Page 192 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 171

Where both agree that the powers of the nation-state are being eroded, the
cultural globalisation literature associates the nation with ‘invented tradition,
manipulative ideology, hierarchical control, intolerance, conformism and
nationalism’ (Curran 2002: 178). Globalisation is thus seen as a largely emanci-
patory force allowing new identities and solidarities to be forged that enable a
new progressive politics to come into being. Global capitalism is viewed as an
enabling force for cultural pluralisation.
A central concern in radical analysis is the weakening of democratic controls
and oversight as a consequence of power shifting from national electorates and
organised labour to global capital. Within CPE there are strong anti-statist,
libertarian and anti-nationalist strands, but most share a general conception of
the democratic state as a key agency in the realisation of social and economic
objectives. More narrowly, the state remains the principal agency in commu-
nications policy and central to prospects for greater democratic oversight of
media and cultural provision. The internationalisation of communications systems
and ownership makes it more, not less, imperative to assess how states use their
actual powers of imperium (law and regulation) and dominium (use of resources,
subsidies and support mechanisms) over communications and cultural activities.
Morris and Waisbord (2001) argue that it is premature to conclude that the
state is withering away and to assume a post-state world. States remain funda-
mental political units retaining significant law-making powers. Globalisation has
challenged but not eliminated states as power centres, as sets of institutions
where decisions are made regarding the structure and functioning of media sys-
tems. For Mattelart (2002: 609):

[the nation-state] remains the place where the social contract is defined. It
has by no means reached the degree of obsolescence suggested by the crusade
in favour of deterritorialization through networks. It takes the nearsightedness
of techno-libertarians to support this kind of globalizing populism, which
avails itself of the simplistic idea of a somewhat abstract and evil state in
opposition to that of an idealized civil society – an area of free exchange
between fully sovereign individuals

Rather, a task for organised civil society is ‘to ensure that the state is not robbed
of its regulatory function’ (Mattelart 2002: 609). Cultural (globalisation) theory
addresses media processes, and theorising about and beyond ethnocentric
frameworks, but has tended to neglect national organisation of communications,
to overstate the decline of the nation-state and to ignore the political economic
dynamics of ‘globalization’.

Media internationalisation

Two radically different perspectives, transnational corporate domination and
cultural globalisation, agree that transnational media are eroding national