Close interaction, incompatible regimes, contentious challenges: the transnational movement to protect privacy

Abstract

Scholars and legal practitioners have found profound differences between the privacy practices of Europe and the United States. This has produced incompatible regimes of regulation, causing serious normative and political issues. This conflict -originally centered on the exchange of commercial data- became increasingly more acute after 9/11, as American policy-makers saw digital data as a major source of intelligence and Europeans become frightened of the impact of American surveillance. On the cusp of 9/11, the EU and the US had negotiated a peculiar mixedlevel agreement -the "Safe Harbor" agreement- to regulate the behavior of firms exchanging data across the Atlantic. The Snowden affair and related revelations showed how badly this agreement worked, producing incentives for European advocates to challenge "Safe Harbor" in court in 2015, resulting in a new -but still untested- agreement in 2016, and influencing the shape of the EU's new data regulatory authority. These interactions raise three kinds of problems for scholars of global governance and social movements: First, how does the combination of close interaction and incompatible regimes affect the capacity of states and other actors to resolve problems of international collaboration? Second, how have international institutions responded to these challenges? Third, such disputes raise the puzzle of how digital globalization has affected the difficult process of the formation of transnational movements. I will argue that -two decades after the start of digital globalization- it has taken critical junctures like 9/11 and the Snowden revelations to produce the political opportunity for the formation of a trans-Atlantic movement on behalf of privacy.