Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

36 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
of modernization and development. Within the ‘developing world’ there
has been consistent opposition by social movements and political parties
from the Left (and occasionally the Right) against neoliberal policy reforms
beginning in the 1980s, but many of these critics tend to argue that
the state’s relationship to its citizens has to be reimagined in contrast to
the development decades of state intervention.
In both former state-socialist and Western welfare state economies,
the culture of the state and the legitimacy of national integration and
economic growth faced significant challenges. 19 In the West, the welfarestate
capacities of national governments to regulate media and communication
changed in response to the changing needs of private industry
which was focusing on global production and sales. This changed the
‘object of economic management’ to focus on balance of payments as opposed
to national full employment. However, equally important to these
structural macro-economic changes are the constitutive role of race and
gender in transforming the legitimacy of the state in any national policy
arena. For instance, the increasing reliance of European welfare-state
economies on foreign immigrant labour from former colonies or Southern
or Eastern Europe posed a threat to the ‘Fordist class compromise’.
In the US, the welfare state faced more profound crises based on the
migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial
North and the arrival of Mexican and other Third World migrants who
were often excluded from the benefits of the welfare state, regardless of
citizenship. In the same way, the growing feminization of the labour force
across welfare states in the 1970s challenged how citizenship rights were
constructed around the patriarchal nuclear family, stressing the limits of
the social contract.
It is crucial to recognize that the crisis of legitimacy of the nation-state
as the arbiter of public interest happens just as pressures from private capital
and multilateral institutions of governance are eroding its power. This
combination of political economic and cultural change helps explain the
transition from Fordism to ‘post-Fordism’ and the rise of a new discourse
of enterprise culture and privatization (Jessop 1992). In the post-Fordist
era, the demands for redistribution of communications resources and cultural
sovereignty raised during the NWICO debates were swept aside in
international policy-making circles. We contend, following Jessop, that
the profound changes that take place in the field of communication and
media policy should be seen as a kind of ‘reregulation’ of neoliberal governance.
This reregulation has meant that the nation-state loses autonomy
in relation to supranational regimes and regional and local governance
bodies. It has also meant the reorganization of the functions of the state to
include ‘partnerships’ with parastatal, non-governmental bodies as well