Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

32 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
aggressive attack against the ‘politicization’ of UNESCO (Preston et al.
1989). This is further evidenced by the fact that both the Reagan and
Thatcher administrations withdrew from UNESCO in the mid-1980s,
taking with them their financial dues and thereby crippling the organization
and the NWICO agenda. However, to fully make sense of the
NWICO debate, we must also take into account the disparate demand
by political leaders for the democratization of multilateral institutions
without any reference to internal democratization. The credibility of
national leaders, who were passionate about Third World solidarity on
the world stage while brutally promoting development at home by silencing
expressions of local culture and discussions about economic and
human rights, was limited to say the least (Mattelart 2002: 182–4; Servaes
1999).
Akhil Gupta (2001) has argued that efforts at Third World solidarity
through the Nonaligned Movement and the call for a new economic
and communication order ‘represented an effort on the part of
economically and militarily weaker nations to use the interstate system
to consolidate the nation-state’ (191). The point here is neither
to deny the substantial achievements of the NWICO era nor to underplay
the extraordinary influence of media industries and the US 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 the international
communication and media policy debate. 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.
As the NWICO debates began and ended with little resolution, the
Fordist era – based on the legitimacy of national regulatory autonomy –
was already in decline. Financial liberalization and the relocation of
manufacturing industries ‘shedding’ production from the First World
to the fast-growing ‘East Asian Tigers’ meant that the collective unity of
the Third World was itself in jeopardy by the mid-1970s. By the time
the MacBride Commission Report was published the nation-state faced a
crisis of legitimacy whether in debt ridden Africa and Latin America, the
crumbling Soviet Block, and even within the fiscally strapped borders of
the welfare state where Reagan and Thatcher began their strategic assault
against the perils of ‘big government’.