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Colin Sparks
The term “globalization” is pervasive. Everyone uses it all the time. It is on the tongues of politicians, businessmen, and academics. It is prominent in discussions of new political initiatives. It is cited in the business pages in the context of the flows of investment and employment around the world.Students flood to courses with “globalization” in the title. Common sense has it that it is the defining characteristic of contemporary society.
The reasons for this unanimity are obvious. Not only are there vast flows money, goods, services and people around the world, but these flows are manifestly growing at an astonishing rate. Telecommunications provide evidence that is completely unequivocal.Between 1975 and 2000, the time spent on international telephones calls over the Public Switched Telephone Network—mostly used by people talking to other people about business and life—rose by about 25 times.Their duration rose every year, even during recessions, from 4 billion minutes in 1975 to around 100 billion minutes in 2000 (ITU 2000, 1). At the same time, there was a massive increase in the number of machines talking to other machines in different countries. The number of International Private Lines, mostly used for Internet traffic, rose about tenfold between 1995 and 1998, from less than 25,000 to more than 250,000. In 1997, the number of these lines passed that of the Public Switched Networks (ITU 2000, 3). The number of countries participating in the Internet went from seven connected to the US NSF Internet backbone to 200 a decade later. By 2001, less than half a dozen countries remained unconnected (ITU 2001, 1).
A similar picture can be drawn of the movement of people around the world. Passenger numbers on scheduled international flights, excluding special holiday charters, rose from just over 100 million in 1975 to more than 600 million in 2000 (IATA 2003, 6).In 1975, 12,406,000 persons arrived by air in the USA and 12,053,000 departed. Roughly half of each total were US citizens. In 2000, the total for air passengers was 62,217,000 arrivals and 57,498,000 departures, with slightly more foreigners than natives moving in both directions (BTS 2002, Tables 1-40; 1-41). The numbers of international tourists also show spectacular growth. In 1975, there were around 200 million international tourist arrivals in the whole world, but by 2000 the number was about 750 million (World Tourist Organisation 2000).Much less happily, the number of refugees rose between 1980 and 2000 from 8.4 million to 12 million (UNHCR 2003, 3). By any measure, this is a world in which international movement, if not an everyday commonplace for the entire population, is an increasingly familiar experience for relatively large numbers of people.
Above all, the thesis of the increasing importance of global trade and global capital flows to the world economy looks unassailable. Total world exports of goods and services were worth $US390.5 billion in 1970.By 2000, the figure was $US7,786 billion (IMF 2003a). Movements of capital similarly grew at an enormous rate over the same period. In the period 1992 to 1990, capital inflows into the USA increased from $US170billion to $US1,026billion (IMF 2003b).
Scholars, however, are, or at least should be, concerned with more than slogans. We are interested in theories and concepts, and seek to identify those that can explain something about the world, rather than merely describe it. This paper does not seek to add to the already massive amount of empirical evidence about the extent of globalisation. Rather, it asks what globalization means. It then asks what this elaborated theory of globalization explains about the world. In particular, it seeks to ask what purchase the theory of globalization gives us on contemporary developments in the mass media. In order to undertake this task, the work of a number of prominent writers on globalization is first reviewed with a view to the central elements of the theory. The paper then considers the extent to which there is evidence that either supports or contradicts these elements. Finally, the value of the theory of globalization is assessed with regard to the contemporary media.
Any such project faces immediate difficulty. There is no theory of globalization that commands common assent.On the contrary, there are numerous competing theories of globalization. As Held and his collaborators put it after an exhaustive investigation: “no single coherent theory of globalization exists.” (Held et.al.1999, 436) There is a certain banal agreement that globalization means greater interconnectedness and action at a distance, but beyond such generalities theories differ in fundamental ways. To take one egregious example, the leading theorists are divided over the relation between globalization and that other central contemporary concept in social theory, namely modernity. For Giddens and Appadurai, globalization is constituted in and through the spread of modernity (Giddens 1990; Appadurai 1996). For Robertson modernity is clearly a distinct process from that of globalization.(Robertson 1992). According to his co-thinker Volkmer: “modernization refers to nations and states, globalization to communities of an extra-societal kind.” (Volkmer 1999, 55)For yet other writers, Albrow for example, and at least implicitly Bauman, the global age is the period that comes after modernity, to which none of the social laws that dominated the preceding epoch any longer apply (Albrow 1996; Bauman 1998). Finally, there are writers like Herman and McChesney in our own field who seem to have no time for modernity and use the term “globalization” to mean something barely distinguishable from imperialism (Herman and McChesney 1997). This kaleidoscope of theories seems on the face of it to imply that globalization can mean almost anything that a given author wants it to mean and that we have simply to suspend the quest for consistency and rigour and choose whatever we please.We join the fan club of this or that writer and adopt his (so far as I can tell, it is usually “his”) theory of globalization, forsaking all others.
The second problem is that many of the writers upon globalization are self-proclaimed social theorists, which means that they operate at quite some distance from any evidential concerns.As Hesmondhalgh has noted: “there is an almost spectacular lack of evidence in the work of commentators...associated with the globalization theory.” (Hesmondhalgh 2002, 177) In the place of evidence, we find “opinions, views and prophecies about the direction of the world, and critiques of concepts assumed to be parochial, essentialist and racist” (Friedman 2002, 15). If theories of globalization are not elaborated into testable propositions, it becomes very difficult to determine whether they are capable of explaining significant features about the contemporary world, and again we would be free to choose whatever we please as evidence of globalization.
