Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 33
Neoliberalism, post-Fordism and the deterritorialized
information economy
During the second half of the twentieth century, economics established
its claim to be the true political science. The idea of ‘the economy’
provided a mode of seeing and a way of organizing the world that
could diagnose a country’s fundamental condition, frame the terms of
its public debate, picture its collective growth or decline, and propose
remedies for its improvement, all in terms of what seemed a legible series
of measurements, goals, and comparisons. In the closing decade of
the century, after the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe, the authority of economic science seemed stronger
than ever. Employing the language and authority of neoclassical economics,
the programs of economic reform and structural adjustment
advocated in Washington by the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, and the United States government could judge the condition
of a nation and its collective well-being by simply measuring its
monetary and fiscal balances. (Mitchell 2002: 272)
Many of the national leaders arguing for Third World solidarity and cultural
sovereignty on the UNESCO stage were simultaneously opening
their arms to accept unprecedented levels of foreign private bank loans
thanks to the newly deregulated financial markets in the early 1970s. The
beneficiaries of these loans included ruthless autocrats like Zaire’s Sésé
Seko Mobutu, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesia’s General
Suharto, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. 13 The
Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and IMF encouraged
large-scale borrowing in this period, ostensibly to spur national development,
including infrastructural development in telecommunications and
broadcasting. It was also between 1973 and 1975 that the Group of Seven
(G7) states formed an official alliance of ‘developed’ nations, whereby the
finance ministers of the US, the UK, France, West Germany, Japan, Italy
and Canada met regularly to coordinate economic development strategies
and ‘crisis management’ in response to the increased financial liberalization
unleashed on the world market (McMichael 2003: 121–2). 14
By the early 1980s, a deep recession in Western economies and a monetarist
turn in economic policy meant that credit was suddenly in short
supply. By 1986, Third World public debt was at $1 trillion, and with
interest rates suddenly soaring these nations were held in a kind of debt
bondage having to pay back these loans at whatever cost (George 1992).
It is at this point that the World Bank and IMF become central institutional
actors involved in not merely guiding, but actually designing