Page 45 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

US Foreign Communication Policy 33

'fixed.' In other words, the complex ways of doing state business,
although historically determined, are shaped by structural rigidities.
These established ways of doing directly influence the intellectual
capacities of state agents, while their ways of seeing and doing, in
turn, may be used to reinforce or revise state structures. The biases of
US foreign communication policy officials, at any particular time,
thus are directly shaped by the peculiarities of existing state structures
- structures that are shaped by the material and intellectual capacities
and interests of a usually complex array of private and public sector
agents.
Through empirical evidence and the application of critical political-
economic theory, this book shows that the systemic and structural
relationship of the American state with US-based capital in foreign
communication policy has involved far more complex processes than
the cultural imperialism paradigm can reveal - at least as it now
stands. Rather than a structurally entrenched American imperialism
defining the course of US policy, historical shifts in policy-making
priorities, capacities and outcomes instead have generated multiple
and even disparate centers of policy leadership. In specifying these,
their contexts and the forces underlying them, a relatively sophistic-
ated representation of cultural imperialism can be developed.
As shown in Chapter 6, the mediating role of the American state
was crucial in the success of a trade-based foreign communication
policy strategy as represented by the Uruguay Round of GATT. Both
it and the American state now can be viewed as essential components
of late-twentieth-century international information and communica-
tion developments. In this contemporary history, different states and
different officials within each state act in response to domestic and
international as well as intra-state forces. Cox elaborates on this:

Each state has evolved, through its own institutions and practices,
certain consistent notions of interest and modes of conduct that
can be termed its particular raison d'etat. This autonomy is,
however, conditioned by both internal and external constraints.
State autonomy, in other words, is exercised within a structure
created by the state's own history. 37

What remains to be elaborated is the nature of these constraints at
any particular time, in any particular nation state, and on any par-
ticular issue or policy question. Of course these internal and external
constraints are dialectically influential. For example, the hegemonic