Page 214 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

204 Communication, Commerce and Power

result of the institutionalization of a free-trade/free-flow information
regime in the 1990s.

8.3 HEGEMONY, CULTURE AND MEDIATORS OF THE
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Assumptions regarding the strategic necessity of formulating counter-
hegemonic challenges at a global level, while correctly focusing on the
role of cultural and intellectual capacities in redressing dominant neo-
liberal 'common-sense' assumptions, not only remains a more diffi-
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cult task than the mounting of a Gramscian war of position at the
national level, but for the foreseeable future it is of secondary import-
ance given the findings of the present study. Because the state is the
essential mediator of 'globalization,' challenges to the contemporary
world order first depend on capabilities forged at the national level.
This is not to deny that transnational production and related activ-
ities, for example, are in themselves substantive and influential. Nor is
it to challenge the fact that such structures have been and are extra-
ordinarily important in relation to national and local policies and
imaginations. It is important to recognize, as does Leo Panitch, that
'movement-building struggles arise in conjunctures that are ... more
than ever determined on a world basis. Movements in one country
have always been informed and inspired by movements abroad.'
However, Panitch also (accurately, I think) views such global forces
in the context of a strategic historical perspective:

There is no need to conjure up out of this an 'international civil
society' to install a 'transnational democracy.' Rather, a series of
movements will likely arise that will be exemplary for one
another, even though national specificities will continue to prevail.
Of course, one hopes that these movements will be, as far as
possible, solidaristic with one another, even though international
solidarity movements cannot be taken for alternatives, rather than
as critical supplements, to the struggles that must take place on
the terrain of each state.U

To focus on the assumed development of a global civil
society, mediated by transnational communication technologies like
DBS, international organizations, institutions and, still more
abstractly, international regimes, as the means through which a