Revisiting the history of global communication and media policy

Abstract

This chapter provides a broad overview of the shifts in the field of global communication policy as the nation-state’s regulatory power itself is reconfigured from the post-World War Two era to the current era of global integration. In historicizing the shift in global governance we highlight the various factors which led to the rise and ultimate decline of the Fordist mode of regulation. In the first section, we consider the continuities as well as the ruptures of the shift by focusing on the specific experience of the postcolonial state. We contend that these states, unlike their welfare state and state-socialist counterparts in the First and Second Worlds,1 were already integrated into an uneven international system of governance, well before the pressures of globalization. The post-World War Two project of ‘national development’ and modernization of Third World economies and cultures were very much at the heart of the most significant struggles in the field of global communication policy and provide a particularly interesting vantage point to consider the ideals and failures of the state’s role in representing public interest. In the second section, we account for the turn toward the neoliberal2 information economy focusing on the transformation of the state in shaping national policy. We trace the evolution of North-South relations in this ‘flexible’ post-Fordist regulatory era by laying out the material and symbolic dimensions behind the ‘reregulation’ of global communication policy. Specifically, we consider how the field of communication policy is transformed as the nation-state loses relative autonomy just as the object of regulation and accountability shifts from nation-states to markets and civil society. We conclude the chapter by arguing that we need to rethink the normative claims about public interest and social justice in a transnational, if not post-national era of policy practice.