Global Media and National Policies

There has been a conventional wisdom in contemporary media studies that views the phenomenon of globalisation (economic, political, technological and cultural) as a process that diminishes the role of the nation-state. Extrapolating from the observation that each generation of media technologies has enabled more rapid transmission of messages from one place to another, and that the scale of technologies such as those associated with communication satellites and digital networks is global, it has been claimed that forces associated with globalisation weaken the capacity of nation-states to regulate media institutions and media content.

Globalisation broadly refers to the spread and interconnection of production, communication and technologies across the globe. Media and communications have been drivers in the new globalised environment characterised by free trade and free flow of information, technological advancements and technologically mediated communication and new institutional arrangements. The complexity of the media networks and communications companies involved in the global scene and the speed of their expansion on an international scale is unprecedented. This has put pressure on the existing regulatory framework which is perceived to be inadequate to address issues in a fast-moving globalised world. One such issue concerns the shift in state sovereignty to the international level in media regulation resulting from increased trade and new technologies. According to Raboy (2007), media issues are increasingly transnational, and hence require international interventions and fresh regulatory mechanisms of various types to shape them and drive their development and social responsibilities. Unlike the national media systems where the rules governing the media were more straightforward in general terms (there are cases, especially in the Mediterranean countries where media regulation has been unclear), the emergence of a global media system brings with it increasing calls to apply new rules or reform the existing ones.

For the last quarter century, enthusiasm and fury about globalisation fuelled speculation about the waning of the state. Globalists of various ideological stripes envisioned nothing but its inexorable demise. They were convinced that the myriad forces of globalisation were poised to send states to the museum of Modern Oddities. The ‘modern state’ had no fighting chance against a formidable combination of global forces — capital, technology and civil society. The odds were against states. The state could no longer do what it was supposed to do — perform key functions such as control the economy, address social challenges, foster cultural unity and ensure information sovereignty. In a de-centred world, transformed by globalisation, the state could hardly claim to be a political, economic, social or cultural centre. The decline of the state seemed as inevitable as the passing of seasons.

There is no doubting that important aspects of both the global economy and society are becoming more integrated. The epoch of autarchic national development, most clearly embodied in the former USSR and Mao’s China, but present to a greater or lesser extent in many other societies, is certainly over. The successors of those two states are today deeply engaged with the global market and their citizens enjoy much greater freedom of international movement than in the past. There is, perhaps, one outlier, North Korea, that still tries to maintain the old ways intact, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the idea that the state could and should direct every aspect of economic life, insulate itself from the world and subordinate everything and everyone to the tasks of national defence and economic development has been abandoned. The dominant orthodoxy today, spurred by the enormous economic growth of China, is that it is only through integrating closely into the world market can any country hope to escape the traps of poverty and stagnation.

There is a widely held view that the nation-state has become less central to media and communications policy over the last two decades. As Jan van Cuilenberg and Denis McQuail (2003, p. 181) observed in their overview of trends in communications policy-making, ‘the old normative media policies have been challenged and policy-makers are searching for a new communications policy paradigm’. There are characteristically five factors put forward as to why the nation-state has become less central to media in the twenty-first century:

Like that of Mark Twain, reports of the death of the nation-state in the face of globalisation have been greatly exaggerated. The papers in this collection variously address what has been described as the ‘return of the state’ as an important factor in the consideration of the changing climate for global communications. The intellectual context for this has been the currency of debates about the globalisation of the media which, in the past, have tended to conclude that the combination of deregulatory state policies, the capacity for online communications to ignore national borders, the rise of large transnational media organisations and the expansion in transnational trade in media products have led to a media environment in which the significance of the nation-state has been dramatically reduced. This position has not gone uncontested: Sabina Mihelj, for instance, has protested that ‘the perception of globalization as a threat to nation-states and national culture is far too simplistic to account for the nature of interaction between the global and the national in the contemporary world’ (Mihelj, 2011, p. 1), and I have taken a similar position elsewhere as well (Turner, 2009; Pertierra and Turner, 2013). Nonetheless, the assumption of the increasing powerlessness, indeed the irrelevance, of the state within the new order of media and communications has been one of the orthodoxies underpinning a number of influential narratives of media development, particularly in the West, over the last decade or so.

Cultural industries have made a significant contribution to economic development in modern China. In addition, as an extension of the power of ‘culture’, cultural industries are also regarded as a domain closely related to social cohesion and stability. In China, the state authorities still exercise strict control over the cultural industries, from publishing to music and movie businesses. However, against the backdrop of globalisation, market forces have also been able to intervene in the development of these cultural industries. The interplay between political forces and market forces has thus intensively influenced the content and products of these cultural industries, which in turn play a crucial role in shaping the national identity. By using the online game industry as a case study, this chapter addresses the enduring issue of national identities through the cultural policies in a rapidly developing sector. We will discuss why and how top-down cultural policies and capitalist forces in a globalising market come together to shape the Chinese national identity.

