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The New World Information and Communication Order

An Idea That Refuses to Die

Kaarle Nordenstreng

This topic leads us to a particular chapter in media history, dealing with international politics as much as media studies. The concept of a “new world information and communication order,” known as NWICO, became a leading theme in global media policy debates from the 1970s until the 1990s, covering the period from heights of decolonization to the collapse of communism. The debates started in diplomatic forums of the developing countries, particularly the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),¹ and extended to professional and academic circles so that in the 1980s NWICO was part and parcel of the discourse on the media's role in society and the world at large. By the new millennium, however, it disappeared from the agenda, to be replaced by concepts such as media globalization. In the 2010s, NWICO already belongs to the history of the field – a history that keeps re-emerging under a different aegis.

NWICO is quite a hot chapter in the history of the field. It connects the media, and the study of the media, to the geopolitical struggles between the US-led capitalist “West” and the Soviet-led socialist “East,” on the one hand, and the industrialized “North” and the developing “South,” on the other. NWICO became the buzzword for media controversies in the final period of the Cold War and in the transition to a post-Cold War world. However, NWICO did not only serve as a political context to media and their policies at the time; it was also a catalyst for paradigmatic shifts in international communication studies. The present author even compared NWICO and a critical variant of communication research as two tracks of the same movement (Nordenstreng, 1993).

In brief, the concept was born in an aggressive wave of decolonization spearheaded by NAM in the first part of the 1970s; it was consolidated during an information war, with a counterattack by the Western powers in the mid-1970s, followed by a diplomatic truce in the late 1970s; then it was shunned by another Western corporate offensive in the 1980s, and finally frozen in the turmoil of the 1990s. Yet its idea carried over to the new millennium, no longer as a pervasive concept but embedded in a number of key issues in global media policy and study.

Birth in a Decolonization Offensive

By the early 1970s, the developing countries had accumulated a great deal of political power and economic potential, with the support of such organizations as NAM and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). All this created a new relation of forces in the world arena, already under pressure from the socialist part of the world, leading to such manifestations as the oil crisis and the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO)¹ – all of which worked against the vested interests of the Western countries. Another corollary to this offensive against the West was a polarization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, reflected not only in a war between the parties, but also in the UN resolution by which the majority of the international community determined Zionism as a form of racism.³

In this situation, it appeared that a new chapter in world history was in the making, and it was not by chance that the phrase “new order” became popular. After all, it implies a radical analysis of the world; the concept of order points at a global structure not far from Lenin's theory of imperialism. It suggested a radical program to change the world, which was still dominated by Western imperialism; the notion of “new” implying a call for war against the “old order.” Consequently, the basic pattern was that the West was on the defensive and the developing countries, supported by the socialist countries, were on the offensive.

Under these conditions the idea of decolonization was well established as a political program and an intellectual concept. But before 1973, it was not applied to the sphere of information and culture. This occurred systematically in NAM platforms during 1976: first in a symposium on information in Tunis, then in a conference of information ministers in New Delhi, and finally in the summit in Colombo.

The first event to articulate media and communication in terms of an international order was the NAM Symposium on Information in Tunis (Tunisia) in March 1976. The resolution of this symposium includes the following paragraph:

The paragraph before this speaks about emancipation of the developing countries from “structures of imperialist power,” which should be seen in the general context of what was expressed already by the 4th NAM Summit in Algiers (Algeria) in 1973: “the activities of imperialism are not confined solely to the political and economic fields, but also cover the cultural and social fields,” demanding NAM to take “concerted action in the field of mass communication” (quoted in Nordenstreng, 1984a, p. 9).

The placing of mass communication within the structures of “imperialism” was also quite common at the time among critical scholars and development activists in the United States and Europe. Even the President of Finland – a capitalist country pursuing a neutral foreign policy between East and West – used the term when drawing attention to the structural inequalities in the media field, nationally and internationally: “Just as within Finland there is a situation in the press described as a bourgeois hegemony, on the international arena there is a state of affairs called communication imperialism” (Kekkonen, 1974, p. 44).⁴

Yet the prime mover of the NWICO concept was NAM, which followed up the Tunis symposium in July 1976 when the NAM Ministerial Meeting in New Delhi (India) established the “Press Agencies Pool of the Non-Aligned Countries” and adopted a landmark “New Delhi Declaration.” It serves as a textbook presentation of the reasoning behind NWICO:

