Introduction from

Media and Globalization: Why the State Matters

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Rethinking Media Globalization and State Power

Silvio Waisbord and Nancy Morris

The idea that globalization erodes the power of the state has become conventional wisdom in globalization studies. As a process that supersedes geographical borders, the argument goes, globalization deals a powerful blow to the nature of the state. Governments claim to exercise authority over a territorial space but this becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, amid globalization. Regardless of which dimension of globalization is considered, according to some globalization theorists the result is the same. The rise of transnational organizations, the unprecedented worldwide expansion of corporations and market economies, the global capacity of military superpowers, the ability of technology to eliminate spatial barriers, and the consolidation of an international legal system, to mention a few dimensions of globalization, render obsolete the basis of stateness, the existence and protection of a sovereign territory (Wriston 1992; Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson 1995; Waters 1996).

These arguments are found across the social sciences, and they are central to communication and media studies. The impact of international forces on state sovereignty is a long-running theme in the field of international communication. The cultural imperialism and New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) literature of the 1960s-1980s criticized the presence of foreign media, particularly from the United States, as a threat to cultural autonomy in the developing world (Dorfman and Mattelart 1972; International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980). Several now-classic volumes have examined the challenges that international media flows pose to national autonomy. Kaarle Nordenstreng and Herbert I. Schiller’s National Sovereignty and International Communication, published in 1979, laid the cornerstones for discussion of issues related to development communication, the “new international information order,” and emerging communications technologies. Long before the explosion of megacorporate megamergers, the birth of the World Wide Web, or the coining of the term “globalization,” Nordenstreng and Schiller noted that “powerful forces have been trespassing over national boundaries on an unprecedented scale. The central organizer of this border-crossing has been the business system, operating globally” (1979: ix). They highlighted “the vital importance of communication in the struggle to achieve meaningful national autonomy” (1979: xi. See also Hamelink 1988). In a follow-up edited volume published fourteen years later, Nordenstreng and Schiller noted that the concept of national sovereignty in international communications was “a continuing, though problematic, theme” (1993: xi).

As several authors (Alleyne 1995, Frederick 1993, Hamelink 1988, Mohamrnadi 1997a, Mowlana 1997) have argued, the coming of digital technologies and systems that transcend geographical limitations, coupled with the unfettered worldwide expansion of media and telecommunications companies, represents the latest assault on state sovereignty - that is, on the capacity of states to rule within a certain territory without intrusion from other states. The premise of sovereignty is that states have undivided power (Held 1989) to make decisions within their borders without interference from other states or organizations. Communication sovereignty refers to states’ exercise of authority over flows of ideas and information inside their territories. Tile gap between the ideal of sovereignty and contemporary reality, a concern of globalization scholars in several fields, has been particularly evident in regard to communication and information. Although states have been endowed with the task of cordoning off communicative spaces, the control of these intangible borders is seen as a Sisyphean task in the face of media globalization.

While some observers celebrate the effects of media globalization on states, others find them deeply troubling. Optimists believe that cross-border technologies open up new possibilities for more people around the world to have better and faster access to more information. This position brings together Ithiel de Sola Pool’s “technologies of freedom” (1983) argument with the antipathy to government intervention in communications that underlies, most clearly, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Media moguls, Western officials, neoconservative thinkers, and technology enthusiasts have repeatedly touted the benefits of media globalization for democratic prospects worldwide. From a perspective that sees the state as the bogeyman of information democracy, the globalization of media technologies makes it possible to bypass government control. The democratization of information undermines the attempts of authoritarian states to control information flows and to curb the entrance of ideas that autocrats might deem inappropriate. As catalysts of the breakup of government communications monopolies, market reforms coupled with wider access to media technologies usher in information democracy. Any individual connected to the global information superhighway has access to more information than any of his or her forebears could ever have imagined, and this access comes substantially without government regulation.

