“Stressing the need to develop communication infrastructures in Third World countries is a legitimate and necessary concern, but its importance should not be exaggerated. Solving contemporary communication problems is not only a question of money and training. The idea of a Marshall Plan for the development of Third World communication is inappropriate and would tend to reproduce Western values and transnational interests in Third World societies. Any action in this field should be carefully chosen in order not to strengthen minority power structures in Third World countries and not to serve as a vehicle for cultural domination” Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Somavia (MacBride Commission, 1980, p. 347).
The understanding of North/South relations in the field of communication and information has evolved considerably in more than half a century. Relationships between wealthy countries – known as “Western” – and the so-called Third World as a whole1 was one of the major thematic axes of international communication, then a young discipline – and one of the main roots of CIS. This axis or “domain”, in the terms of Kaarle Nordenstreng (2007), is a structuring element of international communication, with the dominant theories of mass media rooted in the international configuration of the Cold War. Today, access to information remains unequal in the world; however, the dichotomy of North/South and rich/poor countries is less central in this disciplinary field. A review of the history of these theories will reveal a particular international context and the way media and information were viewed in the countries of the South, and particularly in Arab countries.
To trace the genealogy of international communication, we could follow the footsteps of Armand and Michèle Mattelart and go back to the 18th Century, when the French philosopher Claude Henri de Saint Simon considered the land communication routes as essential to the vitality of an industrial society in the same way as the arteries are for a living organism (Matterlart and Mattelart 1998, p. 6). However, international communication began to become a field of research only in the 20th Century. Its subject, in the aftermath of World War I, was the propaganda, as the eponymous book by political scientist Lasswell illustrated in Propaganda in the World War (Lasswell 1927). However, it was especially in the aftermath of World War II that international communication was built around founding works, dominated at that time by American works. This discipline was born, as Hamid Mowlana points out, in the shadow of international relations: “International communication as a field of research was born out of the traditions of theories and policies in international relations. A considerable body of research relevant to the various methodologies in international communication has been jointly formed by the human and technological activities that have taken place over the past half-century” (Mowlana 1998, p. 5). This scientific dissemination reflects the American expansion in the military, economic and cultural domains.
In the aftermath of independence, a major part of international communication focused on Third World countries. The keyword was modernization – a term that Mowlana points out was often glossed as “westoxification” follwoing the work of Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (Mowlana 1998, p. 6). The work in question had noble intentions and intended to promote the development of poor countries. According to researchers and experts, mass media could be used to modernize underdeveloped countries. All that was needed was to develop a formula to foster the social transformation needed in the “new” countries.
The founding father of this vision is Daniel Lerner2. According to this sociologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), mass media could have a decisive effect on the lifestyles of people in Third World countries. His work was based on field surveys in Turkey, Iran and four other Arab countries: Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Syria. These countries, imbued with the Muslim culture, were, according to the author, hampered in their development by tradition. Lerner presents a functionalist and evolutionary theory of modernization by exposing the different stages of a modernization process. In this, he joins the economist Walt Whitman Rostow, who proposed a five-step development model in 1960 that ranges from traditional society to the age of mass consumption (Rostow 1960).
Lerner explains that the power of the mass media is that it allows empathy. For him, audiovisual media allows people to project themselves, to learn and to open themselves to the world without having to travel (Rostow 1960, p. 53). For Lerner, the media are mobility multipliers. According to his model, the media can take traditional societies out of the underdevelopment that characterizes them according to a multi-phase pattern that begins with urbanization, which is the equivalent of one-tenth of the national population. Then, literacy and urbanization increase simultaneously, and literacy in cities continues regardless of population growth. Literacy would then encourage people to use mass media, or media participation, and would eventually lead to the emergence of a participatory society.
The so-called theory of modernization was emulated and work flourished to defend the thesis that the mass media had the power to detach societies from tradition and modernize them. The theories of Wilbur Schramm, the author of Mass Media and National Development in 1964, later published under the aegis of UNESCO (Schramm 1964), is a perfect illustration of this. According to Schramm, economic and social progress can be generated by the media. Like Lerner, he argues that the mass media can enable people in Third World countries to free themselves from the weight of tradition, which is seen as a brake on social progress.
