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Conclusion 197

to the transnational corporate order might be derived from
persuading the least advantaged states to install and hook into the
new electronic networks. 4

Although these motivations and interests, at some level, are prob-
ably accurate, it conveys an 'America-equals-imperialist' and 'LDCs/
UN-equals-anti-imperialist' generalization that itself requires much
elaboration. Fundamentally, this perspective tends only to locate the
agents of change in existing or potentially collectivist anti-status quo
organizations, such as UNESCO. Without the analytical capacity to
pin-point tensions and potential contradictions stemming from the
peculiarities of more particular historical conditions or structural
forms, the imperialist process - short of revolution - becomes vir-
tually unalterable.
Beyond its empirical and theoretical limitations, this concentration
on core-periphery relations itself can generate strategic problems. To
assume that the NWICO, for example, represented a truly counter-
hegemonic movement and that the LDCs supporting it were bullied or
co-opted into their subsequent acceptance of a neo-liberal world order
is naive and ahistorical. Also, to view Third World leaders as cham-
pions of their publics in the struggle for social justice, rather than their
roles in servicing the interests of domestic capitalists and state offi-
cials, too often mistakes public pronouncements for actual material
interests and motivations. Rather than assuming free trade, World
Bank support for telecommunications investments and the privatiza-
tion of broadcasting services and many other developments to be the
outcomes of the triumph of US or Northern interests over the South
(which, at one level, they certainly are), an account of the material and
structural changes that have taken place in LDCs would provide a
more complex and accurate account. Of course this is not to say that
some peripheral elites (and certainly some peripheral masses) have not
been bullied or swept along in the sea of information economy and
neo-liberal hype. It is to say, however, that to understand counter-
hegemonic strategic options at any given place and time, an explicit
analysis of the 'victims' of cultural imperialism is an important but
neglected task. Ultimately, the emphasis found in the cultural imperi-
alism paradigm on the assumed interests of the United States and
capital in relation to the assumed interests of LDCs and 'the
exploited' is analytically thin and, in itself, strategically unhelpful.
In relation to assumptions raised by some analysts working within
the boundaries of the cultural imperialism paradigm, this book has