Page 108 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Foreign Communication Policy and DBS: 1962-1984 97

sovereignty, DBS itself remained a technology of only marginal inter-
est to most American officials. Moreover, given the presence of the
NWICO and other assertions of collective and national power among
LDCs, foreign communication policy officials had little incentive to
push forward a working transnational DBS system. Before Reagan
took office, foreign communication policy had been characterized by
a cautious assertion of free flow principles. After 1980, communica-
tion policy goals were as aggressively pursued as any other component
of the Reagan administration's New Cold War.
The crisis period in foreign communication policy that emerged in
the 1980s, and the history of American intra-state policy conflicts,
again reveal the cultural imperialism paradigm to be too simplistic.
For example, the tendency of Schiller and others to characterize US
conflicts with both the UN and the ITU as a clash of largely homo-
geneous interests tends to gloss over a more complex history. While
neither the UN nor the ITU acted as passive institutions mediating
conflicts concerning free flow versus prior consent interests, neither
were the unified proponents of some kind of counter-hegemonic world
order. The US-UNESCO conflict, for instance, more accurately
involved the efforts of LDCs (and others) to reach a compromise on
free flow versus prior consent in order to maintain some amount of
policy-making autonomy in relation to capitalist developments. For
the Reagan administration, however, any such compromise was unac-
ceptable given the crisis then facing the American political economy
and the commitment of the executive branch to define it in a freedom-
versus-communism context. While US-based TNCs and the White
House were compelled to apply a take-no-prisoners approach, as
Theodore H. Von Laue has argued, UN agencies pursued little more
than a kind of 'anti-Western [means of] Westernization.' 93
In 1984, UNESCO, the so-called Grenada of international agencies,
became the primary target of US efforts to discipline international
institutions and organizations. This did not constitute the sudden
development of a well-conceived free flow reform plan among
American state officials. Not only was a free flow-prior consent
compromise unacceptable to the Reagan White House, the very exis-
tence of potentially oppositional international institutions could no
longer be tolerated. While ignoring the advice of State Department
and FCC personnel, and even recommendations from its own appoin-
tees to UNESCO, the administration's withdrawal- inspired by its
New Cold War ideology - produced little more than a strategic
vacuum. Rather than the outcome of some sort of seamless web of