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THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 25
Developmentalism, Fordism and the shadow of the Cold War
The eras of the Pax Britannica, the Pax Americana, or the Pax Soveitica –
the era of states inclined to prophetic visions of their own grandeur
and the unshakeable affirmation of their superiority – gave rise to the
tendency to look at the world from the point from which power radiated
outwards. The East–West confrontation has left its imprint in the
form of a bipolar division of the planet that fuelled the imaginary with
a metaphysical contest between the forces off good and evil – at least
until the day when the bloc conception crumbled along with regimes
thought eternal and omnipotent. And yet the Manichean vision of the
planet has not vanished from mentalities. The Cold War had scarcely
been buried when a regional war broke out, and this religious conception
of grand international oppositions made a spectacular resurgence.
The havoc it has wrought is visible even among the most enlightened
intellectuals. (Mattelart 2002: 242)
In an exhaustive historiography, Armand Mattelart writes of the enduring
legacy of military and economic power in shaping the role of modern
media and information systems. These arguments remain resonant
today as new foreign and civil wars are rationalized as an ‘exceptional’
response to terrorism, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or at ‘home’ in the
West (Agamben 2004). Mattelart cautions against the ‘fading memory’
of past internationalization, the way in which conservatives and liberals
alike assume that today’s multipolar and networked world marks a
distinct rupture from previous modes of governance and technological
order (Friedman 2005; Ohmae 1999). In this tradition, we trace how the
bipolar ideological division of the world as defined through the Cold War
remains central to the current definition of ‘free’ media and information
flow. We also consider how the brutal encounter and legacy of colonialism
continues to shape the problems and solutions in the field of global
media and communication policy.
We start with the end of the Second World War, when multilateral
governance was codified with the founding of the United Nations (UN).
The UN charter provided for the establishment of specialized bodies
like the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) which has dealt explicitly in regulating international communications
and media industries, as well as the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Trade and
Tariffs (GATT), which would eventually play a prominent role in these areas.
Although multilateral governance of communication industries has
a longer history – for instance, the International Telecommunications