If we are to make any serious intellectual progress, we need to go beyond this free-for-all of ideas and assertions and try to identify at least a degree of common ground between the different theories. We also need to try to develop the insights of social theory into the kinds of propositions about the mass media that we can subject to an evidential critique. If we can succeed in those twin tasks, then there is some chance that we can answer our own questions about what globalization might mean and whether it helps us understand the contemporary world. There is a certain similarity between the first part of task and the attempt by Tomlinson to develop a “discourse of cultural imperialism” in order to critique that diverse current of thought (Tomlinson 1991, 1-33). I would prefer, however, to situate myself within a rather older current of thought, developed by Thomas Kuhn to understand the history of the natural sciences, which speaks of the elaboration of “paradigms” that determine normal science. While this term is just about as imprecise as “discourse”, it seems to me more useful because it involves not only the internal logic of thought but also the ways in which that relates to the gathering of evidence.Kuhn argued that in choosing the term paradigm： “I mean to suggest that some of the accepted examples of actual scientific practice-examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together-provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.” (Kuhn 1962, 10) What I want to identify is the “paradigm” of globalization:the underlying conceptual framework that all of the competing theories share at least in part, and suggest ways in which these might be used to gather evidence that might support or question their validity.
The first distinction that it is necessary to make in order to establish the globalization paradigm is between what we might call “weak” and “strong” theories of globalization. Weak theories of globalization use the term, but they rest upon a quite different set of assumptions. They are concerned with structures of domination, with the centrality of the economic in social explanation, with the destruction of less profitable forms of cultural production by the large capitalist corporations, and with the articulation between these capitalist corporations and the political and military power of the state. The obvious example from the field of media and communication is the work by Herman and McChesney cited above.Despite the language of globalization that these theories employ, they are really more readily understood as developments and modifications of the imperialist paradigm, against which theories of globalization proper were articulated. We will, therefore, leave them to one side in this discussion, since they raise different issue that we do not have the space to explore.
Our concern here is with “strong” theories of globalization, which may be argued to have sufficient common underlying features to constitute a genuine paradigm.This paradigm is, in its main features “strikingly new” (Appadurai 1996, 27). It is “iconoclastic” in that it requires us to “reinvisage the world” as structured in quite different ways to the preceding epoch (Tomlinson, 1997, 173).At least from the point of view of media and culture, there are five main elements to this revolutionary new paradigm:
1.Understanding globalization requires a new methodology that is radically non-reductive.According to Giddens, globalization is a “complex set of processes, not a single one” (2002, 12-13). Beck argues that: “the various autonomous logics of globalization—the logics of ecology, culture, economics, politics and civil society—exist side by side and cannot be reduced or collapsed in to one another.” (2000, 11)The attempt to explain globalization in terms of a single master determinate like “the expansionary logic of capitalism, or of the global diffusion of popular culture, or of military expansion, is necessarily one-sided and reductionist” (Held et.al.1999, 437). Appadurai argues that： “the complexity of the current global economy has to with certain disjunctures between economy, culture and politics.” (1990, 296)In operational terms, it follows from these theoretical propositions that we will not be able to find evidence of any close relationship between, say, the “autonomous logics” of media products (culture), their international trade (economics) and the exercise of state power (politics).On the contrary, we would expect to find that “the composition, the global flow, and the uses of media products are far more complex than 〔theories of media imperialism〕 would suggest.” (Thompson 1995, 169)
2.Symbolic exchanges, and the international circulation of media products, are today central to the functioning of the global world in the way that the exchanges of raw materials and manufactured commodities were central to earlier epochs. The development of cheap and rapid technologies of travel and of communication has meant that “the world, or at least much of the world, is now self-consciously one single field of persistent interaction and exchange” (Hannerz 1996, 19). Symbolic exchanges are a wide category of different activities, ranging from international financial flows to the sale of TV series, but they have in common the fact that their immateriality means that they can overcome distance and: “it follows that the globalization of human society is contingent on the extent to which cultural arrangements are effective relative to economic and political arrangements...〔and〕...the degree of globalization is greater in the cultural arena than either of the other two.” (Waters 1995, 9-10)In operational terms, we would expect to find that, in the contemporary globalized world, media companies, or at the very least large scale media companies, are more important economically, and are more evenly spread in their activities around the world than are the extractive and industrial behemoths of the earlier epoch: paradigmatically, automobiles, aviation and oil.
3.The global epoch is characterised by the fact there is no dominating or controlling centre to the contemporary world. As Bauman put it: “the deepest meaning conveyed by the idea of globalization is that of the indeterminate, unruly and self-propelled character of world affairs, the absence of a centre, of a controlling desk, of a board of directors or of a managerial office.” (1998, 59)This decentring of the world is particularly important in the field of media and communication because of the existence of a strong current of thought that stressed the central role of the USA to the international trade in media products. According to the globalization paradigm, this is not the case: “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes.” (Appadurai 1996, 31)In operational terms, we would expect to find that there are a number of roughly equal production centres for media artefacts that exchange their products reciprocally one with another, and that none of them was so much larger and more important than the others that it could be said to dominate them.
