Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

34 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
and enforcing development policy, including communication and media
policy in both the Second and Third Worlds. In practice this has
meant the push to liberalize, deregulate and privatize domestic communication
and media industries. McMichael (2003) argues that the
debt crisis consolidated two trends that were already in place in the
1970s: First, the crisis caused ‘the undoing of the Third World as a
collective entity’ based on the distinct trajectories of the rapidly expanding
economies of the Asian Tigers or Newly Industrialized Countries
(NICs) 15 in contrast to the debt-ridden nations in need of ‘restructuring’;
Second, these events legitimated global governance by the
World Bank and IMF who took charge of evaluating the well-being of
national economies based on whether or not they followed the principles
of structural adjustment which included undoing expensive social
programmes for health and education, removing barriers to investment
and trade, devaluing national currencies and promoting export-led
development. 16
With the end of the Cold War in clear sight, the US and its allies quickly
shifted the locus of international policy debates from the wider ‘politicized’
fora like UNESCO to narrow technical venues where First World
nations held more clout and Transnational Corporations had access to
manoeuvring favourable policy outcomes. In terms of the specifics of the
NWICO debate, the US and its allies shifted the discourse of information
inequality and cultural sovereignty to creating requisite regulatory
conditions for an ‘information society’ in the ITU and the World Intellectual
Property Organization (Kleinwächter 2004a). A much more
significant shift in venue would take place in the Uruguay Rounds of the
GATT. The GATT was established in 1947 through pressure from the
US, and had grown from an organization of 23 members in 1947 to 128
members in 1984 (Siochrú et al. 2002: 54). The purpose of the GATT
was to remove tariffs and promote trade – mostly focusing on manufactured
goods until the 1980s. The Uruguay Rounds, which began in
1986, significantly broadened the scope of the GATT to include trade in
‘services’ where ‘developed’ nations had an obvious initial comparative
advantage in selling the hardware and software necessary for entry into
the information economy including telecommunications equipment and
services, television and film products, advertising and marketing services,
and networking and database services.
In addition to broadening its scope to include agriculture and passing
the controversial General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS),
the eight years of negotiation that made up the Uruguay Rounds also
created a new set of binding rules for member states based on liberalizing
investment (Trade-Related Aspect of Investment Measures, TRIMS) and