Other observers, in contrast, find such rosy promises unconvincing and alarming. They see such information utopias as myths rather than real prospects (Ferguson 1992). For critical political economists, media imperialism theorists, and antiglobalization activists, the process by which media corporations gain power and untrammeled market forces consolidate their hegemony is hardly a matter for democratic enthusiasm (McChesney and Herman 1997; Schiller 1996). In this view, the organization of global information flows along free-market lines signals the eclipse of state projects for self-determination and for the protection of autonomous information spaces, reducing states’ historic grasp on communications sovereignty. With the possible exception of economic nationalists and cultural purists, proponents of this position do not romanticize state control of communications, even as they continue to warn against the damaging consequences of media globalization.

In the context of this ongoing debate, this book explores the role of the state in communications and cultural policymaking in a globalized world. Although there is substantial evidence that the forces of global media and commerce threaten the state in relation to communication and information, we seek to examine this argument more closely by asking what states can and cannot do. Certainly, states currently face changing and challenging conditions. The remarkable global expansion of media corporations, facilitated by liberalization and privatization of media systems worldwide and the development of cable and satellite technologies, has reduced states’ ability to exercise power and maintain information sovereignty. It would be unwarranted, however, to conclude that the state no longer matters. Reports about the death of the state may be greatly exaggerated, as many contributors in this book suggest. Also, there is insufficient evidence for asserting the death of the state, because the state remains underanalyzed in the literature on media globalization. Pinned between the global and the local, states continue to be largely absent from current analyses in media and communications. A fundamental premise of this book is that a reevaluation of the notion that globalization erodes state power is necessary in studies of media globalization. As such, this book shares with recent works in the social sciences the idea that it is premature to conclude that the state is withering away and to assume, catastrophically or gleefully, a post-state world. With them, we agree that the interaction between globalizing forces and states is more complex than is usually recognized in the globalization literature, and that states retain important functions and are not likely to disappear (Evans 1997a; Hirst and Thompson 1995; Sassen 1998; Krasner 1991).

Our starting point is that the state still matters as an analytic category, despite the considerable confusion that surrounds it. As Nikhil Sinha discusses in chapter 4, the state remains a problematic and elusive concept in the social sciences. In recent decades, renewed intellectual interest has not put this matter to rest but, rather, has revealed the difficulty in reaching even a minimal definition of the state that is widely accepted. There is little consensus beyond agreement that the state is related to rulemaking and enforcement within geographical boundaries. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998: 60) words, “States set up and enforce rules and norms binding the run of affairs within a certain territory.” Despite this persistent confusion, the state remains a fundamental pillar of the international system and fundamental point of reference at individual, national, amid supranational levels. “[A]s even tile name of tile United Nations reveals,” Jurgen Habermas (1998: 105) points out, “world society today is composed politically of nation-states.” Convinced that the state merits analysis, we have asked a number of media scholars to consider the role of states in regard to media and information sovereignty. The contributors to this volume discuss various relationships between states amid communications issues. They take different positions on the question of the erosion of state power amid globalization, but collectively they argue that states must be taken into account as actors in media and telecommunications.

STATES, LAWMAKING, AND POWER

The coercive and discursive powers of states to control communications increasingly come up against globalizing forces. Governments cannot escape confrontation with powerful transnational corporations and international organizations whose horizons extend far beyond the state. States remain fundamental political units in a world that continues to be divided along Westphalian principles of sovereignty according to which states are supreme authorities within their borders. Douglas W. Vick explores the concept of sovereignty in chapter 1.

Several contributors to this volume suggest that the growing prominence of international agreements has not eclipsed the most tangible power available to states: lawmaking. Globalization has challenged but not eliminated states as power centers (Garnham l986)—sets of institutions where decisions are made regarding the structure and functioning of media systems. Just as states continue to assert and defend sovereignty by participating as autonomous organizations in international organizations, sovereignty is also expressed through a variety of media policies. Studies of media policies continue to demonstrate that, notwithstanding the strong combined pressures from external actors (global corporations, financial institutions, and international bodies), states ultimately hold the power to pass legislation that affects domestic media industries. The dynamics of media policymaking, whether policies adhere to or maintain distance from the neoliberal cornerstones of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation, suggest states’ relevance as power containers (Giddens 1985). For many, the state remains the best hope for harnessing market-driven media globalization. While some authors see governments as guarantors of the interest of media capital (Winseck 1998), others hold democratic expectations and endow the state with important functions. For example, Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1997: 25) writes, “there is no other credible route ~than the state] available for the resolution of significant media issues in the twenty-first century, unless we are prepared to believe that the ‘free’ market is the best regulator.”

