Page 220 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

210 Communication, Commerce and Power

national delegations of Canada, France, Australia and the United
States. 21 Such instrumental relationships no doubt will problematize
hegemonic aspirations for a consensual rather than a coercive world
order. More generally, the World Trade Organization almost certainly
will become the forum in which nation states will be hailed to chal-
lenge what they have only recently constructed: the 'inevitability' or
'naturalness' of neo-liberal developments and the apparent neutrality
of free-trade and free flow international media. Paradoxically, in a
world characterized by institutionalized state-mediated power dispar-
ities, the nation state remains the only institution through which the
now seemingly unslayable conceptual giants called globalization and
liberalization can be challenged.
The form in which such challenges and the mobilization of the
nation will take place will involve the structural capacities of states
and the related ability of public and private sector officials to recog-
nize and redress structural problems. This, of course, will probably
take place in periods of political and economic uncertainty as various
domestic and international agents reassess their interests and engage
in the struggle to reform, create or destroy domestic and international
media. The economic, political and military position of the United
States and the successful institutionalization of a free-trade/free flow
regime involving new and reformed mediators is the basis of a poten-
tial period of consensual hegemony. But tensions and contradictions
will continue to surface. The successful reassertion of some kind of
Pax Americana thus will depend on the ability of the American state
to respond to future crises in light of its cultural and other power
capacities. As this study has shown, this struggle will unfold through
domestic and international mediators and it will directly involve the
cultural-power capabilities developed by domestic and international
opponents during these formative years of the international informa-
tion economy.