1. The present global information flows are marked by a serious inadequacy and imbalance. The means of communication of information are concentrated in a few countries. The great majority of countries are reduced to being passive recipients of information which is disseminated from a few countries.
2. This situation perpetuates the colonial era of dependence and domination. It confines judgments and decisions on what should be known, and how it should be made known, into the hands of a few.
3. The dissemination of information rests at present in the hands of a few agencies located in a few developed countries, and the rest of the peoples of the world are forced to see each other, and even themselves, through the medium of these agencies.
4. Just as political and economic dependence are legacies of the era of colonialism, so is the case of dependence in the field of information, which in turn retards the achievement of political and economic growth.
5. In a situation where the means of information are dominated and monopolized by a few, freedom of information really comes to mean freedom of these few to propagate information in the manner of their choosing and the virtual denial to the rest of the right to inform and be informed objectively and accurately.
6. Non-Aligned countries have, in particular, been the victims of this phenomenon. Their endeavors, individual and collective, for world peace, justice, and for the establishment of an equitable international economic order, have been underplayed or misrepresented by international news media. Their unity has sought to be eroded. Their efforts to safeguard their political and economic independence and stability have been denigrated. (Quoted in Nordenstreng, 1984a, pp. 10–11)

As pointed out by the present author (Nordenstreng, 1984b, p. 29), this declaration presents a fundamental challenge to the traditional libertarian theory of the press in three respects. First, it implies that laissez-faire will lead to monopolization and create neocolonial dependence. Second, it shows how insufficient is an abstract right to information without ensuring the material means to put that right into practice. Third, the information in the media is given explicit content qualifications: it should be objective and accurate.

The New Delhi Declaration was endorsed a month later by the 5th NAM Summit in Colombo (Sri Lanka), where 87 members of the movement – over half of the UN membership – resolved: “A new international order in the fields of information and mass communications is as vital as a new international economic order” (Nordenstreng, 1984a, p. 11). Linking NWICO with NIEO further galvanized the concept, turning it into a highly political issue in the global arena. The linkage also highlighted a powerful common denominator: the idea of collective self-reliance (Pavlic & Hamelink, 1985).⁵

The political history of decolonization would not be complete without noting that the socialist bloc of the East, although formally a separate third party of the power game, was a kind of “natural ally” of NAM as they both were directed against the West and its capitalist interests in the world. This became particularly clear in the media field, where in the early 1970s the Soviet Union had initiated a project to establish regulatory relations between international media such as news agencies and foreign broadcasts, on the one hand, to the principles of international law and professional ethics, on the other. A flagship of this project was the Mass Media Declaration of UNESCO which was drafted at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) between 1970 and 1978, with NAM and the Soviet-led East sharing the same strategic interests against the corporate-dominated West (Nordenstreng, 1984a).⁶

As far as the history of ideas is concerned, a central intellectual ingredient in the rise of NWICO was the concept of freedom – how the value-loaded idea of press freedom was suddenly brought under a critical light. Powerful input to a critical look came from Herbert Schiller's (1976) account of the genesis of the US free-flow doctrine as an instrument of cultural domination. A sharp look at the same issue from the South was provided by a veteran journalist in India, D. R. Mankekar, in books with telling titles such as One-Way Free Flow (1978) and Whose Freedom? Whose Order? (1981). A Western position was articulated by a British journalist, Rosemary Righter, in her Whose News? Politics, the Press and the Third World (1978). (For an overview of the free-flow doctrine in global media policy, see Nordenstreng, 2011a.)

Parallel to questioning the traditional bourgeois notion of freedom, a new concept was introduced by a liberal French media expert, Jean D'Arcy: The Right to Communicate (Fisher & Harms, 1983). This was an attempt to meet the intellectual and political challenge of the time, with a Western human rights bias. However, it only obtained a lukewarm reception in Western political circles, except in countries such as Sweden, which introduced the Right to Communicate into UNESCO's program in 1974. It was welcomed in the developing world as a new collective right defending cultural sovereignty. In fact, for some time it was a serious candidate for the leading intellectual idea in global media debate, but it never succeeded in achieving the same momentum as NWICO.

