Barbara Ward has written that revolutions do not occur until people learn that there is an alternative to their way of life. Since the whole world is now tied together by an electronic infrastructure we have what amounts to a continuous global conversation. The implications of the global conversation are about the same as the implications of a village conversation, which is to say enormous. A village will quickly share news of any advantageous innovation. If anyone gets a raise or a favorable adjustment of his or her rights, everyone else will soon be pressing for the same treatment. The global conversation prompts people to ask the same questions on a global scale. To deny people human rights or democratic freedoms is no longer to deny them an abstraction articulated by the educated elite, but rather customs they have seen on their TV monitors. Once people are convinced that these things are possible in the village, an enormous burden of proof falls on those who would deny them.

Today village and indeed national borders have ceased to be boundaries. Data of all kinds move over and through them as if they did not exist. Satellites now peer down into every comer of a nation-state, data and news are received by people within national borders on every device ranging from a hand-held transistor radio to personal computers at home and work tied into huge data networks. In short, the sovereign has totally lost control of what people can see and hear, and can no longer maintain the fiction that there are no alternate types of political structures.

Not only does the information revolution make the assertion of territorial control impossible with regard to what people can see and hear, but also less relevant in other ways. The physical control of territory has always been one of the most important elements of sovereignty, but this control in many important respects is fading away. Not long ago armies fought and men died for the control of the iron and steel in the Ruhr basin, because the ownership of these assets conferred real economic and political power.

Today these once fought over assets may be a liability. To the extent that new technology replaces once essential commodities with plastics or other synthetic materials, the relative importance of these areas to the vital interest of nations is bound to change. Even control of the so-called geographic "choke points" has less significance than it once had. A few years ago the conventional wisdom told us that all the lights would go out all over the world if the Suez Canal were ever closed. The power of a sovereign state, in this case Egypt, to block the flow of oil from the Middle East was believed to be absolute. The conventional wisdom did not take into account the technology that would allow the building of super tankers that could carry oil around the Cape of Good Hope economically. Similarly advances in military technology are vitiating the relevance of other geographic strategic positions. This velocity of change is shifting the tectonic plates of national sovereignty and power in ways that are still unfolding.