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148 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
offers insights into the normative dimensions of global social justice after
more than two decades of theory and praxis around transnational social
movements and the challenges of deliberation through difference.
In this chapter we begin our discussion about the role of civil society
in shaping the normative debates around global communication
policy by examining the institutional context of the WSIS process. We
trace how NGOs, based and funded primarily in the North, have to
some effect replaced the predominant role of non-aligned Third World
nation-states of the cold-War era, as the most vocal advocates of a social
justice platform countering the dominant vision of the neoliberal
information society. Taking into account the organizational limitations
and the historical specificity of the concept of civil society, we consider
the reasons why weak claims for redistribution have been overshadowed
by narrow claims for recognition. In the final section of the
chapter, we draw from feminist critiques to interrogate the discourse
of civil society and social justice in the field of global communication
governance.
Taming civil society at the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS)
NWICO-UNESCO + ICANN = WSIS? (Selian and Cukier 2003:
137)
The call for a New World Information and Communication Order
(NWICO) was a collective response to the machinations of the Cold
War and the structural biases of development in the Fordist era by national
leaders from the non-aligned nations demanding redistribution of
communication resources and emphasizing national cultural sovereignty
and diversity. Charges of ‘politicization’ of global communication policy
during the NWICO era was followed by a stealth campaign by transnational
corporate lobbyists and First World state delegations to ‘depoliticize’
the debate – shifting the object of regulation away from questions
of structural imbalance between nation-states, for example, or incendiary
claims about ‘cultural imperialism’, towards the seemingly more neutral
realm of creating regulatory conditions that would ‘harmonize free trade’
and accelerate technological convergence. As discussed earlier, the site
of policy debates also changed most notably with the emergence of the
WTO, shifting policy emphasis almost exclusively around trade-related
areas of governance.
We have seen a variety of social movements that challenge the neoliberal
mandates of global communication governance in the last two