Consolidation in an Information War⁷

The mounting media-related activities of NAM, the UN, and UNESCO in the early 1970s gave rise to opposition in the West, particularly among private media circles. Accordingly, US newspaper publishers established the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC)⁸ “to wage an eventually successful global struggle in and around intergovernmental organizations to beat back authoritarian proposals for a restrictive ‘new world information and communication order.’” The WPFC's first battle against UNESCO was waged at the Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in San José (Costa Rica) in 1976. Although the moment was favorable to UNESCO's pursuit of a modestly “anti-imperialist” line, the WPFC succeeded in making the concept of a national communication policy controversial, thus impairing the momentum of this program of UNESCO.

The next battleground was UNESCO's General Conference in Nairobi in 1976, convened for the first time in Africa. The developing countries came there with the freshly articulated NAM position, and the socialist countries were prepared to push through the Mass Media Declaration as drafted by an intergovernmental meeting which failed to reach a consensus and instead voted with an East–South majority, leaving the West in a defeated minority. The Western countries and media proprietors were most concerned in this draft about a reference to the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism and about an article suggesting that states are responsible for the activities in the international sphere of all mass media under their jurisdiction (as determined by international law).

Consequently, Nairobi became the scene of unprecedented diplomatic and nongovernmental lobbying. In order to understand the events at UNESCO it is important to recall that at the same time, in 1976–1977, the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations prepared special reports and organized hearings on global media policies, and these activities were no longer typical manifestations of the counterattack waged by lobbies such as WPFC. While certainly motivated by the same Western probusiness interests, they advocated a more flexible approach – a strategy of selective accommodation to, and active partnership with, the forces confronting the West. The mood of the day was: “Whether we like it or not, there will be a ‘New World Information Order.’”⁹

Accordingly, the information war proceeded to a new stage, after the NAM offensive and the Western counterattack – a truce. In fact, before and during Nairobi 1976 – while the Western press and private broadcasting interests kept campaigning against UNESCO – Western diplomats were busy suggesting deals to the developing countries. The political purpose was to play down the draft Mass Media Declaration, which by that time had become a symbol for the principles and contents of the mass media within an anti-Western context. By and large, the new strategy followed the old formula: If you can't beat them, join them!

It was this situation of conflicting political strategies that led to the compromise whereby the Mass Media Declaration was shelved for another two years and the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems was established – to be headed by Sean MacBride (MacBride et al., 1980). It was a clever tactical move by UNESCO's Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow to set up a “reflexion group of wise men” as a way to avoid a political crisis, which had accumulated at UNESCO due to increasing disagreements about the organization's competence to determine normative standards for the media.

The conflicting strategies of Nairobi 1976 were further elaborated by the time of the next UNESCO General Conference in Paris in 1978. An outspoken statement was given by the head of the US delegation, Ambassador John E. Reinhardt (an African American representing Jimmy Carter's administration), who in his address contrasted “restrictive declarations” against “positive cooperation” and made a call for “American assistance, both public and private, to suitably identified regional centers of professional education and training in broadcasting and journalism in the developing world,” as well as “a major effort to apply the benefits of advanced communications technology, specifically communications satellites, to economic and social needs in the rural areas of developing nations.” There was little new in this program, but its launching at UNESCO as a kind of political demonstration gave rise to the concept of a “Marshall Plan of Telecommunications,” mooted by those developing-world representatives who were not quite convinced of the sincerity of US intentions. In fact, this led two years later to the establishment of the International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC).

Obviously the US “carrot” was designed to play down – even to bury – the Mass Media Declaration and other manifestations of the new order. However, the fact that the Declaration was finally adopted, only three weeks after launching the “Marshall Plan,” shows that the Western strategy did not quite succeed. It did not stop the developing countries, supported by the socialist countries, from pushing “restrictive declarations.” It helped the Western side only as leverage in the bargaining process over the formulations of the Declaration. At this period of accommodation, the United States did not deploy its “stick” – for example, by threatening to withdraw from UNESCO.

Another compromise on the same US–developing countries basis was a resolution, adopted by consensus at the 1978 General Conference, concerning the MacBride Commission. This resolution appreciated the interim report which the Commission had prepared for the General Conference, and invited, among other things, the members of the Commission “to address themselves, in the course of preparing their final report, to the analysis and proposal of concrete and practical measures leading to the establishment of a more just and effective world information order.” Although this resolution did not contain explicit “free flow” references, it obviously met the Western interest in luring the developing countries to turn attention away from fundamental principles and content considerations (such as the Draft Declaration) to practical cooperation (such as the “Marshall Plan”).

