Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

172 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
was neither to deny the substantial achievements of the NWICO era nor
to underplay the extraordinary influence of media industries and the US
and UK in opposing any moves to challenge the development paradigm.
Rather, recognizing the legacy of the postcolonial state and historicizing
this specific mode of transnational imagining of a coordinated nationalist
response to Western cultural dominance exposes the gaps in international
communication and media policy debates. When during the NWICO
debates political leaders from large sections of Africa and Asia argued
that ‘democracy was a luxury that could wait for the serious business of
development’ (Alhassan 2004: 65), the legitimacy of the nation-state to
represent public interest was certainly open to question. It is thus without
romantic illusions about a more just past that we analyzed the evolution
of North–South relations in the post-Fordist regulatory era.
In the same spirit, we considered the limits of the Western welfarestate
model of regulation of communications and media industries, which
would set the standard for international regulatory norms. Throughout
the book, and in particular when examining Western regulatory arenas,
we focused on the institutions of policy, norms and objectives and their
impact for the publics concerned as these are experienced through internal
dichotomies and inequalities, including multisectional, cross-cutting
experiences of disadvantage. In the second part of the book we explored
the historical and political and cultural contexts of the ‘backbones’ of infrastructure
and culture, through the study of telecommunications and
broadcasting policies. In Chapter 3 we began our discussion of telecommunications
policy as a fundamental domain as it sets the minimum condition
of entry and participation in the ‘new information economy’. We
pointed out that the global reregulation of telecommunications policy
reinforced a ‘new geography of inequality’ marked by uneven global integration
of connected cities and regions, transforming earlier Cold War
imaginaries of the developed versus undeveloped worlds. We traced the
growing power of transnational corporate actors to shape both domestic
and transnational policy outcomes in this period whereby pubic policy
priorities came to reflect the welfare of private interests and foreign investment.
Once again, we returned to the experiences of states and societies
in the South to consider the vantage point of nations that have undergone
the most dramatic scale of change in this sector in the past twenty
years. Our focus on the experiences of postcolonial states showed us that
the lack of legitimacy of the state’s failed commitment to redistribution
helped mobilize public support for a liberalization paradigm pushed by
Northern institutional actors. Considering these internal factors helps
account for the legitimacy of these reforms and foregrounds the possibility
for contestation of these new rules of governance. In drawing from