4.In the global epoch, it is no longer viable to talk of isolated “national” units, either of economic life or of culture. The degree of interconnectivity is such that, in the case of media artefacts, the circuits of meaning production are increasingly detached from the specific tastes of given national audiences. In the place of unique and coherent national cultures we have a situation in which “hybrid cultures and transnational media corporations have made significant inroads into national cultures and national identities” (Held and McGrew 2002, 36).The products that circulate globally are neither “western” in content nor part of an apparatus of domination. On the contrary: “contemporary syntheses can be constructed from symbolic and material resources that originate almost anywhere on earth.” (Lull 2001, 137)In operational terms, we should find widely circulated media products that are free from the markings of particular national cultures, and which are in their central organisation hybrid.
5.The global epoch is marked by the erosion of the power of the “Westphalian” state system, in economics, in politics and in culture (Beck 2000, 4).The classical state was, in every sense of the word, sovereign. Contemporary developments have undermined such entities in two distinct ways. The development of international organisations that possess the ability to impose binding decisions upon the state have undermined it, we might say, “from above”. At the same time, the increasing power of local organisation has undermined the state, we might say, “from below”. As a consequence “the military, economic and cultural self-sufficiency, indeed self-sustainability, of the state—any state—ceased to be a viable prospect” (Bauman 1998, 64). These developments have been particularly influenced by the evolution of media technologies: “electronic mediation transforms pre-existing worlds of communication and conduct...〔and〕 ...neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound with local, national or regional spaces.” (Appadurai 1996, 3-4) Operationally, we should be able to identify the weakening of state-centred media institutions on the one hand, and on the other the emergence and strengthening of both global and local media.
If these are the main elements of the globalization paradigm, and if the propositions that have been inferred from them follow logic from the premises, then the next obvious task is to ask whether these propositions are true, and it is to that task that we now turn.
There has, of course, been a long tradition of dispute in the social sciences about the degree to which it is possible to construct theories of determination, and I do not propose to revisit the battlegrounds of my youth and rehearse Marx, Althusser, Williams, Laclau, and the rest.The contemporary issues are rather different.The classical debate over determination was concerned overwhelmingly with whether it was possible to demonstrate that the internal structure of a particular artefact or a particular ideology could be shown to correspond to a particular social reality. In the context of globalization, this is not what the discussion is about. The paradigm is concerned with autonomous logics of culture, politics, economics and so on. This is logically quite distinct from any claim about the ways in which politics or economics might influence the form or content of a particular film or television programme.
The globalization paradigm argues that it is a new and distinct feature of the contemporary world that, unlike earlier epochs, the international circulation of cultural artefacts and practices is independent of political or economic pressures. So, for example, it is relatively simple to argue that in the bad old days the spread of a cultural artefact like the English language was closely linked with politics and economics through colonialism and imperialism, but that today there are no such pressures leading to the continued expansion of the knowledge of English. There is an autonomous cultural logic, that has nothing to do with politics or economics, which leads millions of people around the world to spend hours grappling with the distinctions between bow, bough, tough, thorough, through, trough. It has nothing to do with the fact that the world’s dominant economy operates in English.
Whether such a proposition about the English language is true or not we can safely leave to the socio-linguists. In our own field of the media, however, it is evident that the international circulation of cultural artefacts has been closely tied up with political and economic considerations for nearly a century now. One obvious instance of this is the Motion Picture Association of America. This has long been associated with political lobbying designed to gain favourable terms from the governments of foreign countries, and in recognition of that role it dubs itself “the little State Department”.There is no sign of any sudden break in the last 25 years or so when the old habits of close co-ordination between politics, economics and culture have suddenly been abandoned and replaced by an autonomous logic of motion picture export. To take a recent example, in February 2004 the US and Australian governments signed a Free Trade Agreement, and the MPAA issued a press statement reading in part that: “Ambassador Zoellick is to be commended for securing a first-rate Agreement that provides full protection for American films and TV programs.” (MPAA 9 February 2004) Even though Jack Valenti is at long last planning to retire, there is no sign that his replacement (apparently Condoleeza Rice is one of the names in the frame) will follow a different logic than the ruthless linkage of politics and economics and culture that has been the hallmark of his 38 year long reign in the MPAA (Larsen 2004).
The truth is that the proposition that the international trade in films and television programmes, which are central embodiments of contemporary culture, follow a logic that is autonomous from politics and economics is unsustainable. They do not. Indeed, there is a strong case to say that the contemporary epoch is marked by an ever-closer interpenetration of broadcasting and economics. In the past, there were substantial broadcasting institutions which, while of course they operated within economic constraints, were to a large measure driven by cultural or political considerations. The most obvious example of a broadcaster whose logic might arguably be claimed once to have been cultural is the BBC, but this is also a notorious example of an organisation that has been forced to become more and more commercial in its operations over the last twenty years. Broadcasting in India provides another clear example of how what was once a landscape dominated by a broadcaster, Doordarshan, that was driven by cultural and political logics rather than commercial considerations, has over the last decade been increasingly driven by an economic logic, as a direct result of the introduction of new satellite broadcasters (Page and Crawley 2001). Similar cases about the increasing importance of economic factors in determining the logic of broadcasting can be made out in many other cases, notably the former communist countries of Europe and, of course, in China.
The evidence from the media suggests that the proposition of a radically new epoch in which the circulation of culture follows an autonomous logic independent of economics and politics is wrong. A much better approximation to what has been occurring is to say that there is a more general, although still incomplete, shift from the political determination of broadcasting towards its economic determination.