Consequently, Nairobi 1976 and Paris 1978 showed that the Western counteroffensive was effective by stopping the South and East from continuing with their automatic majority. On the other hand, the developing countries and the socialist countries also obtained their part of the compromise. The Mass Media Declaration was finally adopted by consensus in November 1978.¹⁰ And the MacBride Commission was mandated to examine the problems of communication in order to get “towards a new, more just and more efficient world information and communication order,” as the subtitle of the Commission's Report was formulated (MacBride et al. 1980). These were clearly compromises between the capitalist West, socialist East, and the Non-Aligned South of the time. There was room for compromise – a truce in an information war – in the late 1970s, largely due to the East-West détente and the oil crisis, which supported those Western strategists who preferred carrot to stick.

The next UNESCO General Conference in Belgrade in 1980 was historic, not only because it formally established the IPDC, but also because it brought together all aspects of the great debate of the 1970s, including its most controversial elements concerning the conceptual and political substance of NWICO. This took place around a resolution on the MacBride Report, delivered on that occasion. Patient and painful negotiations between and within various geopolitical groupings led to a consensus on Resolution 4/19, articulating the most elaborate definition of NWICO ever achieved in the UN system:

The General Conference considers that

1. (a) this new world information and communication order could be based, among other considerations, on:
   1. (i) elimination of the imbalances and inequalities which characterize the present situation;
   2. (ii) elimination of the negative effects of certain monopolies, public or private, and excessive concentrations;
   3. (iii) removal of the internal and external obstacles to a free flow and wider and better balanced dissemination of information and ideas;
   4. (iv) plurality of sources and channels of information;
   5. (v) freedom of the press and information;
   6. (vi) the freedom of journalists and all professionals in the communication media, a freedom inseparable from responsibility;
   7. (vii) the capacity of developing countries to achieve improvement of their own situations, notably by providing their own equipment, by training their personnel, by improving their infrastructures and by making their information and communications media suitable to their needs and aspirations;
   8. (viii) the sincere will of developed countries to help them attain these objectives;
   9. (ix) respect for each people's cultural identity and the right of each nation to inform the world public about its interests, its aspirations and its social and cultural values;
   10. (x) respect for the right of all peoples to participate in international exchanges of information on the basis of equality justice and mutual benefit;
   11. (xi) respect for the right of the public, of ethnic and social groups and of individuals to have access to information sources and to participate actively in the communication process;
2. (b) this new world information and communication order should be based on the fundamental principles of international law as laid down in the Charter of the United Nations;
3. (c) diverse solutions to information and communication problems are required because social, political, cultural and economic problems differ from one country to another and, within a given country, from one group to another.

It is not difficult to see that, under paragraph (a), a great deal of diplomatic trading had resulted in favoring the Western “free flow” position. However, all of these 11 points are merely among other considerations on which the new order could be based. Paragraph (b), on the other hand, provides a brief but crucial statement on what the new order should be based. The latter endorses the general position that international law constitutes the basis for all international relations, including those in the field of journalism and mass communication. Accordingly, not only did all the member states (including the United States at the time) approve the idea of defining the new order, but its overall orientation was fixed to the UN principles of international relations. This may not appear, at first sight, as a particularly significant position, but on closer examination it is the most essential element of the whole resolution. Paragraph (c) finally highlights that this field should respect diversity rather than uniformity – a concession to Western interests.

Accordingly, the core of NWICO is that it places the mass media within the framework of international law, as clearly pointed out by its early advocates (Masmoudi, 1979; Osolnik, 1980). In point of fact, this is not something new but rather an endorsement of a long-standing principle. Likewise, the very concept of an international order is already to be found in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes not only the celebrated Article 19 on the right to freedom of opinion and expression but also Article 28: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”

Therefore, an essential part of the NWICO substance is composed of existing instruments of international law. The first inventory of international law relating to the mass media – both their freedoms and responsibilities – was made by Hilding Eek (1979), a Swedish emeritus professor of international law. It appeared in a reader with other chapters by respected US authorities showing that the media and their freedom are indeed governed by a well-established framework of international law. It was typical, then, that there was need for inventories of relevant international instruments (Nordenstreng, Manet, & Kleinwachter, 1986; Ploman, 1982), followed by textbooks with the same approach (Hamelink, 1994).

