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THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 43
Finally, Fraser identifies the problem of ‘misframing’ where social
movements impose a ‘national frame on a global problem’. For social
movements claiming recognition, this might lead to demands for ‘secure
ethnic enclaves’ – restrictive immigration policy or violence against ‘outsiders’
– just as migrations of populations increase both within and across
national borders. Similarly, Fraser argues that ‘defenders of redistribution
are turning protectionist at precisely the moment when economic
globalization is making Keynesianism in one country an impossibility’
(Fraser and Honneth 2003: 92). The problem of misframing is evident
in the struggles over the regulation of work in the global information
economy. Now that white-collar workers – the flexible knowledge workers
of the post-industrial economy – have been negatively affected by
the insecurities of the global economy through the off-shoring of work,
temporary migration and competition from emerging markets, there are
renewed calls for ‘national’ regulatory solutions against ‘Third World
labor standards’. The ‘double standard’ that allows social actors from
dominant powers to make protectionist claims after two decades of evangelical
preaching to Third World nations about the benefits of deregulated
labour markets, hardly seems like an effective political strategy in
the long-run.
Instead, there is a compelling need for a global frame for what are
increasingly ‘post-national’ problems. For Fraser, the dilemma of misframing
corresponds to the issue of representation as the third political
dimension of social justice alongside of recognition and redistribution
(Fraser and Naples 2004: 117). The legitimacy of social actors to represent
the interest of citizens and their relationship to state institutions
democratically becomes a pressing concern as democratic politics framed
within the context of the nation-state expands (Chandhoke 2005). In
the post-Fordist era, the terrain of political claims has expanded beyond
class as has the scale of contest beyond that of the sovereign nationstate.
The uncertain correspondence between the state and public interest
or the complex relationship between state and nation are not peculiar
pre-modern features of ‘underdeveloped’ societies, but rather point
to the need for a cultural theory of the state whether examining the
rise and fall of public broadcasting within the British or Canadian welfare
state or the seeming disappearance of the state in the post-Soviet
era. 23
In chapters 3 and 4, we will examine historically specific empirical
areas of policy reform in the fields of telecommunications and broadcasting
policy. We focus on how various actors compete for symbolic power
within the institutional bodies of local, regional, national and multilateral
governance to make sense of the outcome of global communication