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THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 37
as private capital. Finally, reregulation also includes the ‘internationalization
of policy regimes’ in effect blurring the distinction between domestic
and foreign policy.
The expansion of the GATT, the creation of the WTO and the reinforced
role of the World Bank, the IMF and the G8 are clear examples
of supranational regimes, along with the growing institutional power of
regional trade agreements in areas such as trade in cultural products and
harmonization of technology standards and intellectual property rights.
The three most significant groupings are referred to as the triad regions
of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), centred around
the US economy and established in 1994, the Asian Pacific Economic
Community (APEC), centred around Japanese and Chinese economies
and established in 1989, and the EU. In subsequent chapters, which provide
an extended discussion of the EU, we argue that the loss of national
autonomy is very much a source of political contest in the present
moment where the ‘business of rule’ has not corresponded easily with
national identity.
The loss of the nation-state’s autonomy happens in relation to the
expansion of regional and local governance structures, as national governments
decentralize governance of local networks that serve as links to
a larger global economy. Sassen (1999) and Castells (1996) have written
about the new geography of centrality and marginality that make up network
societies, whereby local and state governments invest in developing
strategic spaces within a global city or region to serve as crucial nodes
of production or management for a variety of transnational firms, while
bypassing other spaces that are considered less lucrative. The expansion
of private information and communication technology (ICT) networks
following the logic of ‘premium networked spaces’ has created new
regulatory parallels between business districts, ‘techno-poles’ and ‘hightech
innovation clusters’ across the North–South divide (Graham and
Marvin 2002). The relative loss of national autonomy should therefore
be understood as a dynamic process, where the new translocal linkages
between firms might be challenged by regional or translocal state and
non-governmental actors that have the potential to disrupt the very terms
of global expansion and integration.
The reorganization of the functions of the state is evident in the shift
from a centralized notion of government to a decentralized mode of
governance:
This trend concerns not so much the territorial dispersion of the national
state’s activities as a reorganization of functions in the broader
political system on whatever territorial scale the state operates. It