Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

26 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
Union (ITU) has its origins in 1865 but came under UN supervision
in this period – 1945 marked a new era of global governance. The UN
was established with the specific mandate of mitigating the recurrence of
another major war just as the US and the Soviet Union emerged as the
two military superpowers in 1945. These UN bodies set the normative
grounds for international cooperation from regulating the terms of trade
and transfer of technology to establishing a universal commitment to
‘the right to freedom of opinion and expression’. 3 Shortly thereafter,
the first steps were taken to establish the European Union (EU), which
would prove to be an influential actor in the field of global communication
policy.
In this period, debates over the merits of two competing systems of media
governance – state-owned media reflecting the Soviet model versus
the privately owned commercial media system reflecting the US model,
recur within the UN bodies, tension between the multilaterally mandated
right to freedom of information against the principle of national
sovereignty. In practice, Eastern and Western blocks were not obliged
to follow each others’ rules, so the fora of international governance had
less direct effect in shaping actual domestic policy in either the First or
Second Worlds. In contrast, the formerly colonized world now configured
as the Third World, became the physical site of ‘hot wars’ and the
political battles over competing systems governance. It is in this context
that ‘development’ as a project emerged to be carried out through
multilateral institutions of governance where ‘Communication and its
technologies were called on to occupy a key position in the battle for
development’. 4 For this reason, the most significant struggles over international
communication policy actually took place between the newly
configured Third World nations whose weight in numbers challenged
the economic and military clout of First World nations (Western nations
along with Japan) resulting from decolonization in Africa, Asia and the
Middle East between the 1940s and 1970s.
Many of these newly sovereign nations along with their postcolonial
counterparts in Central and Latin America embarked on projects for national
integration as a way to counter the negative effects of the colonial
division of labour. Colonial nations were invariably locked into communications
and transportations systems that were ‘designed mainly to evacuate
exports’ as opposed to promote internal economic exchange (Hopkins
1973, cited in Graham and Marvin 2001: 84). For most postcolonial
political leaders, nationalizing communications infrastructure and using
mass media to integrate fractured colonial nation-states was high
on the agenda. These national policy objectives were mediated through
multilateral institutions and bilateral agreements that set the normative