This seminal work was well received by researchers and promoters of programs for economic and social development. Programs were indeed set up by the governments of Third World countries influenced by these experts from the United States and Western Europe3. Mass media was considered to be a disseminator of knowledge and an accelerator of development. That Schramm’s work was carried out in the 1960s is not fortuitous, recalls D.K. Thussu. Indeed, this decade had been proclaimed by the United Nations as the decade of development; research on this issue was therefore generously funded by UN agencies and Western governments, led by the United States (Thussu 2006, p. 57). This reminder of Thussu refers us back to Peemans’ words: “we can only understand the process of forming thought on development and the diversity of its orientations if we place it in a periodization that corresponds to the inflections of the historical context in which it was deployed, and to the conflicts of actors that have marked these different periods” (Peemans 2002).
It is clear that it is very risky to propose a definition of the notion of development, and it would necessarily be reductive in that “the words of development” (Cartier-Bresson et al. 2009) refer to both practices and a composite set of theories. We could distinguish three axes in a very general way. The first concerns “the social” and focuses on the well-being of the population. Development applies to work on literacy, education, agriculture, birth control and health. In this context, social development policies are policies of action on the ground. The second axis is political in nature: development is understood as the establishment of a stable democratic regime and the increased political participation of informed citizens. The last one is economic and gave rise to sometimes very theoretical and globalizing works such as Walt Whitman Rostow’s framework, mentioned above (Rostow 1960). In all cases, the media was considered to be capable of disseminating knowledge, innovations and information4, to promote the political mobilization of a civil society and to accelerate the impact of economic development policies5.
Gilbert Rist, a former professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, has ventured into critical and epistemological work on the history of development. For this contemporary researcher, development is above all part of the Western imagination. Here is his definition: “‘development’ consists of a set of practices that are sometimes apparently contradictory in appearance and which, in order to ensure social reproduction, require the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and social relations with a view to the increasing production of goods (goods and services) intended, through exchange, to solvent demand” (Rist 2013).
It is a fact that the Western model of development in the 1960s was perceived as a form of colonialism working through international institutions6. Moreover, social development programs, 10 years after mass media’s promises, have had only very mixed results. In the 1970s, Everett Rogers criticized Lerner’s theses and the theory of diffusion of which he himself was the author (Rogers 1976, and for a critique of diffusionism, see Rogers 1978). It can be recalled that, according to Lerner, urbanization could lead to increased social well-being and capital accumulation as a preamble to the education of people in the South. Rogers pointed out that the rapid urbanization of cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia was placing people in increasingly precarious living conditions.
Schramm shared this position in 1975 at a UNESCO conference. He publicly pointed out that the gains of any progress have been absorbed by the population explosion. Between 1960 and 1970, the total number of illiterate adults in the Third World increased by 65 million, in parallel with rapid population growth. At the political level, and contrary to Lerner’s predictions, participatory institutions were non-existent in most countries of the South. However, the amount of electronic media had increased7 without any correlation with literacy rates. In a section entitled “The decline of the old paradigm” (Schramm 1979, pp. 2–5), Schramm challenged his own theories. He wrote this self-criticism in 1979 in a book with the same title as the book he discredited, Mass Media and National Development: “I have just had the humbling experience of re-reading a book I wrote 17 years ago. As authors always do, I found excuses for what I read. The field was in flux: we did not know much about it then; great changes have taken place since I wrote. […] I should have been more sceptical about the applicability of the Western model of development. I should have paid more attention to the problem of integrating mass media with local activity. Above all, I should have given more thought than I did to the social requirements and uncertainties of development, and in particular the cultural differences that make development almost necessarily different, culture to culture, country to country. Now, towards the end of a long career, I shall probably not rewrite that book” (Schramm 1979, p. 1).