Decline in a Corporate Offensive

The Belgrade consensus of 1980 was not long lasting. The truce in the information war of 1977–1980 was broken when the leading Western powers shifted toward a neoconservative approach. A penetrating analysis from the latter point of view was offered soon after Belgrade by Rosemary Righter (1980; quoted extensively in Nordenstreng, 1984a, pp. 57–58):

Righter regretted the strategy of accommodation, which had placed Western countries “on the defensive, again trying to buy time.” But she saw signs that “the events at Belgrade, in the aftermath, may finally provoke Western realization that it must stop this slow erosion of the freedom of the press and of the flow of news and ideas.” And she was right, as indicated for example by The New York Times (May 24, 1981) noting that “Western news organizations will no longer be perceived as fighting alone in the name of press freedom and democracy” but “they will be allied with powerful business whose interests in maintaining the status quo are unabashedly materialistic.” Moreover,

Such reactions soon escalated into a new campaign where “gloves come off in the struggle with Unesco,” as the title of The New York Times article reads. And this time it was a fundamental change in the Western strategy – from accommodation back to confrontation. It was a historical reappraisal, because ever since Nairobi 1976 the official Western approach, as recorded at UNESCO and the UN, remained fairly consistent until the end of 1980. This approach had been an integral part of the foreign policy of the Carter administration.

The fact that Reagan took over from Carter at this stage obviously gave encouragement to a radical change in strategy – from a flexible liberal line to a hard conservative one. A visible demonstration of the new line was in spring 1981 when 63 delegates from 21 countries gathered at the “Voices of Freedom Conference of Independent News Media” in Talloires (France), convened by the WPFC with Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. As put by Rosemary Righter in The Sunday Times (May 24, 1981), “after 10 years of losing ground in this longs immering controversy, Western governments are at last formulating a common strategy to reverse the trend towards state interference in the exchange of news and information and its content.” This meant, first, to turn attention away from a normative consideration of the content of communication and the sociopolitical objectives which the media are supposed to serve and, second, to invite the media of the developing countries to cooperate with the private sector of the industrialized West in setting up, training, and maintaining their media infrastructure and personnel. In other words, “trading ideology against cooperation,” as Righter fittingly put it.

Thus Talloires was not a frontal attack against everything put forward by the new order movement. Rather, it was an updated version of the “Marshall Plan” approach which the Western powers employed at UNESCO from 1976 to 1980. It was logical, therefore, that among the Talloires participants there were some coming from the developing countries (notably such moderates as Jamaica, Egypt, and Malaysia).

By and large, the notion of press freedom in the Talloires doctrine is virtually identical with the classic notion of free enterprise. It is natural, then, that the participants were “leaders of independent news media” – mostly owners or managers of private media enterprises and leading journalists working for them, i.e., representatives of proprietors' interests, rather than professional journalists' interests. This is exposed in the Talloires Declaration, which ends: “Press freedom is a basic human right.” In reality, it is the individual (“everyone”) and not the media (“press”) that is under international law the subject and “owner” of the “right to freedom of opinion and expression.” Freedom is granted to citizens and not to institutions such as press enterprises.

The next steps in an escalating confrontation were taken within the US. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1981. There the Assistant Secretary of State, Elliot Abrams, had this to say:

The NWICO displayed here is an extreme “enemy image,” far removed from the original NAM aspirations and the UNESCO consensus reached less than a year before. Nevertheless, the House of Representatives went along and adopted a resolution to the effect of withdrawing the US contribution to UNESCO's budget (about 25% of the total) “if that organization implements any policy or procedure the effects of which is to license journalists or their publications, to censor or otherwise restrict the free flow of information within or among countries, or to impose mandatory codes of journalistic practice or ethics.” This “Beard amendment” received an unusually high level of support from the President of the United States. In a letter dated September 17, 1981, addressed to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, President Ronald Reagan wrote:

The new Western offensive was met by the advocates of NWICO with less spectacular presentations but without any notable compromising. The NAM Intergovernmental Council for the Coordination of Information expressed “its full support for the activities of UNESCO concerning the promotion of the New International Information Order” and by the same token, “rejected the simultaneous campaign of destabilization launched by Transnational Power Centers against the International Organization since the end of 1980, in the understanding that these global attacks by the big news agencies and corporate enterprises are truly aimed at preventing the implementation of the New International Information Order and its fundamental principles.”

