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CONCLUSION 171
as the structural conditions that shape the material outcome of policy
practices, combining insights from the French Régulation School, the
work of cultural theorists of the state and feminist and poststructuralist
theory.
As female scholars in an area that is definitively a male domain, we
are daily reminded of the discrepancy between the technical expertise
of governance and the wider world of politics and lived experience. Our
ecumenical approach to theory and our empirical focus, which is meant
to be broad but by no means comprehensive, reflects and limits our own
areas of expertise, interest and engagement. 1 We have tried in this book
to take the productive insights of critical political economy while paying
attention to historical difference. The ‘mode of observation and analysis’
that we have followed attempts to overcome the taken-for-granted polarities
between the international/global policy world and the local/national
policy arena. Mattelart has identified the need to reconceptualize international
communications precisely because:
[T]here is a danger of allowing oneself to be enclosed within the ‘international,’
just as some, at the other end of the spectrum, risk becoming
immured in the ghetto of the ‘local’. In succumbing to this danger,
one risks subscribing to a determinist conception in which the international
is converted into the imperative – just as, the opposite pole,
the exclusive withdrawal into the local perimeter is the shortest way to
relativism ...All these levels of reality, however – international, local,
regional, and national – are meaningless unless they are articulated
with each other, unless one points out their interactions, and unless
one refuses to set up false dilemmas and polarities but instead tries
to seek out the connections, mediations, and negotiations operating
among these dimensions, without at the same time neglecting the very
real existence of power relations among them. (Mattelart 2002: 242.
Italics in original text.)
We have argued throughout that discussions of communications policy
in the South often ‘become immured to the ghetto of the local’ both by
liberal and Marxist theorists who may become too entangled in their
own conceptions of determinism, technological or economic. We argued
in Chapter 2 that postcolonial states were already negotiating uneven
transnational pressures and domestic policy priorities such as national
integration, technological self-reliance and national development as early
as in the Fordist era. Tracing the history of the NWICO era from the
vantage point of the ‘imperfect’ postcolonial state allowed us to reconsider
the limits of the norms set by powerful Western welfare states and the
justification for its undoing in the 1980s and 1990s. The objective here