Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 47
involved in ‘brokering’ private bank lending in the ‘developing’
world (McMichael 2003: 125) – that corruption as a disease endemic
of Third World states began to be diagnosed. It was only then that
corrupt military strongmen were seen as easy targets embodying
failed states as opposed to failed international development policy.
14. This group did not go ‘public’ until 1986, and became the Group
of Eight (G8) in 1997 when Russia officially joined the organization.
The G8 meetings reflect the growing influence of private
transnational firms on shaping policy, and the G8 serves to ‘guide’
the policy expansion within the WTO. For more from the organization’s
own website see: http://usinfo.state.gov/ei/economic issues/
group of 8.html
15. The NICS, also referred to as the ‘Asian Tigers’ or ‘Asian Dragons’
are Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
16. The Bretton Woods institutions played a significant role in making
the Asian NICS a model for state reform across the rest of the
Third World in the 1980s and 1990s. The premise that the Asian
NICS had grown rapidly because of their commitment to free trade
glossed over the strategic role of these states during the Cold War
which guaranteed access to American and Japanese markets, as well
as the combination of authoritarian rule and redistributive function
of the ‘developmentalist’ state. For more on misperceptions about
the NICs developmentalist strategies see: Amsden 1989; Wade and
Veneroso 1998.
17. For more on member nations of the WTO and its organizational
structure see: http://www.wto.org/english/thewto e/whatis e/tif e/
org6 e.htm
18. There are a number of issues of contention that currently divide
Northern and Southern delegations within the WTO including
intellectual property protocols, trade in agriculture and the basic
structure of the WTO rule-making process. Marin Khor, the director
of the NGO Third World Network argues that ‘it was the WTO’s
untransparent and non-participatory decision-making process that
caused the “unmanageable situation” that led to the collapse of
the Cancun Ministerial’. For more see: http://www.choike.org/
nuevo eng/informes/1236.html
19. The argument here is based on Bob Jessop’s analysis of the ‘contradiction
in the field of social reproduction’ in his discussion of the reasons
for the erosion of the Keynesian Welfare state (Jessop 1999: 385–6).
20. A variety of groups within civil society have raised questions about
the accountability of state and multilateral institutions as well as
transnational corporations in relation to the needs of citizens.
However, critics have also raised questions about the accountability