Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

28 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
the differences in the parameters and distributive consequences of public
welfare and public interest between Western European, Canadian and
Australian corporatist modes of governance in contrast to the US model
of corporate liberalism (Calabrese 1999: 275; Garnham 1990; Horwitz
1989; Mansell 1994; Streeter 1996; Winseck 2002).
The Fordist era of national integration and economic expansion produced
a very specific understanding of the state within the international
state system. Fundamental to the formation of the rules of international
governance was the assumption that ‘all states in principle are, or will
become, similar, or at least mutually intelligible, in their structures and
in the rationalities governing their actions’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001:
10). Political elites from across the postcolonial world were eager to embrace
this understanding of the state as the central institutional actor
capable of delivering national development, whether these states chose
central planning, a mixed model of national private industry and state
participation, or early forms of export-led expansion. Third World political
elites embarked on the project of development, attempting to move
forward and shed the ‘flawed’ characteristics of pre-modern institutions
(Huntington 1968). The state itself was understood as the ‘modern sector’
to be supported by multilateral agencies, foreign governments and
donors with little reflection upon the fact that these were inherited colonial
institutions designed to control as opposed to serve the ‘native’ populations.
Mahmood Mamdani (1996) has shown how newly independent
African nation-states, diagnosed by development experts as ‘weak states’,
were barely dismantled versions of colonial administrations, which had
been purposely centralized, without independent judiciaries and meant
to be oppressive towards the colonial subject population. Instead of addressing
the roots of these institutional imbalances, or questioning how
colonialism led to ‘underdevelopment’ (Golding 1974; Schiller 1992), social
scientists based in the US took the lead through UN agencies to resolve
the problem of development through new technologies of progress,
including communication and the mass media.
In 1958, Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society consolidated
and made explicit the prescriptive link between exposure to commercial
mass media and the requisite social and psychic preconditions – the
revolution in rising expectations – that would propel a linear mode of
development. Sociologists like Lerner, and eventually scholars of the
emerging discipline of international communication, identified a series of
non-economic ‘agents of development’ – urbanization, literacy, exposure
to the media – that would serve the dual purpose of erasing the negative
effects of ‘traditional values’ while creating the conditions for modern
market subjects who would be equally at ease as citizen and consumer. 6