Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

42 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
‘exploited classes’ and ‘despised sexualities’ are at once about recognition
and redistribution (Fraser and Honneth 2003).
In this context, actors seeking to make these claims for justice or seeking
to engage in progressive politics face three dilemmas, according to
Fraser. First, there is a problem of ‘reification’, or giving the impression
that an abstract category represents something concrete. While some
struggles for recognition seek to adapt to condition of increased complexity
by emphasizing ‘respectful differences in multicultural contexts’
others embrace forms of communitarianism, drastically simplifying or
reifying group identities and encouraging ‘separatism, group enclaves,
chauvinism and intolerance, patriarchalism and authoritarianism’ (Fraser
Honneth 2003: 91–2). In the field of media policy, reified notions of community
in response to globalization complicate earlier claims of ‘cultural
imperialism’ and ‘cultural diversity’ as expressed in the NWICO era. Today,
Christian fundamentalists and xenophobes, pan-Islamic nationalists,
conservative Zionists and Hindu Chauvinists have all deployed arguments
against the globalization of culture by focusing on the threats to
‘local’ and ‘national’ culture. These reinterpretations of the older cultural
imperialism argument legitimate deeply unequal social orders by
strategically reifying local cultures as monolithic.
Second, Fraser argues that there is a problem of ‘displacement’ where
conflicts over recognition dominate just as ‘neoliberal capitalism exacerbates
economic inequality’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 91). In their
study of transnational social movements in the 1980s and 1990s, Keck
and Sikkink argued that the most successful global campaigns mobilized
around negative freedoms that associated ‘bodily harm to vulnerable individuals,
and legal equality of opportunity’ – in each case human rights
claims for recognition. They pointed out that despite agreement between
activists across borders over rights based norms like these – structural inequality
of outcome remains a source of tension between activists from the
South and the North. In other words, their study found that campaigns
around negative freedoms such as the rights of women to live without
threats of violence, the rights of minority communities to live without
discrimination by the state (in Fraser’s terms, claims for recognition),
have greater ‘transcultural resonance’. They found, however, that activists
from the South were equally concerned with positive freedoms (in
Fraser’s terms redistributive claims) associated with ‘poverty and inequality
in an internationalist framework,’ where the political and institutional
power of the North to set and challenge the rules of globalization is
paramount. 22 We will argue in subsequent chapters that these tensions
are a persistent feature of current struggles in the field of global communication
policy.