Page 41 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

US Foreign Communication Policy 29

pre-existing political, economic and cultural structures. The state
remains a core institution in international relations. While the state
itself necessarily is utilized to support this systemic growth, competing
capitalist interests use states as vehicles through which domestic and
international structures are reformed to accommodate their particular
needs. Moreover, states, as institutional structures, themselves are
usually reformed in order to take on such tasks on behalf of dominant
private sector interests. Deepening the complexity of this process are
the more general dimensions of consciousness, culture and the condi-
tions of day-to-day life. If the globalization of capitalist production
activities and social relations is being facilitated by DDS and related
transnational technologies, the task of specifying the complex and
contradictory processes at work - substantively beyond the general-
izations provided by the cultural imperialism paradigm - now consti-
tutes a rather urgent undertaking.

2.4 MEDIATORS OF THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL
ECONOMY

The American state stands as a core institution and DBS an extra-
ordinary transnational technology in the contemporary international
political economy. The recent history of DBS and related develop-
ments reveal the United States and other states to be complex struc-
tures, institutionally entrenched but nevertheless dialectically
responsive to internal and external forces in ways that are directly
biased by pre-existing structures. Changes in intra-state structures, for
instance, that affected US foreign communication policy in the 1980s
were directly influenced by corporate forces seeking a stable interna-
tional free flow-cum-free trade regime. However, the capacity of the
American state to modify itself in order then to reform international
institutions was limited and the particulars of this history were
directly influenced by the characteristics of existing state structures.
It is in this sense that an elaboration of American state capacities can
be pursued by explicitly conceptualizing the state as a complex med-
iator of private and public sector agents. To repeat, the structural and
historical conditions in which the state performs these mediations are
biased in ways that, at any particular time, are largely out of the direct
control of any particular agent or bloc of interests.
An analysis of the American state as a: complex medium of organ-
ization and conflict, and on the efforts of mostly private sector agents