Abstract
The underdevelopment of a theory of culture among both critical international political economists and agents of US foreign policy is remarkable. In these pages I begin to redress this gap by focusing on the role of the American state in shaping cultural capacities as a method of constructing and maintaining international consent. This effort is pursued through a critique of aspects of the cultural imperialism paradigm - something of a staple among students of international communications since the late 1960s - and some discussion of ‘knowledge’ as a neglected concept among students of political economy. In what follows, the practical nature of culture in the dialectical construction, maintenance or annihilation of a hegemonic order is pursued. More than a critique, this chapter also presents theoretical tools of use both in this book’s analysis of DBS and US foreign communication policy and, it is hoped, in the more general theoretical and strategic efforts of critical social scientists.
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Notes
MacBride et al., Many Voices, One World. International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (Paris: UNESCO, 1984) p. 193.
Luiz Felipe de Seixas Correa, ‘Direct Satellite Broadcasting and the Third World’, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 13 (1974) 73.
Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1976), p. 9.
Ibid. pp. 64–5
Herbert I. Schiller, ‘Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era’, in Critical Studies in Mass Communications Vol.. 8(1) (March 1991) 14.
The centrality of elite networks linking government, military and corporate communication interests is first articulated in Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire. For example, see pp. 55–9.
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., pp. 82–3.
Ibid., esp. pp. 68–70. On p. 80, Schiller writes that ‘Each new electronic development widens the perimeter of American influence, and the indivisibility of military and commercial activity operates to promote even greater expansion.’ Exceptions to this apparently unproblematic perspective include the work of Vincent Mosco, ‘Who Makes US Government Policy in World Communications?’ Journal of Communication, 29 (1) (Winter 1979) 158–64.
Representative examples can be found in Jorg Becker, Goran Hedebro and Leena Paldan (eds) Communication and Domination, Essays in Honor of Herbert I. Schiller (Norwood: Ablex, 1986).
A comprehensive critique on the purported effects of cultural imperialism has been produced by John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
Ibid., p. 7.
The term ‘media imperialism’ has been used, sometimes interchangeably with ‘cultural imperialism.’ The former is often used by liberal or non-‘critical’ writers. A core reason for this is that the broader context of domination informing the Marxist or more critical scholar, and the role of the mass media in this more holistic conceptualization, is not accepted a priori. Moreover, empirical efforts to quantify mass media penetration constitutes a far more straightforward proposition than attempts to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative implications of a complex of ‘cultural’ domination. See Chin-Chuan Lee, Media Imperialism Reconsidered (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979).
An ‘invasion’ of consumerist practices and values is often portrayed in the context of an external force disrupting the cultural harmony present in a previously unsullied society. The MacBride Commission report and other NWICO studies reflects this kind of cultural protectionism based on the assumed ‘naturalness’ or righteousness of existing nation states as cultural entitities. For a critique of this ‘invasion’ approach, see Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, esp. pp. 23–4, and David Morley, ‘Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the Sitting-Room’, in Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London, Routledge, 1992) ch.13.
Edward A. Comor, ‘Introduction’, in Comor (ed.), The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunication and the Information Economy (London and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 1994) esp. pp. 6–10.
Robert W. Cox, ‘Multilateralism and the World Order’, in Cox (with Timothy J. Sinclair), Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 517.
Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 118.
Cox, ‘Multilateralism and the World Order’, pp. 517–18.
In relation to the individual, the term ‘culture’ is used in the following pages to mean ’a general state or habit of the mind,’ while for a community it will be used in references to ‘the whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual’: Raymond Williams, ‘Culture and Civilization’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967) p. 273.
On this general perspective, see Paul Levinson, Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age (Greenwich, Conn. JAI Press, 1988).
Ian Parker, ‘Myth, Telecommunication and the Emerging Global Informational Order: The Political Economy of Transitions’, in Comor (ed.), The Global Political Economy of Communication, p. 47.
Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter Publishers, 1988) p. 25.
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., see esp. pp. 126–31.
Ibid., p. 118.
Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) p. 2.
See L. David Ritchie, ‘Another Turn of the Information Revolution, Relevance, Technology, and the Information Society’, Communication Research 18 (3) (June 1991) 412–27.
Stephen Gill, ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium. 24 (3) (Winter 1995) 422.
Theda Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 9.
Ibid., p. 11.
Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, p. 6. Cox defines ‘historical structures’ as the ‘persistent social practices, made by collective human activity and transformed through collective human activity’ - p. 4. By the term ‘state structure,’ Cox means ‘both the machinery of government and enforcement (where power lies among the policy-elaborating and enforcement agencies ...) and the historic bloc on which the state rests’ - p. 254.
Ibid., p. 6.
Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change, Global Governance since 1840 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) pp. 27–8.
Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, p. 410, fn. 10.
Ibid., p. 254.
Ibid., pp. 399–400.
See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) esp. pp. 121–97.
Robert W. Cox, ‘The Global Political Economy and Social Choice’, in Cox, Approaches to World Order, p. 193.
Ibid.
Among the preconditions for this fraction’s success are the following: its ability to unite various interests both through its willingness to make compromises and provide economic and ideational leadership; its compatibility with other domestic and international political and economic interests and growth strategies; and, fundamentally, its essential compatibility with predominant productive capitalist activities. See Rene Bugge Bertramsen, ‘From the Capitalist State to the Political Economy’, in Bertramsen, Jens Peter Frolund Thomsen and Jacob Torfing (eds), State, Economy and Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991) p. 112.
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© 1998 Edward A. Comor
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Comor, E.A. (1998). Critical Perspectives on US Foreign Communication Policy. In: Communication, Commerce and Power. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26235-9_2
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