Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 35
protecting property rights (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights, TRIPs). These agreements would be the basis for replacing
the GATT with the permanent institutional structure of the WTO in
1995. The WTO is essentially a multilateral regulatory agency based on
member nation representation (currently at 148 members) 17 that coordinates
trade policy, negotiates trade disputes and has the legal power
to sanction member nations through an empowered Dispute Settlement
Body. In contrast to the GATT, which was exclusively a treaty that dealt
with trade, the WTO has jurisdiction like the UN to enforce its rulings
in the much broader realm of ‘trade-related’ issues. In effect, the WTO
‘harmonizes’ trade policy between member nations such that individual
states can be sanctioned for any kind of regulatory intervention that is
seen as discriminating against the ‘free’ movement of goods or services.
In practice, this has meant unprecedented challenges to national labour,
health, environmental and other public interest legislation that is now
deemed a violation of the rules of ‘free’ trade. While any member nation
has the right to lodge complaints through the WTO against another
nation-state that is ‘distorting trade obligations,’ the highly technical and
opaque structure of the WTO explicitly favors the most economically
powerful member states and the transnational firms that are the biggest
beneficiaries of the ‘harmonization’ process (Jawara and Kwa 2004). Since
the last failed WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun in 2003, a Group of
Twenty Southern (G20) nations including Brazil, China, Egypt, India and
South Africa, among others, have ‘joined forces to defend the interests
of developing countries in multilateral trade negotiations’. 18
The authority of the World Bank and IMF in transforming the role
of the state in the ‘developing’ and former Socialist world, along with
the rise of the G8 nations and the WTO gave credence to the argument
that national elites and policy-makers across the world had now come
to agreement over the ‘Washington Consensus’ of neoliberal reform for
both strategic reasons and out of economic necessity. This transformation
was also, however, a result of the failures of most postcolonial states
to deliver the promise of modernization and progress to its citizens as
discussed in the previous section. In this case, it is not so much the institutional
failures – which became the myopic focus of policy reform
initiatives by the World Bank and others who would now manage ‘good
governance’ – but rather the symbolic violence enacted by state institutions
on behalf of the public that lent a degree of legitimacy to whatever
external pressures there existed for reform. These gaps in the symbolic
authority of the nation-state to represent public interest allowed a variety
of civil-society organizations, ranging from religious nationalists to new
social movements, to offer competing political solutions to the problems