Anyone know what "reforms" he's talking about? And what are the politics of returning to UNESCO *just now*?
In reading his speech, I had the usual sense of nauseating bewilderment (surely he has the worst speech writers since...god, who knows -- a long time; all that terribly plodding parallelism is so grating) in trying to follow his tortured argument, but the bit about UNESCO stuck out as especially odd.
The US's attack on UNESCO has been seen as an important bit of international politics by communications theorists on the left, especially Herb Schiller. Here are a few choice quotes from him re: UNESCO:
...the vehement hostility of the Reagan administration to the UN
system in general, and to UNESCO in particular, can best be
understood as an effort to destroy the international public
sector. In doing so, it eliminates the alternative to transnational
corporate enterprise.
By weakening UNESCO, for example, the capability of an international
organziation to defend the informational interestsd of its members
against transnational corporate activity is undermined...the main
argument used by U.S. officials to attack UNESCO is "its supposed
intent of promoting government-controlled media." It hardly matters
whether this was a justified accusation. The main motive of the
attack on UNESCO has been the desire to weaken public-sector
communications structures which have long existed in many nations...
The unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. from UNESCO in 1984, in this
perspective, can be seen as the American government's encouragement
of deregulation and privatization in the international arena and in
the poorer countries especially (Schiller, Culture Inc., p. 115).
In his <cite>Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America</cite>, (p. 120), Schiller ties the Reaganite attack on UNESCO to the rise and symbolic independence of NWICO:
In the '60s and '70s, a group of postcolonial Third World states made
mostly rhetorical efforts to create a New World Information and
Communication Order (NWICO) that challenged the Western--mostly
American--domination of world news, and information and cultural
flows...These views were summed up by Zimbabwean PM Robert Mugabe
(!!), a decade after the NWICO movement...
In the information and communication field, the Non-Aligned
Nations and other developing countries are adversely affected by
the monopoly which the developed nations hold over the world's
communications systems...The old order has ensured the continued
dependence of our information and communication infrastructures
and systems on those of the developed nations. Such dependence
constitutes a serious threat to the preservation of our
respective cultures and indigenous life-styles.
All of which is made even more interesting by a piece in the latest Monthly Review, which points out the importance of Western and US-dominated media systems in the construction of the public meaning of 9-11, particularly in the endless replaying of the planes flying into the WTC towers, which the author claims are now the most viewed images in the history (I'm a bit skeptical about that, but it's gotta be close). In some sense destroying UNESCO and anything like NWICO laid the groundwork for constructing the most US-friendly meaning of 9/11 internationally. And it makes Al-Gazeera, and the immediate post-9/11 attempts by Powell and others to discipline Al-Gazeera, all the more telling.
So, what's going on with the US rejoining UNESCO? The fights over deregulation and privatization in this area are over, yeah? The public sphere got crushed. And, more interestingly, what is to be said about the timing of rejoining UNESCO *just now*? Is it simply a relatively cost-free way for Bush Administration to signal some positive interest in or engagement with the UN at the time it presses hard to get a "tough" Security Council resolution on Iraq? Or is there more going on?
Kendall Clark -- Some stuff I found on my shelves where UNESCO is discussed:
Herman & McChesney, <cite>The Global Media: the New Missionaries of
Corporate Capitalism</cite>
Herb Schiller, <cite>Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public
Expression</cite>
Edward Herman, <cite>The Myth of the Liberal Media</cite>
William Preston, <cite>Hope & folly : the United States and UNESCO,
1945-1985</cite>