The socialist countries of Eastern Europe were equally vocal in denouncing Talloires and expressing support to UNESCO. A Yugoslavian comment in Review of International Affairs (No. 760, 1981) called the Declaration of Talloires “at best surprising and an anachronism for these times [...] openly for the first time against the new international information order being sought by the non-aligned and developing countries and the immense majority of mankind they encompass.” Soviet reactions displayed a more dramatic picture of the “information war” declared in Talloires – with its originators “often been caught red-handed in collaboration with the CIA,” as Moscow News (No. 28, 1981) put it.

But it was not only the official position of NAM and the socialist countries that maintained an uncompromised view about NWICO. In addition to governments and states there were a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as academic and professional institutions advocating NWICO. Accordingly, the Consultative Club of International and Regional Organizations of Journalists, representing hundreds of thousands of journalists from all parts of the world, also made it known that they would render broad support to NWICO. At their meeting in Baghdad in early 1982 the international and regional organizations of professional journalists stressed that, while the new order was based on respect for international law and the UN Charter, it does not mean the establishment of “government censorship” or “licensing of journalists,” as alleged by the Western campaign. A year later the Consultative Club articulated its position in a historical document, International Principles of Professional Ethics in Journalists.¹¹

At this stage, in 1983, UNESCO's General Conference in Paris requested the director-general to give special attention among other activities to those “which will facilitate an in-depth analysis of the concept of a new world information and communication order, seen as an evolving and continuous process, so as to strengthen the bases upon which such an order conducive to a free flow and better balanced dissemination of information might be established.”

This compromise formulation, adopted by a consensus that included the United States, invited conceptual analysis and thus confirmed that the concept is worth pushing. On the other hand, reference to “an evolving and continuous process” implied that what was at issue is no fixed order with definite parameters but rather an overall course of development – not real action but rather reflection. In this compromise spirit a new platform was opened: the UN–UNESCO Round Table on NWICO, first convened in Igls (Austria) in September 1983 and then in Copenhagen in April 1986. It was a forum for expert discussions on the issues involved, without high ambitions to achieve concrete results. They were quite business-like events, helping to demystify the political tensions and dogmatic positions that had accumulated around the topic. However, a third UN–UNESCO Round Table never took place as scheduled in 1987: UNESCO's Director-General M'Bow was replaced by Federico Mayor and it became obvious that under his direction UNESCO would make a U-turn in matters of communication. Suddenly UNESCO, the earlier facilitator of NWICO debate, lost its interest in the idea and even began to suppress the debate – resorting instead to the old “free flow” approach.

The UNESCO General Conference in Sofia in 1985 no longer had the United States among the member states since it had withdrawn at the end of 1984. The US withdrawal could not be justified on the basis of the above-quoted “Beard amendment,” because there was no evidence of UNESCO restricting the free flow of information – a prelude to what happened with the weapons of mass destruction before the war in Iraq in 2003. The departure from UNESCO in 1984 was a political decision following a new strategy, as shown in the Congress hearings, and a turn away from multilateralism, i.e., from the UN platforms which followed the principle of one state, one vote. The United States simply did not care to be voted down by a majority, and its departure from UNESCO was a warning signal to the international community that it may do the same in more vital bodies of the UN.

In Sofia, a hard diplomatic struggle took place around these issues as the Western side tried to stop not only the elaboration of principles but even all studies and reflection concerning NWICO and related topics. Finally a consensus was reached (including the United Kingdom, which soon thereafter left UNESCO) which essentially preserved the line followed throughout the 1980s. Thus UNESCO would continue the “collection and analysis of information dealing with the development of the concept of a new world information and communication order, seen as an evolving and continuous process,” while “broadening the study base when necessary.” One of such activities was a symposium to review the effect of the 1978 Mass Media Declaration – an exercise coordinated by the present author between 1986 and 1988. This symposium served as a demonstration of how the tide was turning against NWICO and how the corporate offensive was getting more and more intense (Gerbner, Mowlana, & Nordenstreng, 1993, pp. 99–107).

In summary, the balance of global forces changed drastically soon after the MacBride Report was issued in 1980. Ronald Reagan's advent as President in early 1981 turned the United States from multilateralism to a unilateral employment of power politics, with a relative weakening of the USSR and the NAM. The truce of the 1970s was followed by a new Western offensive in the 1980s. At this stage all the elements of compromise which were earlier regarded as valuable and honorable suddenly went out of fashion and even turned into liability risks. Thus M'Bow lost his job and NWICO and MacBride became taboo at UNESCO.

