"Hardliners and High Technology: Conflicts over the Globalization of Computer Technology in the Communist World"

This paper looks at the political economy of technology transfers between the US-based supercomputer firm, Control Data Corporation (CDC), and Central and Eastern Europe during détente. CDC was the preeminent producer of supercomputers in the 1970s. The firm also had a large market in computer peripherals (e.g. disk packs and printers), technologies which had strategic applications. Combining business history, diplomatic history, and legal history, the study traces the firm’s export of computer peripherals to Central and Eastern Europe, highlighting how these transfers worked with and against various states interests in light of the heightened Cold War context. This project in balancing interests demonstrates the firm’s geopolitical clout, providing a necessary counterpoint to literature in the social sciences that frames multinational firms a either stateless or an arm of the state. Moreover, the study illustrates how the firm’s efforts to (what we would now call) ‘globalize’ production exacerbated tensions with the US Defense establishment in the 1970s. In 1976, the US Defense Department released the Bucy Report, a study calling for the restriction of intellectual property to the Communist world for potentially strategic technologies on national security grounds. This suggestion, which led to a series of debates between the federal agency and the firm at the Pentagon, cut against CDC’s commercial project in Central and Eastern Europe, as the corporation was using licensing agreements to export their designs. This research considers collaboration in that it explicates how a firm worked with and against interested parties and communities (e.g. ministries, agencies, and research centers) across ideological, political, and economic boundaries, establishing an early, global supply chain. Moreover, the study demonstrate how this collaboration was ultimately shaped by power, domination, and accumulation.