Many researchers denounced evolutionist, technicalist and “economist” theories of development in general and development through the media in particular. Clearly, the Western model of industrial democracies cannot be exported to the South.
In the context of the Cold War between the former USSR socialism and US liberalism, China engaged in a policy of autonomous modernization, reflecting a third approach. China inspired a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the possibility of an alternative. The NAMs established in 1961 called for the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) within the framework of the 1974 UN General Assembly. In the background, the NIEO represents a challenge to the structure of international economic trade. In the spirit of this criticism of global economic liberalism, the theory that the media could reduce the industrial and political gap between the Third World and the West was refuted. The dependency theory that spread from Latin American universities – from Santiago in Chile and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in particular – was the most widespread criticism in this respect (Bresser-Pereira 2009). According to the dependency theory, the world is a global system where “centers” – the United States, Japan and Western Europe – control the flow of capital between them and the nations on the “periphery” (Cardoso and Faletto 1979). Strengthened by their power, the latter impose their standards and the rules that govern economic exchanges. Peripheral, dependent nations are reduced to the role of low-cost labor reservoirs, consumers and sources of raw materials. This is a vicious circle in that the structural dependence of developing countries does not allow them to be one step ahead of the “imperial centers” of the North8.
As a result, through their domination of the world market, these imperial center countries institute economic, political and cultural norms. Thus, the dependency theory is part of a systemic vision of the world or “global capitalism” (Wallerstein 1974), to Immanuel Wallerstein. An Africanist by training, in 1976, he became director of the new “Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations” at Binghamton University in New York. His vision of a “world system” fits perfectly with that of Herbert Schiller or Armand Mattelart, for whom the marketing of transnational corporations via disseminating symbolic and material goods thus contributes to the domination of the centers through “persuasion” and mind manipulation. The advertising industry was considered by some to be one of the spearheads of this distribution (Mattelart 1989).
The role of the media and widely distributed cultural productions is, in this respect, decisive. Herbert Schiller denounces the “cultural imperialism” exercised by the United States. The psychological dimension of this domination would explain the popularity of Western cultural productions through the conditioning of populations by transnational corporations, which relay these productions (Schiller 1976). Herbert Schiller’s theory, which had a considerable influence, received two types of criticism. The first criticisms nuance the effect of cultural productions on the receivers. The hegemony of American cultural productions would not automatically imply an effect on receivers or consumers. The latter would not be passive since in the last instance they would give meaning, according to their own repertoires, to the imported products and messages (De Certeau 1993, p. 206). The second type of criticism returns to the domination of American, or even Western, culture.
The authors point out that other cultural poles exist, such as Egypt or Mexico in Latin America (Sinclair and Cunningham 1996), who exploit what John Sinclair calls “geolinguistic” regions (see, for example, Sinclair 2000, pp. 19–32).
Nevertheless, the theory of dependence and its cultural component will provide the backdrop for the demands of advocates for a fairer geography of exchanges in the field of international communication. This was also UNESCO’s golden age, which for nearly two decades hosted the debates that will undoubtedly have had the greatest impact on, and made visible, the theme of international communication and its challenges.
The debates on North/South imbalances in terms of media undoubtedly culminated in the 1970s, and the institution and place that sheltered them was UNESCO, a forum for both discussion and confrontation between protagonists with strong positions. Thus, at the 1972 General Conference, the former Soviet Union and the United States defended antagonistic positions. While the former USSR was defending a resolution on “the fundamental principles of the use of the mass media for strengthening peace, international understanding, and the fight against bellicose propaganda, racism, and apartheid” (UNESCO 1973, p. 72), the United States defended the free flow of information, two ideological positions that, in reality, badly masked opposing political and economic interests. The USSR advocated for prior checking of information arriving on its territory, while the United States, which had the power to extend its “freedom of commercial expression” (Mattelart 1999a, p. 360) and politics outside of their territory, intended to take advantage of it.
