Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

2 Revisiting the history of
global communication
and media policy
This chapter provides a broad overview of the shifts in the field of global
communication policy as the nation-state’s regulatory power itself is reconfigured
from the post-World War Two era to the current era of global
integration. In historicizing the shift in global governance we highlight
the various factors which led to the rise and ultimate decline of the
Fordist mode of regulation. In the first section, we consider the continuities
as well as the ruptures of the shift by focusing on the specific
experience of the postcolonial state. We contend that these states, unlike
their welfare state and state-socialist counterparts in the First and
Second Worlds, 1 were already integrated into an uneven international
system of governance, well before the pressures of globalization. The
post-World War Two project of ‘national development’ and modernization
of Third World economies and cultures were very much at the
heart of the most significant struggles in the field of global communication
policy and provide a particularly interesting vantage point to
consider the ideals and failures of the state’s role in representing public
interest. In the second section, we account for the turn toward the
neoliberal 2 information economy focusing on the transformation of the
state in shaping national policy. We trace the evolution of North–South
relations in this ‘flexible’ post-Fordist regulatory era by laying out the
material and symbolic dimensions behind the ‘reregulation’ of global
communication policy. Specifically, we consider how the field of communication
policy is transformed as the nation-state loses relative autonomy
just as the object of regulation and accountability shifts from
nation-states to markets and civil society. We conclude the chapter by
arguing that we need to rethink the normative claims about public interest
and social justice in a transnational, if not post-national era of policy
practice.
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