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US Foreign Communication Policy 37

efforts to forge and maintain consent as to what kinds of political and
economic policies are feasible and desirable. The neo-liberal World
Order being constructed is a far more tenuous development than what
recent analyses emphasizing the 'inevitability' of globalization and the
transformative magic of new technologies would have us believe. As
developed in this book, and stressed in its final chapter, these media of
structural change and consensus building have been and will remain
the sites of contradiction and struggle. Technologies, organizations
and institutions process such struggles and contradictions in their own
ways - what I refer to as their historically constructed 'biases' - and
the structural and cultural implications of such mediations will reflect
these pre-established capacities and dispositions. As such, the Amer-
ican state, as a core and biased medium of domestic and global
political, economic and cultural developments, stands as an institution
through which political action and structural reform can modify the
outcome of contradictions and struggles.

2.5 CONCLUSIONS

The state plays a crucial role in shaping the social-economic condi-
tions through which capitalism develops. It is not a static entity: it is a
living but relatively inflexible institution, painfully reinventing itself in
response to changing historical conditions and dominant social-economic
interests. In relation to DBS and international information and com-
munication developments, the American state has been a complex
mediator - 'complex' in that the response of its personnel at any given
time is biased by pre-existing structural conditions that subsequently
may be reformed.
The orderly functioning of the international political economy
involves the predominance of general assumptions or shared mytho-
logies as to what is feasible and infeasible, realistic and unrealistic,
imaginable and unimaginable. This can occur when a fraction of
capital or conjunction of powerful vested interests come to dominate
an existing or emerging hegemonic bloc. Through its economic and
ideational predominance - both facilitated through the capacity to
reform or control core institutions (including nation states), organiza-
tions and technologies (such as DBS) - a hegemonic development
strategy can be pursued. This economic effort and ideational perspect-
ive then can be universalized into a shared common sense. To some
extent, the present study traces the problematic emergence of a