The claim that the global epoch is defined by the greater importance of symbolic exchanges than preceding periods raises the difficult question of what one means by the term “symbolic exchange”. It is, of course, the case that the bulk of financial transactions, and in particular those that cross international borders, are symbolic exchanges:no one believes that cartloads of gold or paper money are shipped around the world every day in order to balance the books. But this is an activity of a different order from the symbolic exchanges characteristic of the media industries. We can leave the former aside, noting only that while they have vastly increased in scale, whether they are today relatively more important is much more problematic.In discussing the globalization paradigm’s claim that symbolic exchanges are more important today than they were in the past, and that they are much more globalized than are political and economic factors, we will restrict ourselves to the narrow case of media artefacts.
If we take this to mean that the media industry or media products are much more economically important in the current epoch than the production of physical commodities, then the case cannot really be sustained. It is true that today there are many more television channels and magazines than there were half a century ago, and in some countries many more newspapers, but the increase in the absolute size of production does not tell us whether or not the industry has become relatively more important. If we look only at the large-scale companies, we find that there is little evidence that the media is a dominant industrial sector. While the global media corporations are very large indeed, with turnovers of millions of dollars and thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of employees, they are not exceptionally large by the standards of contemporary capitalism. Figure 1 compares three large media corporations with three large non-media corporations, and one corporation that spans both media and non-media. The three non-media companies were taken as representative of autos, aviation and petrochemicals, which are frequently cited as the key industrial sectors of the “Fordist” phase of capitalism that dominated the first three quarters of the last century. As can clearly be seen, the media companies have revenues, assets and staff that are in the same order of magnitude as the “old economy”, but they are in fact rather smaller by most of these measures. In the case of Sony, its electronics manufacturing activities accounted for 61 per cent of revenues in the year to March 2003. Games (12 per cent), Music (7 per cent) and Pictures (11 per cent) were the other major sectors. These figures, of course, tell us nothing about the overall balance of the world economy, but they do strongly suggest that media corporations form a significant but not dominant sector.
A second claim made by the globalization paradigm is that the degree of globalization is greater in the media sector than elsewhere.This is not self-evidently true.We may illustrate this by considering the same comparison between the media industries and the old industries we looked at above.The automobile designed by a company headquartered in Nagoya or Stuttgart is likely to travel around the world with only minor alterations, and perhaps be produced in more or less the same version in several different countries. The airliner produced in Seattle or Toulouse will be more or less identical whatever the flag of the carrier that is painted on its hull. Petrochemical companies, notoriously, operate around the world extracting, refining and selling more or less the same products everywhere. In the case of cultural products, some (major Hollywood movies and TV dramas) can be sold in many countries with few modifications (notably dubbing or the provision of sub-titles), while others (many magazines for example) can be produced in different versions to the same template in many different countries. Some, like the vast majority of newspapers, however, find it difficult to find a market outside of their locality, let alone in another country.
There seems little warrant, then for claiming either that symbolic goods are now more important than other forms of production or that they are in some essential way characteristically global in form and can be contrasted sharply with the products of industrial processes. The evidence appears to contradict the globalization paradigm with respect to the centrality of the mass media and their uniquely global character.
On the face of it, this is perhaps the most improbable claim made by the globalization paradigm. For most of the last century, the world was characterised by competing centres of power. The first half of the century was dominated by the conflict between two of them, the declining British Empire and its emerging German rival. The next forty years were dominated by a conflict between the USA and the USSR. The contemporary world is marked by the domination of single superpower, the USA that has no serious challengers for world leadership.It is difficult to follow Bauman’s claim that no state is viable today.Certainly, no state today is in a position to challenge the USA, on a world scale and for 45 years, as the USSR was able to do, at immense cost to its people, after 1945.In reality, however, the USA is overwhelmingly the dominant military force but, while it is still by a long way the world’s largest economy, as Figure 2 shows, it is no longer so crushingly dominant as it was in 1945. Despite the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, and the potential of India, the developed countries have by far the largest economies in the world, and they are together at least comparable to the USA. There is indeed a sense in which the world is becoming decentred economically.
In the case of the mass media, there are certainly other production centres than simply Hollywood. Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, Taiwan and Hong Kong in the Chinese cultural sphere, the UK in a number of specialist programme types:all of these are well known instances of other centres whose products find export markets either in their region or more widely around the world (Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham 1996; Straubhaar 1991;Fox 1997; Sepstrup 1990). In considering the international trade in audio-visual artefacts, we must of course: “allow for flows within flows, patterns of distribution that do not fit into the familiar and simplistic model that shows the total domination of international television by the United States.” (Tracey 1985, 23) The claim of the globalization paradigm, however, is that the US is today “only one node” in a complex system of programme exchanges rather than the dominant force that it once was.
It is difficult to establish exactly the scale and directions of the world trade in media artefacts with the kind of precision that would be necessary to give a definitive answer to whether this claim is true. The data are notoriously fragmentary, collected on incompatible bases, or held as commercial secrets. We can, however, produce some evidence that, while not entirely conclusive, is certainly more than suggestive as to the truth of the polycentric nature of the world of media production and exchange.
There is, for example, some reasonably detailed material about the UK and European market that is worth taking seriously. The UK has a strong and well-regarded television industry that has a long record of substantial local production. In the UK, as almost everywhere in the world, audience preferences are for domestic products. For many years up the 1990s, the UK imported and exported television programmes of roughly equal value. In the years 1985 to 1990, imports form North America fell from 68 per cent to 61 per cent of the total, although they rose in value from ￡59 million to ￡129 million. At the same time, imports from the EC rose from 16 per cent to 22 per cent of the total.Other developed countries accounted for shares changing from 9 per cent to 14 per cent. Imports from the developing world fell from about 7 per cent to around 3 per cent of the total (Shew 1992, 79).This evidence suggests that the US was the dominant supplier, but that a regional market was developing. The developing world constituted a small part of the total.