This liberal position led to the creation of a well-known NGO in 1976: The World Press Freedom Committee. The committee is in fact the avatar of a regional meeting of UNESCO in Costa Rica9. The Inter-American Press Association, represented by representatives of the press, was at the origin of the project.
In truth, two creeds will mark the decade and the history of North/South relations in international communication: the free flow of information and the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that was carried by the so-called Southern countries. The latter pointed to the unequal flows of information and communication and also the unequal distribution of the means of communication. NWICO emerged in the Arab countries: in Algiers, in 1973, at the Fourth Conference of Non-Aligned Countries. It was then taken up again at the Tunis Conference in 1976. The calls for an NWICO are obviously ideological, but the backdrop of the imbalance that it intends to correct is economic. It is a counterpart to the New International Economic Order (NIEO) following the establishment of international economic regulatory institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF or the GATT10. If NIEO calls for a redistribution of wealth, NWICO condemns the monopoly of Western powers on the media11.
For the United States, the matter is being heard: the media is intended to promote economic and political freedom and democracy. This position is not surprising considering that, according to Oliver Boyd Barrett, they are the most obvious representatives of what he calls “media imperialism”. The political scientist highlights the concentration of transnational media in the hands of the United States, whether it is content (software) or channels (hardware) (Boyd-Barrett 1977). With Michael Palmer, he shows the concentration of information in the hands of a few Western news agencies (Boyd-Barrett and Palmer 1979). In the same vein, McPhail refers to “cultural colonialism” insofar as, according to this Canadian author, there is a dependency between the dominant players in the communication market who export content and hardware and the countries importing these technical and cultural standards (McPhail 1987). UNESCO’s work perfectly documents the inequality of television production flows (see for example, Nordenstreng and Varis 1974). For their part, the countries of the South defended a free determination of national communication policies and bilateral information flows – and not in the North/South direction (see, Chapter 1 of McPhail 2014) – and, ultimately, an order in which transnational information and communication corporations from rich countries do not govern the global economic and political system.
The frontal opposition between those in favor of the free flow of information and those in favor of prior authorization did not allow the UNESCO General Conference in Nairobi in 1976 (Bourges 1978) to keep its agenda. The 1978 UNESCO General Conference was held at the organization’s headquarters in Paris. A resolution of 11 articles, in the form of a compromise, was adopted on “fundamental principles concerning the contribution of the media to strengthening peace, international understanding, the promotion of human rights, and the fight against racism, apartheid, and incitement to war” (UNESCO 1978). In concrete terms, nothing changed on the ground: the dominant players on the information market were opposed to governments that blocked information on their territories.
To give impetus to the debates around an NWICO and to move away from the status quo, Amadou Mathar M'Bow, Secretary General of UNESCO in 1977, appointed an International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, better known as the MacBride Commission. A total of 16 Wise Men embodied this venerable commission, which was chaired by the Irish Sean MacBride, two-time Nobel Peace Prize and Lenin Peace Prize laureate. The other members were Elie Abel (USA), Hubert Beuve-Méry (France), Elebe Ma Ekonzo (Zaire), Sergei Losev (Soviet Union), Mochtar Lubis (Indonesia), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Mustapha Masmoudi (Tunisia), Michio Nagai (Japan), Fred Isaac Akporuaro Omu (Nigeria), Bogdan Osolnik (Yugoslavia), Gamal El Oteifi (Egypt), Johannes Pieter Pronk (Netherlands), Juan Somavía (Chile), Boobli George Verghese (India) and Betty Zimmerman (Canada).
Moustafa Masmoudi was then Minister of Information in Tunisia. He submitted a list of proposals to his colleagues in the spirit of NWICO, of which he was one of the initiators (Masmoudi 1978). The different elements he intended to put on the agenda of the discussions were: the independence of Third World countries in the field of information and communication; the global rebalancing in access to communication resources; the assistance of Western countries to Third World countries to accelerate the development of their methods of communication; support for news agencies in Non-Aligned Countries by Western countries; the establishment of a supranational tribunal by UNESCO for the control of the media throughout the world and the right of governments to limit access to information and restrict the flow of information across national borders.
