New World Information and Communication Order

The controversy around a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) is a key episode in the emergence of global communications governance. Beginning in the 1960s, US efforts to maintain the “free flow of information” as a core principle in international communications were met with criticism from the Soviet Union and its allies as well as the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) of independent states. International arguments within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the main forum of NWICO-related debates between 1972 and 1985, led to the creation of a commission mandated to investigate imbalances in global information flows. Documenting the dominance of commercial and military communications infrastructures by industrialized nations, the commission proposed a stronger international regulation of the media system, based on alternative development paradigms that stressed cultural identity, independence, and self-reliance. Actively promoted by UNESCO until 1983, NWICO contributed to the departure of two of its key members, the United States (1984) and the UK (1985). At the time of World War II, the British network of sea cables connected Australia, Canada, China, India, and South Africa to the imperial center and established a communications monopoly; British (Reuters) and French (Havas/French Information Office) press agencies controlled news flows to and from their colonies. During the final war years, Associated Press (AP), United Press Agencies (UP), and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) called on the US government to challenge British media control and succeeded in turning the “free flow” principle into an element of US foreign policy. In its 1945 charter, UNESCO (its 20 charter members did not include the Soviet Union) agreed “to promote the “free flow” of ideas by word and image”; the UN adopted the principle in 1948. By the 1960s, the United States had established a global media monopoly of its own, sustained by its media corporations, the global distribution of its popular cultural media, and an infrastructure for Cold War propaganda, targeting primarily communist states across Eastern Europe. Despite its coupling with a call for democracy, US support of the “free flow” principle was increasingly considered to safeguard its prominence in information and communication technology and protect the global market of US cultural commodities. Committed to an institutionalization of the “free flow” principle (plans existed for a UN or UNESCO radio station and a global journalism training institute), UNESCO began to change its stance following the 1954 entry of the Soviet Union, Belarus, and Ukraine, who insisted that the “free flow” principle violated the principle of noninterference in the affairs of sovereign states. In the 1960s, many of the newly independent states joined UNESCO and articulated critiques, based on dependency and imperialism theories developed in the context of anti-colonization efforts, of the one-way flow of global communication, of media concentration and foreign ownership, and of the paradigm of modernization that informed Western models of development. In response to the installation of satellite communications bypassing national regulation, they demanded a UNESCO “Declaration on Guiding Principles for the Use of Satellite Broadcasting” in 1972, calling for access to the new system and the right to determine national cultural policy, including the regulation of broadcasts into their territories. After the United States and its allies had been outvoted on the satellite declaration, debate within UNESCO regarding imbalances in global communications flows shifted to questions of media and cultural imperialism. Prompted originally by a 1970 Belarus complaint about CIA-operated Radio Free Europe, heated discussion of a “Draft Declaration on Fundamental Principles Concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding” continued at UNESCO’s 1974 and 1976 general conferences. A compromise declaration was adopted in 1978, encouraging UNESCO members to support “the establishment of a new equilibrium and greater reciprocity in the flow of information.” Following a suggestion by the United States, UNESCO had created an International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems in 1977. Wide-ranging submissions to the commission, chaired by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Seán MacBride, included those developed in the context of NAM. The idea of a “new order,” suggested by Tunisia’s Information Minister, Mustapha Masmoudi, originated in the proposal of a “New International Economic Order (NIEO)” adopted first by the 1973 NAM summit in Algiers, then by the UN General Assembly in 1974, and had become the basis for a similar proposal related to information at the 1976 NAM summit in Tunis. The “Many Voices, One World” report of the MacBride Commission (1980) proposed a material “right to communicate” as a core concept of a “New Information and Communication Order.” UNESCO formally committed itself to NWICO in 1980 and established an “International Programme for the Development of Communication” (IPDC) to initiate communications projects in developing countries. The Non-Alignment Movement, increasingly assertive after the 1973 oil crisis had demonstrated the ability of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to challenge another US monopoly, had succeeded in establishing NWICO, now supported by a series of UNESCO and UN resolutions, as a subject of multilateral negotiations. However, none of the recommendations were legally binding; few financial means had been committed. Claiming that NWICO would strengthen repressive regimes, the Unites States opposed its implementation, equally concerned about its effect on US media corporations. In 1981, a government-supported “Voices of Freedom” journalism conference, organized by the newly created World Press Freedom Committee, issued the “Declaration of Talloires” calling on UNESCO to support the “free flow” principle. Other organizations followed suit, including the Inter-American Press Association, the International Federation of Publishers, and the Heritage Foundation. Following threats of the Reagan Administration to leave UNESCO should NWICO be implemented, the framework was now considered “an evolving and continuous process.” While the IPDC proceeded to operate on a shoe-string budget, discussions at UNESCO and the UN Commission on Information, created to promote NWICO, came to a halt, despite efforts to maintain its momentum at various NAM summits. The United States nevertheless decided to leave UNESCO in 1984; the UK followed a year later. Acknowledging the legitimacy of NWICO demands but interpreting them in terms of the need to support journalism and media education, UNESCO’s 1989 “New Communication Strategy” reaffirmed the “free flow” principle. Sometimes considered evidence of a neoliberal turn of UNESCO, now seen as an active supporter of corporate-led media globalization, the strategy reflects the agency’s secretariat’s attempt to reconcile the criticism of its influential ex-members (the UK rejoined in 1997, the United States in 2003) with the demand for an emphasis on social justice in global communications governance. Discussion of NWICO shifted to nongovernmental fora like the MacBride Roundtable (1989–1999). At the 2003–2005 World Summit on the Information Society, the Campaign for Communication Rights (CRIS) invoked NWICO in its critique of a narrow technological emphasis in the regulation of information and communications infrastructures. Acknowledging the limits of NWICO’s nation-based understanding of cultural spheres and its intergovernmental approach to communications policy, CRIS argued for a democratization of media and communication rather than the state-led creation of global orders. The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions contains elements of NWICO, yet receives no support from the United States, and went into force at a time when communications-related policy making had shifted to trade-related venues such as the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

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