In the 1990s, however, the growth of niche channel satellite broadcasting, which is permitted to avoid European Union indigenous content regulations and imports most of its programming, has led to a sharp deterioration in the balance of trade in this sector, which meant a much faster growth in imports than in exports. By 2002, the UK was in deficit on the trade in television programmes to the tune of ￡553 million pounds. In that year, imports from the USA account for 60 per cent of the total by value. The next large source of programming was the Netherlands, at nine per cent. The European Union together accounted for 24 per cent and the whole of Europe for 35 per cent of the total. The whole of Asia other than Japan and Israel, Latin America and Africa accounted for just two per cent of the total (Pollard 2003, 10). What the data clearly indicate is that the US was and remains the dominant exporter of television programming for the United Kingdom. While there is indeed strong evidence of a regional market within Europe, this trade is, apart from the Netherlands, predominantly with the larger countries (France, Germany, Italy). The amount of trade with countries outside of the developed world is tiny. This situation is changing only very slowly, if at all.
The domination of UK programming imports by products from the USA might be thought to be a function of the fact that the two countries share some social and political dimensions, not to mention a common language, but as Figure 3 shows, the percentage is high in all of the developed countries, at least in volume terms. We would expect to find that in some of the markets for which we do not have the same kind of data, the percentage of US programmes is lower than it is for the developed world—according to one relatively recent report “the West” accounts for 30 per cent of programming in the Chinese market, for example (Brennan 2003). We should, however, remember that North America and Europe account for approximately 75 per cent of the world spending on advertising and therefore the absolute size of the markets in the developing world is small. Economically speaking, therefore, it is almost certain that the US is the dominant player in the international trade in television products and that regional markets, even in rich areas like Europe, are relatively small by comparison.
This sense that what we might call the “weight of the world” continuing to reside in the high-income countries, and particularly in the USA, is also evident if we look at those large media companies that operate on a world scale. Figures 3, 4 and 5 give some facts on the geographical breakdown of the three large, perhaps global, media companies that we examined above. As can be clearly seen, the centre of gravity of each of these companies is very firmly in the developed world. More than that, it is clearly in the USA. Time-Warner, at the time of writing the largest media corporation in the world, obtains 85 per cent of its revenue from the US market, and perhaps 95 from the high-income countries. News International, which is often taken as the archetype of the global media corporation, and which has been the company that has been most active in both India and China, “only” 76.5 per cent of revenue comes from the US division, and at least 92 per cent comes from high-income countries. Viacom provides a similar picture, with 84 per cent of turnover coming from the USA. If we examine the only case of a “global” media corporation whose centre of gravity is in a large market outside of the USA, namely Bertelsmann, we find that, in round figures in 2002, 31 per cent of its revenues came from Germany, 35 per cent from the rest of Europe, 28 per cent from the USA, and only 6 per cent from the rest of the world (Bertelsmann 2002). Very far from the media representing an avant-garde case of the globalization of capital and of markets, it seems that at least in these cases it is more firmly tied to the developed world, and particularly to its “home” country than is warranted by the overall distribution of world production. The activities of large media companies appear to be less globalized than is the world economy as a whole.
Overall, the proposition that the global world is characterised by the absence of a dominant centre does not seem to be borne out by the evidence, at least so far as the media industries are concerned. The trade in television programmes is primarily a trade in US made programmes. There are other exporters, but none of them operate on anything like the same scale as do the US companies:in a reasonably large market like the UK, US imports account for well over fifty per cent of the total. The activities of the global media corporations are dominated by the US market, which is by far the largest source of revenue.If one adds activity in the rest of developed world, the proportion of their income is very high indeed. There are indeed regional markets for television programmes, but they are relatively small compared with the flow of US programming.
The claim that the characteristic cultural experience of the global epoch is “deterritorialized” is a complex one. There are distinct arguments in the informational, educational and entertainment domains that are traditional in discussions of broadcasting. In this paper, we will consider only the third of these. The argument made is that the cultural artefacts that circulate “originate almost anywhere on earth”. We have seen how, from an economic point of view, this is hardly a convincing claim, but it could still be the case that the symbolic material out of which these commodities are manufactured can come from anywhere.
In order to examine this, we need first to make a distinction between what we may term the “official” circulation of cultural commodities and the uses to which they are very often put, some of which are distinctly “unofficial”, and often illegal. This latter is the province of the “Creole”, where a cultural artefact that originates in the developed world is appropriated and changed, if not transformed, by cultural producers in developing countries, who adapt it in ways that fit in better with the local tastes While this is an important and interesting phenomenon, it is “pervasively marked by the constraints of inequality” (Hannerz 1996, 67). In Hannerz terms, it is the “centre” that produces and distributes, and the “periphery” that modifies and adapts. Such a process is clearly distinct from the claim that the artefacts that cultural industries of the developed world produce embody materials that originate elsewhere and which embody a global consciousness rather than that of a developed country, usually the USA.
