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TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 73
liberalization to the transnational level, ‘And there is no going back without
risking possibly severe sanctions, the result being constant pressure
to extend commitments’ (Siochrú et al. 2002: 58). 10
Brazil, China and India are all currently signatories of the ABT, and
a brief overview of reforms in each country provides tangible examples
of the implementation of the new norms of public interest in the
telecommunications field. We have argued throughout that the relative
power of nation-states to negotiate the terms of global governance varies
significantly with political economic and military clout. As we saw in
Chapter 2, Third World solidarity in multilateral institutions has ebbed
and flowed since the mid-1980s when the debt crisis reinforced divisions
between emerging economies and what some refer to as the ‘Fourth
World’, most often associated with the most impoverished nations left
outside the circuits of global capitalism, including much of Sub-Saharan
Africa (McMichael 2003: 139). Competition between Southern nations
for foreign investment marked the early stages of global integration. In
the last five years, at the date of writing, there have been a number of
new efforts at South–South collaboration and solidarity led by emerging
economies such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. We are
not suggesting that the experiences of these relatively powerful nations
are illustrative of the whole developing world. Instead, our focus here
is to highlight the experiences of three of the emerging powers in the
global economy from the South to illustrate the magnitude of the implied
changes, and the political and social costs that this transformation
entails.
In contrast to the early and more radical reformers of Latin America
such as Argentina, Chile and Mexico, Brazil had a longer and more
substantial history of public investment in telecommunications infrastructure
as well as research and development linked to its electronics
sector (Evans 1995). The multilateral push for reforms coincided with
the end of Brazil’s twenty years of authoritarian rule in 1985, which had
produced powerful domestic corporate interests along with a range of
social movements critical of both state power and foreign capital (Evans
1979). Although the Brazilian economy was a victim of the debt crisis and
hyperinflation in the 1980s, the newly democratic state took a more cautious
approach toward reform compared to its regional neighbours. The
new constitution set up in 1988 ‘adopted exclusively public-controlled
models’ for basic telecommunications operations, reinforcing a commitment
to a public monopoly model as other nations were moving towards
privatization (Evans 1995).
Attempts by President Collor to introduce telecommunications privatization
by decree in 1992 was partially responsible for his impeachment