initiative during the 1960s, the first global satellite communications system, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat), was established not to simply serve specific regions of the world but to be truly global. Although for the Intelsat system “global” had a geographical meaning involving world-wide communications, it also had important implications linked to the cold war agenda of the United States and was always in tension with regional and local considerations. This paper specifically explores the implications of ‘global’ for the Intelsat system and the history of communication technologies.