Media and Multilateralism in South America: How the International Matters to Domestic Media Reform

Abstract

Currently, we are seeing major examples of media reform in several South American countries. But accounts of these ongoing processes focus primarily on political processes at the national level, particularly media’s place in the renegotiation of the social contract between state, capital and society. While these works provide important analysis of national political processes, they are limited by their tendency to overlook wider regional and international contexts, including regional integration processes such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) or the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This is problematic because ultimately media reforms should enable more equitable development processes within global capitalist circuits, and not merely greater recognition or representation at the national level. Since patterns of capitalist insertion are often negotiated and implemented at the regional level rather than the domestic level, voice within the domestic sphere may be insufficient to ensure the goal of redistribution. This oversight is particularly relevant, given Latin America’s changing orientation vis-a-vis the global economy in an era of global power shift. Given the global financial crisis, China’s rise and the decline of multilateralism within global trading relationships, South American states have stepped up their international diplomatic game, while at the same time opening themselves to increased dependency on natural resource extraction, producing new patterns of exploitation and resistance within processes of uneven globalization.