One careful discussion of this issue is that advanced by Joseph Man Chan with regard to the Disney animated feature Mulan. He argues that Disney needs to sell its movies both in the USA and in the rest of the world, so when it takes material that clearly originates outside the USA “there is a tendency for Disney to give a foreign culture an American and universal spin” (Chan 2002, 232). On this account, Disney needs to keep enough of the “foreign” to make the movie interesting and unique but to “not so much as to send people away” (Chan 2002, 237). The question that Chan does not resolve, however, is whether the “spin” imparted to Mulan is “American” or “universal”. This is partly because one of his main concerns is the extent to which the film embodies the “cultural integrity” of the original, and in this context he says: “There is no question that the Chinese legend has been Americanized and Disneyfied.” (Chan 2002, 240) He stops short of claiming that the process is one of simple Americanization since the story under consideration has no single unique “original” that can be said to have been changed and altered, so it is not possible to reach a definite conclusion about what has happened in the course of the transition from popular legend to animated feature film.
It is possible, using another example from Disney, to reach much firmer conclusions about the nature of the transformations that artefacts undergo in the course of becoming “global” cultural products.It is true that Disney takes material that “originates almost anywhere on earth” and it is certainly the case that they are transformed. This process often involves quite complex issues of “translation” into animated features from European fairy stories, from Greek myths, from French nineteenth century novels, as well as Chinese legendary stories. Quite apart form the issues of language, the debates around such translations involve discussions of authenticity, commercialization, integrity, cultural domination and so on, that are extremely complex and tangential to the issue of “universal” and “American” spin. We can avoid these problems, and confront the main issue directly, if we consider a central Disney artefact that originated as a wholly commercial product, in a fully developed country, and which already enjoyed a “global” presence before it was taken up and transformed. If we can do that, we can see exactly what the nature of the process of making something into a “Disney” artefact involved.
The example that illustrates these points very well is Winnie-the-Pooh. The two original books, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, were published in London (in the heart of what was then the world’s largest empire) in 1926 and 1928 respectively. Contrary to popular belief, these were not originally stories told in private by a doting parent to a drowsy child. They were from the first commercial fiction, produced by a career writer (A.A.Milne) and a career illustrator (E.H.Shepard). They produced the works as the result of a careful and entirely professional collaboration that was aimed at a market that both originators understood from extensive prior experience. The books were an immediate success, in both the UK and the USA, and were constantly reprinted. By 1992, they had been translated into 32 languages, including Esperanto and Latin (Thwaite 1992, 109).The authors were quick to exploit the success, in radio, Christmas cards, nursery prints, birthday books, project books and so on (Thwaite 1990, 295ff). In order to make them more marketable commodities, both Milne and Shepard were happy to make changes to their originals. These were, from the start, thoroughly commercial artefacts that were exploited in a huge variety of ways and which were sold around the globe. There are no issues of “authenticity” or of “exploitation” to concern us in this case.
In the 1960s, Disney acquired most of the rights to these two books in a process that is currently (2004) subject to a major legal battle in the USA, and proceeded to integrate the material into the work of his company. Since the 1960s, there have been three theatrical release films, a television series using new narrative material, and a deluge of Pooh-related merchandising. From our point of view, the significant facts concern not the change in the owner and manner of exploitation of the same intellectual property, but the transformations it underwent in the process. In fact, Disney’s Pooh is different from Milne’s Pooh in at least six ways. The change from Shepard to Disney is a visual change. Disney’s Pooh is cartoonized, clothed, anthropomorphized (his nose and eyebrows particularly) and made into a figure recognisably in the US cinematic animation tradition. The sound is distinctive as well. The books, of course, had no accent, but most of the characters in Disney’s version have US accents, notably Pooh and Tigger but also, at least in some films, Christopher Robin.The director of the first film, Wolfgang Reitherman, told the Daily Mail, which was leading a xenophobic campaign against the first animated feature, that they had selected the voices because: “The Mid-West accent is the generally accepted neutral accent at which we aim as it is acceptable to the whole American market.” (Quoted in Thwaite 1992, 165) The place is shifted from a weakly marked UK to a strongly marked US suburbia, particularly in the short video animations. In one, Christopher Robin plays with a football. Which sort of football?Well, you can guess.The language is altered, too. The original version was famously cavalier about language: Christopher Robin was “bisy” and would be “backson”. The Disney version is educationally correct—culminating in an 18—volume “Grow and Learn” library of texts based on the characters. Disney also plays havoc with the narrative structure. The most notable of numerous alterations is that Tigger does not appear in the original until the second story in the second book, but in the Disney version he is present from the start:the stories are often billed as “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too”. Closely aligned with these narrative changes are changes in character. The most obvious is the introduction of Gopher, whose opening words in the first movie are “I’m not in the book”, but the shift in the central relationship from that between Pooh and Piglet to that between Pooh and Tigger is the most significant change.Gender, almost invisible in the original, is very strongly marked in Disney.
It is possible to continue cataloguing the changes at length, but it is quite clear that there has been a shift in what we might call the underlying cultural unconscious that informs the whole. The original books are, unquestionably, straight out of the comfortable world of the British middle classes. The sensibility at play is that of the magazine Punch for which both original creators regularly worked. The films, videos and mountain of merchandise are, equally unquestionably, straight out of Middle America.We can illustrate the extent to which the new versions are the product of an American sensibility very simply:one of the books spun off from the videos is Winnie the Pooh’s Thanksgiving. This transformation has been central to the way in which Disney’s Pooh has become a global cultural commodity. It is a different, American, artefact from the (unquestionably imperialist) English original.