Globalized and globalizing free-market practices are sweeping the world. Yet even in media systems ruled by free-market principles, governments continue to license broadcast frequencies, impose limitations on media and telecommunications ownership and operations, and enforce existing laws - in other words, to set up and monitor tile basic legal system supporting market policies that underpin media systems.

However, in the tug-of-war over media and telecommunications, states are not equally powerful in terms of their ability to negotiate with global corporations concerning the conditions of establishing media businesses in their countries. But for every example of state powerlessness when confronted by the market juggernaut, there is a counterexample of how states matter. Consolidation and concentration of ownership in media and communications are penetrating deeply into areas that were formerly highly regulated. A growing body of literature indicates how liberalization and privatization policies have opened up previously closed markets to omnivorous media companies (Bustamante 2000; McChesney 1999). India is a case in point, as Nikhil Sinha discusses in chapter 4. At the same time, large states with promising market potential are able to exert influence over global media conglomerates. China for example, has gotten concessions from Rupert Murdoch in exchange for allowing his media companies to enter the largely untapped market of the most populous country in the world (Gittings 1998). Emerging supranational organizations can command sufficient political power to counter conglomerate economic power as illustrated, for example, by the conditions imposed by the European Union on the AOL/Time Warner merger.

For states, retaining control over communication is in part a matter of economics. Just like any other product or service, anything legally produced and sold within a country generates jobs and tax revenues and contributes to GNP, anything exported additionally generates foreign earnings, anything imported drains national coffers. Media policies regarding taxes and tariffs aim to achieve economic results.

Further, economic tools may be used for political ends. The protection of internal markets for a country’s own media and telecommunications companies can be used by ruling parties or dictatorial regimes wanting to gain or maintain the cooperation of the domestic media. Notwithstanding globalization, governments retain the capacity to control the media to reinforce legitimacy or fortify a regime’s hold on power. This use of the media goes directly to the fundamental role of media as carriers of messages. (This is not to deny that goods, too, carry messages, but without accompanying media to provide possible interpretations, the messages conveyed by goods are not transparent in the way that those conveyed by media are.) Considering that power building today generally takes place in highly mediated societies, authorities resort to a variety of media mechanisms simply for instrumental purposes. Governments attempt to manipulate news and intervene in various media and cultural matters. Covertly or openly, they court amid cajole, control and caress media organizations and orchestrate news management strategies to gain political advantage and fealty from different constituencies. Authoritarian governments in Latin America and in the former Communist bloc exerted direct control over media through employing censorship, licensing of journalists, or simply shutting down dissident media outlets (see Fox 1988; Fox amid Waisbord 2001; Downing 1996). Despite the demise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism in many regions of the world, these sorts of practices have not completely disappeared. Although they rarely advocate formal censorship to domesticate public opinion, democratic administrations frequently resort to more subtle methods, such as libel suits to muffle critical reporting or withholding official advertising to keep the news media at arm’s length.

Political and Cultural Citizenship

Certain areas of governmental control have been less susceptible than others to globalizing forces. States continue to cordon off spaces for political debates. Within a country, the media are crucial to political participation. Democratic theories, whatever their conceptual or normative differences, consistently assign the media the role of providing information necessary for democratic governance and citizen participation. This premise underlies much of the analysis and criticism of media performance in contemporary politics (McQuail 1992). Insofar as authorities wish to encourage democratic participation, they may enact communication policies to that end. Government-mandated community access channels on U.S. cable TV systems are one example of such a policy. Another is found in Germany, where broadcast regulations explicitly favor a strong community orientation (McQuail 1992: 59—60). Robert B. Horwitz describes the democratization of South Africa’s broadcasting sector in chapter 3.

