Page 162 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

152 Communication, Commerce and Power

on their behalf. Perhaps most fundamental and least understood is the
role played by the state in the negotiation of common-sense percep-
tions of 'reality' in the international political economy. Since the late
1980s, the only state capable of mediating such conceptual transfor-
mations has been the American state. The end of the twentieth cen-
tury has been a moment of historic transition involving, among other
things, a struggle to reform the structural and conceptual bases
through which capitalist activities will continue.
The domestic structures through which US foreign communication
policy is articulated were reformed in response to the crisis involving
the disjuncture between free flow policy and the needs of the Amer-
ican information economy. In response to a diversity of mostly US-
based service sector corporations, existing communication policy
agencies began to adopt free trade as a complementary policy
approach. Meanwhile, the USTR emerged to pursue unprecedented
international trade in services and intellectual property rights agree-
ments. The ascendancy of the USTR and its adoption of telecommun-
ications and other free flow-related issues previously handled by the
State Department, Commerce and others compelled a more compre-
hensive but not altogether unproblematic restructuring of these agen-
cies under the new free-trade effort. This period in which the
American state was reformed in order then to reform international
institutions and foreign government policies successfully involved not
only changes in the mechanics of communication policy, it also
involved changes in the ways in which officials think about policy.

NOTES
Jill Hills, The Democracy Gap (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) p. 51.
It should be noted that Hills' use of the term 'structural regulation' is not
related to references to state structures found in this book.
2 These companies collectively constituted about three-quarters of AT &T's
1981 assets of $145 billion. On the divestiture, see Jeremy Tunstall,
Communications Deregulation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) pp. 89-
114. Also see US Department of Commerce, 'NTIA Telecom 2000:
Charting the Course for a New Century' (Washington, DC: NTIA,
October 1988) pp. 430--3.
3 While communications 'deregulation' most notably began with a
Supreme Court ruling in 1968 permitting users of the telephone system
to connect non-AT&T equipment onto the system, the AT&T divestiture
constituted a radical leap toward structural regulation due to its mam-
moth scale. Just before its divestiture in 1984, AT&T was the largest