The changes that take place when cultural artefacts that originate almost anywhere in the world are taken up by the cultural industries of the developed countries are not arbitrary. Nor that are they intended to produce a product that will appeal some deterritorialized sensibility. They are reshaped to fit what their new owners believe will appeal to the sensibilities of the particular market place in which they are operating. As we saw above, that is most likely to be the USA, given the scale and wealth of that market, but it can also be that of the UK, or Germany, or France, or any other rich and powerful country with a developed culture industry. The process is the mirror image of the “creolization” that Hannerz discussed. We can apply what he said about the “cultural entrepreneurs of the periphery” exactly to the process we have been discussing by changing only one word: “The cultural entrepreneurs of the centre carve out their own niche, find their own market segment, by developing a product more specifically attuned to the characteristics of their local consumers.” (misquoted from Hannerz 1996, 74)
The fifth element of the globalization paradigm is the erosion of the power of the “Westphalian” state system. These once powerful bodies are being replaced by the direct interaction between the global and local. The unmediated interaction between these two spaces defines the global age.It explicitly excludes the level of the state. Plenty of people discuss the “global/local nexus” and “glocalization”, but no one, so far as I know, writes about the global/national/local triad (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996, 3; Robertson 1994).
In part, this assertion depends upon what one believes “the state” to consist in. It seems to be clear that the model of the state as the guarantor of national economic life, which was present in extreme form in Stalinist Russia but which had a wide variety of manifestations including states run by social democratic Europeans, bloodstained Latin American generals, and the Apartheid-era white racists of South Africa, is no longer viable. Only a few isolated countries, notably Cuba and North Korea, continue to hold on to the old program, at least for now. Elsewhere, there is recognition that integration in to the world economy is the prime objective of economic policy, and while the state may try to negotiate the terms of that integration, it is not in a position to ignore it. This is, perhaps, the most important truth in the entire globalization paradigm and it has very considerable ramifications for how we think about the world.
There is, however, another way of looking at the state, for which we might claim greater theoretical warranty. The classical sociological formulation of the nature and role of the state runs thus: “Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it...namely the use of physical force...the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e.considered to be legitimate) violence.” (Weber 1918/46, 77-78)From this perspective, claims for the erosion of the state by the process of globalization look much more contestable.
Legitimate violence can be exercised in two ways: against other states, and against the citizens of a state. In other words, states wage wars and states jail citizens. We do not need to rehearse the contemporary use of violence between states in any detail to accept that there is no evidence of a decline in this function of contemporary state. The current British prime minister has committed the British military to more international campaigns than any previous incumbent. It is true that military expenditure around the world fell quite sharply in the period after the end of the Cold War, but it has risen again in recent years. The expenditure is concentrated in a few countries:the USA accounts for 40 per cent of world military expenditure, and together with Japan, the UK, France and China, accounts for more than 60 per cent of the total (SIPRI 2003). While it may be true that some states are less able to project their power on an international stage, it is clear that a small group of large states continue to have the will and ability to do exactly that.
The other aspect of legitimate violence is that exercised by the state against its own citizens. In some states, the extreme punishment of execution for certain crimes remains in force, but imprisonment is more widespread and much more common. Here, there is little sign that the state is on the retreat. In the case of the USA, there were less than 200,000 people in state and federal prisons in 1970 and 1,440,655 at the end of 2002, with another 665,475 held in local jails (Sentencing Project 2003).Admittedly, with more than 700 inmates per 100,000 of the population, the USA is the world leader in incarceration, but the upward trend is visible in other countries as well. Imprisonment is a widespread reality in the contemporary world: 126 countries have incarceration rates of 100 per 100,000 of the population or more (Prison Studies 2004).
While the field of the mass media is a little removed from these harsh realities of the nature of the state, it is nevertheless the case that, historically, there has been a close relationship between the two, and it might be the case that more recent developments have undermined at least these aspects of state power. The press and broadcasting were “children of the modern nation state, directed towards a national community” unlike the satellite television, which has a geographical footprint broader than the state, or the Internet, that is boundless by design (Hjarvard 2002, 71-72). At the same time, the development of supra-national organisations might have led to the growth of supra-national media, for example the global public sphere that Volkmer claims to have identified (Volkmer 1999).
There seems to be little evidence to support either of these contentions. By far the best developed of the supra-national organisations is the European Union, and this has in common with all the other international bodies (except ICANN) that it is founded by a treaty between states. Despite evolving many of the paraphernalia of a state, there is no sign as yet of the emergence of any supra-national media organisations. Both broadcasting and the press in Europe remain overwhelmingly within the boundaries of existing states. Other international organisations important to the circulation of media artefacts are similarly state-centred. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for example, states flatly that: “only States can be members of WIPO.” (WIPO 2004)
While it is true that there is a wide range of broadcasters that operate across national boundaries, it is not the case that any of them are independent of the power of states. One of the clearest examples of this was the way in which the Turkish government was able to put pressure on the British Independent Television Commission to remove the licences from the satellite channel MED-TV, which supported the political independence of the Kurds (Hasanpour 2003). More generally, despite the extraordinary growth and impact of satellite television in the Arab world, the fact remains that all of the stations in question, including the famous Al Jazeera, are dependent upon existing states (Sakr 2001). Even the British ITC was able, on its own initiative, to close down a number of satellite channels broadcasting pornography into the UK from European countries with more liberal laws (ITC 1999). Satellite broadcasters are as much subject to the legal controls of states as are their terrestrial competitors.