States also still control the processes and mechanisms of formal citizenship and the movement of people across borders. Mobility of capital and goods, ideas and images, does characterize the current global era, but citizenship, contingent on the lottery of birth, continues to be tied to states. Unprecedented numbers of migrants, refugees, and tourists daily cross political boundaries but states still monopolize the privilege of citizenship rights. Laws concerning the citizenship of media company owners are one manifestation of this control. Many countries, the United States and Canada being conspicuous examples, require owners of broadcast media licenses to hold national citizenship (United States 1998; McQuail 1992: 54). Europe’s historic pattern of public monopolies of broadcast media is yielding to private ownership of new outlets, with citizenship requirements. The maintenance of provisions that establish that citizens should control the majority of media ownership was an important issue during the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) debates (McAnany and Wilkinson 1996). Rupert Murdoch took the exceptional step of becoming a U.S. citizen in order to further his media empire in the world’s wealthiest media market - a glaring illustration of the power of the citizenship requirement.

On the other hand, transnational forms of political participation in a global public sphere together with growing numbers of diasporas, cyber-communities, and other cultural groupings that cut across state boundaries invite the reevaluation of national-based models of citizenship. The availability of transnational media may facilitate the creation of transnational collective identities. Electronic mail groups and global news networks provide the communication backbone for global political activities. Constant flows of media materials between home countries and diasporic communities feed long-distance nationalisms. Observing these phenomena, some analysts have taken the notion of belonging that accompanies citizenship and applied it in metaphorical ways, coining such phrases as “cultural citizenship” (Garcia Canchini 1995) or “cosmopolitan citizenship” (Hutchings and Dannreuther 1999) to describe postnational forms of participation that supersede territorially based citizenship. Cosmopolitan citizenship is not only considered real but also has been posited by some as a desirable, democratic alternative to the limited, exclusionary, and biased nature of national citizenship (see Nussbaum 1996; Hutchings and Dannreuther 1999).

Media issues are of paramount importance for the prospects of “information citizenship” (Murdock and Golding 1989). Nation-based media continue to be important not only for propagandizing state ideals but, contrarily, for expanding the opportunities for citizens to produce and consume information that is relevant to them as members of political and cultural communities as well.

Information citizenship has an equivocal relationship with information sovereignty. Pursuing different goals and driven by different intentions, governments have invoked “information sovereignty” to justify various communications policies. Some governments have enacted statist cultural policies to protect indigenous media producers and fend off Hollywood interests. Mexico and Brazil, for example, have comprehensive and protectionist policies that have contributed to the development of relatively strong media industries (de Santis 1998; Sinclair 1999). Some governments have attempted to close off flows of information: Islamic governments in Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Pakistan have expressed concern about the effects of global media flows on cultural mores and gender images. To keep out foreign television programming, Iran’s Islamic Council Assembly banned satellite dishes in 1994 (Mohammadi 1997b: 88). Germany has tried to curb Internet traffic in pornographic and Nazi material by targeting Internet Service Providers (Vick 1998: 420). The Chinese government has blocked satellite TV broadcasts of BBC news. But in the information realm, governments are finding it increasingly difficult to restrict access to external sources. Motivated, well-resourced, and technologically savvy citizens find ways to evade restrictions in order to connect to the Internet and to receive other globalized communications. Activist groups can now reach constituencies that were previously inaccessible. From the outside in, human rights groups such as Amnesty International communicate directly with affected publics, and from the inside out, opposition groups such as the Zapatistas in Mexico bypass traditional means and disseminate their statements worldwide on the Internet.

The political and cultural realms intersect in the formation of collective identities, a less tangible aspect of the relationship among globalizing forces, the state, and the media. Living in a country and holding formal citizenship have long been seen to engender a sense of belonging and identification with that country and its residents - one’s fellow citizens. Several authors have stressed the relevance of print and broadcast media in articulating national communities and shaping real or imaginary cultural borders (Deutsch 1966; Anderson 1983; McQuail 1992). Issues of media and collective identity are discussed by Philip Schlesinger, Peter B. White, Stephen D. McDowell, and Joseph Straubhaar in their contributions to this volume.