This chapter discusses whether we are witnessing the return of the notion ‘state’ in communication policies in the European Union (EU). The EU — situated between national states and the broader process of globalisation — is an interesting case and can provide useful insights to the debate. The chapter argues that even in the case of the EU — the strongest regionalism movement there exists, whose policies are binding on its 28 member countries and whose law has precedence over national law — the state is neither necessarily weakened nor strengthened. Rather, European governance is understood in the context of the constant adaptation of the modern state, and associated in particular with the rise of the regulatory state. EU policies are an attempt to help national states respond to and cope with the challenges of the post-war national welfare order. Viewed from this perspective, the main contestation in EU integration is primarily about its character (what kind of Europe) rather than its level (more-or-less Europe). Still, European governance accentuates the problem of govern-mentality since it cannot fully compensate for the loss of the policy-making capacities of the national state.

The institution of public service broadcasting (PSB) and more recently public service media (PSM), offering new multiplatform services that go beyond radio and television, has always been connected with the constructed concept of nation (Williams, 1975; Gellner, 1983). This is particularly the case in its European heartland where PSB was initiated by the nation-state. As a policy project influenced as much by political and ideological interests as social imperatives, state intervention at a national level was justified by technological limitations, which in the early days of broadcasting underpinned powerful national PSB institutions, which mostly operated as monopolies. PSB then was a key policy instrument for nation-states. The nation-state used PSB as a positive intervention to achieve certain policy goals including the production of information, educational and entertainment content that was meant to contribute both to social cohesion and national identity.

In his book about the impossibility of doing journalism ‘as we know it’ in a dictatorship, Joris Luyendijk makes an important point about the terminology journalists have at their disposal. The regimes in police states use ‘labels that are familiar to us: president, parliament, police, party’. But, he says, ‘an altogether different system hides behind this façade’ (Luyendijk, 2010, p. 240). A similar mismatch applies to terms such as state, public and market, when used in relation to politics and media systems in the Arab world. It is customary to hear that large parts of the Arab media are ‘state controlled’. In fact, they are controlled by governments with very little in the way of popular mandate or legitimacy. Indeed, such conflation of state and government calls to mind Abrams’ advice (1988, pp. 79–81) that we should recognise the ‘idea of the state’ as a historical construct that seeks to attribute ‘unity, morality and independence to the disunited, amoral and dependent workings of the practice of government’. As for the notion of a ‘public’, this becomes elusive in situations where the people’s opinions and agency are suppressed. The surrogate term ‘Arab street’, used frequently in US media in the 1990s and 2000s, implied ‘volatility and irrationality’ on the part of Arab public opinion and invited publics elsewhere to ‘dismiss or mischaracterize’ it (Regier and Khalidi, 2009, pp. 11–12).

The role of the state in public broadcasting remains strong but state– media relations are undergoing multi-pronged change which is yet to be sufficiently studied. While Flew and Waisbord (2015, p. 620) concur with the ‘continuing centrality of nation-states to media processes’ they also crucially observe that ‘We should move past the debate between “the global” and “the state” in media studies in order to better understand the interaction among competing forces’ (p. 13). In the African context, Zeleza (2009, p. 19) also reminds us that ‘media infrastructures, practices and policies are embedded in the prevailing material conditions of production, the ideologies of current political economies and the discourse of networks of particular periods’. These observations are crucial when investigating the role of the state in public broadcasting within the context of ‘local, national, and global forces’ that ‘shape media politics and policies’ (Flew and Waisbord, 2015, p. 633). This chapter makes three important arguments. The first concedes that states remain responsible for the overall policy and structure of their media markets, but argues that the public interest should guide how they control public broadcasting. Using the example of Zimbabwe and insights from elite continuity theory (Sparks, 2009), the role of the Zimbabwean state in public broadcasting is discussed in historical and contemporary terms.

This paper argues that post-communist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) must be viewed alongside reconfigurations of democratisation and social changes taking place in the West. After the political breakthroughs of the early 1990s most CEE societies adopted a capitalist logic towards the media, which resulted in uncertainty and flux, characterised by commercialisation, media fragmentation and group polarisation. This paper suggests that the CEE region, in general, should be studied as a ‘test case’ where the various problems and weaknesses of postmodern life, such as increasing consumerism, individualisation, alienation, discontent and loss of community feeling can be observed, identified and tested. It analyses transformations in the CEE mostly from a media-focused perspective and argues that the role of the state, including the political choices of elites and also forms of (unregulated) marketisation, need to be examined to better understand the outcomes and variations of democratisation in this part of Europe.