Page 210 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

200 Communication, Commerce and Power

organize both domestic and international priorities. But again,
ongoing changes in the form in which states act as domestic-global
mediators - and the increasingly porous qualities of the capitalist-
nation state dichotomy (that is, the capacity of capital to act as 'good
corporate citizens' and/or as mobile and flexible transnational actors)
- problematizes even the theoretical status of US workers as ideal
agents of 'progressive' reform. This caveat underlines not just the
dialectical nature in which national and global forces affect one
another, also it reflects the temporal immediacy and political-
economic volatility accompanying late-twentieth-century communica-
tion and information developments - developments that the American
state has aggressively pushed forward and must continually learn to
live with.
As outlined in Chapter 2, what Cox calls the internationalization of
the state involves tensions between global forces and national struc-
tures. As shown in this study, the American state has been restruc-
tured in ways that have prioritized international free flow of
information reforms through mostly trade-related agencies. The com-
plex forces at work have reflected and involved a realignment of
dominant class relationships. The general competitive needs of
corporate producers and consumers of information-based commod-
ities now, for the most part, are being accommodated in the United
States, international organizations, institutions and even LDCs. While
the American state may be structurally disparate, it also is a complex
institution characterized by historically constructed rigidities and pol-
icy-making biases. State structures can be dangerously inflexible in
response to shifting needs and the changing make-up of dominant
interests. Importantly, however, because these conditions are histor-
ically constructed, they are by no means unalterable.
The ups and downs of the American hegemonic project have been
traced in this book through the capacities held by state officials to
maintain or modify relevant international mediators - that is, the
regimes, institutions and organizations mediating international relat-
ions- on behalf of mostly US-based interests. Long-standing efforts
to counter prior-consent international legal regimes with free flow
principles, for example, have constituted one of the core struggles
waged by the United States. The relative decline of the United States,
dating from the early 1970s, presented LDCs and others with oppor-
tunities to reform the existing world order through, for instance, the
movement of various international institutions and organizations
away from an American world view. Facing this crisis, in conjunction