There is similarly little evidence that the state is being undermined from below, by the “local”. It is certainly true, particularly in Europe, that there have been a number of movements, some of them successful, that have undermined the existing states “from below”, but these have been concerned not with abolishing states but with reconfiguring state boundaries to produce what they believe is a better fit between state and “nation”. In the case of the mass media, there has long been a “local” media, both in the classical sense of media relating to geographical localities and in the new sense of the local being constituted out of a commonality of experience.In the USA, for example, the vast majority of the 1,476 daily newspapers circulating in 2000 were local papers.It is a mistake, however, to imagine that these instances of local media are in some way counterposed to what are usually called the “national” media with a scope that runs across the state as whole. In both broadcasting and the press, there are strong pressures towards the consolidation of ownership in local markets, and this is primarily consolidation within the boundaries of one state. The major force restricting this process of “nationalization” in the ownership of the local market is the regulatory regime enforced by a state. One very clear example of what happens when the state abdicates this regulatory responsibility is provided by Italian television in 1970 and 1980:there was initially a proliferation of local stations, but the economic logic of broadcasting very quickly consolidated the market into a small number of major networks, today overwhelmingly in the hands of Silvio Berlusconi. Very far from being someone who is hostile to the Italian state, he is, of course, currently its Prime Minister.
From the point of view of the mass media, then, the picture is the same as that with respect to the classical functions of the state. There is no evidence that either the global or the local is undermining the state. Both the global, or at the very least the supranational, and the local are important dimensions of the mass media, but they exist alongside of the national. There are, of course, tensions between all three of these terms, but the evidence does not support the contention that one is being undermined by the other two.
The leading propositions associated with the globalization paradigm are thus all substantially mistaken. Culture and economics are very closely associated in the contemporary world. There is little evidence either that the culture industries are much greater in scale than other sectors, or that their operations are more globalized than are, for example, automobiles. The US is still the largest economy in the world by some distance, and it accounts for a very high proportion of the revenues of media corporations. Reflecting the economies of scale to be gained in that huge market, US products dominate the world trade in media artefacts, despite the significant presence of regional and other exchanges. The products that are circulated globally are not “global” or “hybrid” in character but primarily tailored to the tastes of their home market, which is most often the USA. Finally, while there are important global and local dimensions to the mass media, there is no evidence that these two poles are reducing the importance of the state as a definer of cultural production.
As with all mistaken paradigms, adherence to the globalization paradigm obscures central aspects of contemporary reality. To take one example, the globalization paradigm places great emphasis upon diasporas, and devotes considerable attention to the hybrid cultural artefacts that are produced by these groups. There is no doubt that this is an important reality, as the briefest visit to London or New York demonstrates beyond question. In the case of the UK, more than 3.5 million people came to the UK from abroad for more than one year during the decade after 1991, although of course the net change in population was much smaller because there was also a substantial outflow (National Statistics 2004). The same process took place in the USA, albeit on a vastly larger scale.
The globalization paradigm is correct to identify shifts such as these as extremely significant, but it is blind to two central realities. First of all, these are not new developments. The current population of the USA is overwhelmingly descended from people who made similar journeys 500, 300, 100 or 50 years ago. London, too, has known continual waves of immigration for at least as long. These previous diasporas developed their own cultural institutions just as today’s do. Just up the road from where I am writing is a building with “Capel Cymraeg 1908” over its door. Secondly, and perhaps more strikingly, a concentration upon these developments in the metropolitan centres of the advanced world completely misses the nature and scale of the real movement of migration. As Figure 7 shows, the really huge migrations of recent times—on a world scale more than 1,000,000,000 people in 20 years—have taken place within countries, not between them. The globalization paradigm, obsessed with the experience of the developed north, is curiously blind to the colossal dimensions of the global phenomenon of human movement.
This process of urbanization, of course, is a product of the rapid global economic development that we noted above, but it is not best understood as “globalization”. It is, rather, a familiar phenomenon from the history of capitalist development—the movement from the country to the city, from agriculture to industry—that was visible two hundred years ago in the first phase of the industrial revolution in Britain.
More generally, it seems to me that many of the phenomena that we have reviewed here are better understood as aspects of capitalist development than as the products of some new and distinct social phenomenon called “globalization”. In this respect, the “weak” theories of globalization make a better fit with contemporary reality than do the stronger versions. That is not to claim that “nothing has changed” and we can rest happily on the intellectual achievements of previous generations.Obviously, important things have changed，for example, the relative balance of scale between the US economy and some of its emerging competitors. It is, however, to claim that many of the issues that were traditionally central to the account of capitalism, like inequality and exploitation, remain central to the analysis of contemporary society. To take an obvious example:the best exemplification of a global medium is the Internet, which is not currently subject to the constraints we have examined above. But it is not global in reality. A quarter of the world’s population, more than one and a quarter billion people, are today without any access to electricity, and that number will rise over the next 25 years (World Energy Outlook 2002). No electricity, no Internet. A theory that is blind to such facts is blind to reality.
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Figure 1 Comparative Scale of Companies in Different Sectors in 2002
Figure 2 Comparison of the Scale of Major Economies 2002
Figure 3 Market Share of US Exports in 1997
Figure 4 Breakdown of Assets and Sales Revenue for News Corporation 2002
Figure 5 Breakdown of Assets, Profits and Sales Revenue for Viacom 2002
Figure 6 Geographical Analysis of Turnover by Market for Time-Warner 2001
Figure 7 Recent Mass Population Movements
〔作者系英国西敏寺大学中国媒介中心教授〕