The MacBride Commission did not go that far; positions within it were not unanimous, which fueled tensions. The MacBride Commission report, Many Voices, One World (MacBride Commission 1980), is a milestone in the history of media and international relations, but its proposals were neither revolutionary nor binding. A total of 82 recommendations, divided into five main parts, first deal with the importance of communication in society12 and then draw up an inventory of the state of information and communication in the world. The third part, an attempt at delicate conciliation, documents the concerns of those who support the free flow of information and those who oppose “vertical” or “one-way” communication flow. The fourth part concretely deals with institutional and professional frameworks (including those of journalists and researchers), and the last part makes proposals that are more in line with the NWICO “camp”. This is because they advocate for a rebalancing of information flows and for Third World countries to have the means to be more autonomous in the production and dissemination of information concerning them. The report’s conclusions are clearly the result of compromises between opposing positions. Sean MacBride wrote in the preamble to the report:
“(…) Nor did the background to the establishment of the Commission permit any optimistic temerity in anticipating the difficulties of the task ahead or of reaching agreed conclusion.
In the 1970s, international debates on communications issues had stridently reached points of confrontation in many areas. Third world protests against the dominant flow of news from the industrialized countries were often construed as attacks on the free flow of information. Defenders of journalistic freedom were labelled intruders on national sovereignty. Varying concepts of news values and the role, rights and responsibilities of journalists were widely contended, as was the potential contribution of the mass media to the solution of major world problems”.
The 21st General Assembly of UNESCO held in Belgrade in 1980 was less impressive but led to concrete progress. A resolution relating to an NWICO was approved. In addition, a new body was created at the initiative of the United Nations: the International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC). This is a more operational and much more modest mechanism than the ideals of the MacBride report. The objectives of the IPDC are to link requests and proposals in the field of information and communication. To respond to requesting countries, each member country may make a financial or technical contribution (equipment, training). Donors and recipients of these resources can be public or private institutions.
The 35 members of the IPDC Intergovernmental Council met for their first annual meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1982. The observation was quickly made: overwhelming requests for funding on the one hand and a limited budget on the other hand. A total of 50 funding projects were awaiting the Council, of which 19 were selected (15 were regional programs, 3 were international in scope and related to telecommunications and 1 was national in favor of Zimbabwe).
The heated controversies that had fueled UNESCO’s chronicles did not stop at the IPDC’s doorstep. This resulted in the departure of UNESCO from the United States in 1984, followed by Great Britain a year later (Mignot-Lefevre 1984). Thomas McPhail, who, before becoming an academic, was then a UNESCO staff member, reminds us of the official justifications for his departure, relayed by The New York Times. “According to the State Department spokesman, the decision was made because ‘UNESCO has politicized virtually all the issues it addressed, it has shown hostility towards the fundamental institutions of a free society, particularly a free market, a free press, and has shown unbridled fiscal expansionism’” (McPhail 2014, p. 190). UNESCO’s budget was reduced by 25% following the withdrawal of the United States and by 4.6% following that of Great Britain13. This was a major blow for UNESCO, which had to lay off more than a quarter of its staff and suspend many projects14.
It is clear that the opposition between the market and, on the one hand, the followers of NWICO and national sovereignty and, on the other hand, those of the free flow of information, is economic (the dependency theory is enlightening in this respect) and political. The challenge is to control information and, consequently, public opinion. By the end of the 1980s, the terms of this debate would evolve and finally become diluted: the international North–South opposition would give way to a public–private opposition. The governments of the South, even authoritarian ones, will have only one alternative: the liberalization of their economies and, consequently, the privatization of entire sectors of what constituted the public sector. In the field of information and communication, we will see in the next chapter that this results in a new doxa: the entry of the countries of the South in general, and the Arab countries in particular, into the so-called “information society”, whose virtues are praised by the International Telecommunication Union.