The promotion and maintenance of national and cultural identities is a prominent reason why governments regulate certain aspects of the media. Nationally produced media can be used to promote local values and identities. Local identities may also be encouraged by language policies such as the Irish government’s support of Gaelic media (Hall 1993) or Ecuador’s bilingual education program for indigenous peoples (Rival 1997). Some policymakers feel that the complement to encouraging national media production is limiting foreign values or identity messages carried by communications originating from outside a country. This desire is based on the notion that imported media material damages national and cultural identities. Philip Schlesinger discusses problematic assumptions behind this notion in chapter 6.

The tools that governments use that go beyond economic inducements and sanctions include limiting foreign material by imposing “domestic content quotas requiring that a certain percentage of the content on cinema screens, television, and radio be of national origin. The European Union, attempting to engender a “European identity,” requires that broadcasters in member states devote 51 percent of their airtime to European works. This directive has significant loopholes and there have been conflicts about its implementation but it remains on the books. A number of countries throughout the world have also instituted domestic content requirements. Direct state support for film industries is widespread throughout the developing world (Armes 1987) and elsewhere. In Europe, for example, the U.K. allows tax write-offs of production costs of lower-budget films, and France subsidizes its filmmakers (Hamilton 1998). Stephen D. McDowell describes Canadian cultural policies in chapter 7.

Although factors such as language barriers and the size and wealth of domestic markets are responsible for different balances of domestic and imported media content (Hoskins, McFadyen, and Finn 1997), government policies are also crucial in understanding why communications systems are not equally permeable to media globalization. Many media systems world-wide feature a great deal of domestically produced content supplemented with imported content. Others, in contrast, consistently depend on imported media fare and have difficulties producing a steady flow of local audiovisual content. The cases of Canada, France, Japan, and Korea, among other countries where the proportion of foreign content on terrestrial television remains low, attest to the fact that government policies continue to make a difference. Daeho Kim and Seok-Kyeong Hong detail the Korean situation in chapter 5.

The flip side of controlling imported media is exporting media with the aim of disseminating certain messages internationally. Economic and cultural concerns overlap when exported media are deliberately used as carriers of positive messages about a country. The desire of some governments to keep foreign markets open for their media exports may stem from recognition not only of the direct economic payoffs of sales of media programming but also of the potential indirect economic benefits of creating an amenable environment for consumption of other products from the exporting country. This motivation is evident in U.S. film history (Guback 1969). Further, media can carry ideological messages that authorities wish to propagate internationally, a function that has also been noted in discussions of U.S. films (Izod 1988).

It would be premature to announce that states have become irrelevant either as sites for political activity or as hubs for cultural solidarity. Collective identity is still fundamentally tied to the state as both a power container arid an identity container. State control over citizenship not only as the organization of persons within and crossing borders but also as a primary category of self-definition remains a powerful tool that has not succumbed to globalization (Waisbord 1998).

CONCLUSION

This introduction has identified several issues that need to be considered to understand state intervention in communications amid globalization. States maintain control over political tools, which are deployed differently in different parts of the world, depending on the type of regime, the level of media self-sufficiency, and the concerns of the day. Globalization has made it more difficult for all states to monopolize the information that citizens consume, but it has neither eliminated attempts to influence media content nor slowed governments’ allocation of resources to make this possible.

States and global interests interact in complex ways. The tension between them is a defining force in contemporary media and telecommunications, and their overarching commercial and political environments. States remain important agents in shaping the global media order and the structure of media markets. They perform different functions that aren’t equally threatened or obliterated by globalization, and they have tools for taming globalizing forces. States retain the locus for decision making on domestic policies, and they concentrate technical administrative capacities that are not currently replicated by any other institutional arrangement.

Not all states are equally important and effective in carrying out those functions, however. Power asymmetries among states in the international arena must be considered to understand how media globalization affects different societies. The U.S. government wields more influence in shaping international communications policies than any other state; members of the European Union (some more than others) speak louder than the majority of Third World countries in global communications matters.

These are some of the issues that form the multiple dimensions of the interaction between states and media globalization. This book seeks to reevaluate arguments about the decline of state power by suggesting that the interaction between the global and the national is more complex than is generally recognized in the globalization literature. An analysis of the various capabilities of states in regard to communications allows for nuanced and qualified conclusions that are not captured in broad-brush statements that announce the end of the state. Because the state will not disappear from international communications, it should not be absent from debates about the internationalization of communications.

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