In a broader context of Western politics, UNESCO was regarded as a burden, whereby the Reagan administration decided that the United States would leave the organization, followed by Thatcher's United Kingdom. Here it is important to realize that the US and British departures from UNESCO were not caused primarily by NWICO, MacBride, or M'Bow. The true reason was a strategic shift away from multilateralism – a warning to the international community that leading Western powers would not be outvoted by the majority of the world's nations. As expressed by a former Assistant Secretary of the State of the Carter administration, UNESCO was “the Grenada of the United Nations” – referring to the US invasion of that tiny island to overthrow its Marxist government, a relatively small target to demonstrate what can be done on a larger scale if the interests of the big power are not respected.

The corporate offensive dominated the whole decade of the 1980s, but next to that were the uncompromising positions of NWICO advocates. While the concept of NWICO led its life within NAM as well as among many representative NGOs, its destiny in the intergovernmental UN forums was more compromised. Throughout the 1980s, it came under increasingly heavy pressure from Western governments, led by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Yet despite all the maneuvering and blackmail – including the United States and United Kingdom withdrawing from UNESCO – the concept survived until the end of the 1980s.

For Western corporate forces, NWICO was a “bad idea that refuses to die,” as the media lobbies used to say.

Freeze in Globalization and Civil Society

A new stage of the global media debate emerged in the 1990s when NWICO, including references to the MacBride Report, began to wane from intergovernmental platforms. In UNESCO, NWICO became almost a taboo, and the UN General Assembly just recognized “the call in this context for what in the United Nations and at various international forums has been termed a new world information and communication order, seen as an evolving and continuous process” (Gerbner, Mowlana, & Nordenstreng, 1993, p. xii). NAM, for its part, lost a good deal of steam when one of its central members, Yugoslavia, disintegrated and the collapse of communism brought a fundamental change to the bipolar world where NAM had entered as the third force. Nevertheless, NAM continued as an organization.

Moreover, a completely new version of the new order was introduced by President George Bush as a vision for the US strategy in the post-Cold War world and particularly in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in early 1991. Suddenly the United States was promoting the concept of a New World Order – including an information order dominated by CNN – and the United States was not at all concerned about its “politicization” or poor definition. Even before this, Schiller and others had sarcastically observed that a new information order has in fact been established – by the transnational corporations. Indeed, we can say that by the early 1990s NWICO “came about – in reverse” (Gerbner, Mowlana, & Nordenstreg, 1993, p. xi). Cees Hamelink offers a gloomy update on this development:

Not only did the new world order come about in reverse but also the collapse of communism caused a drastic shift: the radical as well as the reformist forces behind NWICO were overridden by emerging new corporate interests. Globalization was the universal buzzword for this stage in development of the world as well as in media debates. Globalization was a complex and controversial concept, offering media people the prospect of both threat and opportunity. (For an overview of the media and globalization debate, see Ampuja, 2012.)

In this situation some wondered whether it was time to say farewell to NWICO (Sparks & Roach, 1990), while others believed that after its rise and fall it was time for renewal (Gerbner, Mowlana, & Nordenstreng, 1993). No doubt NWICO fell down the political and academic agendas, but it was not lost. While the political context had drastically changed, the issues involved remained more or less the same. For example, the prospects opened up by a global information society and its challenge to national sovereignty did not bury but rather reinvigorated the NWICO idea. However, it was no longer called NWICO; the terminology and rhetoric were changing, but the substance mostly remained and was only complemented by new elements of technological and social development.

An important chapter in the history of NWICO was the MacBride Round Table on Communication established by a number of journalism and media related NGOs. The first Round Table was held in Harare (Zimbabwe) in October 1989 – just before the Berlin Wall fell. This was a strategic move to carry on the NWICO tradition, in the ecumenical spirit of the MacBride Commission, as a coalition of professional and academic supporters of the idea without political pressures from governments or intergovernmental organizations. The MacBride Round Table met annually throughout the decade, helping to keep NWICO on the professional and academic agenda. (For a full account of the annual MacBride Round Tables, see Vincent, Nordenstreng, & Traber, 1999.)

The MacBride Round Table was established to overcome the discontinuation of the UN–UNESCO Round Table – to ensure that the NWICO debate would be carried on – but it was also inspired by a more general idea of creating an NGO coalition as an expression of the grassroots voice and as a mobilizer of professional and citizen interests in support of NWICO. As put by the present author in the early 1990s:

In hindsight it is obvious that there was a general trend away from governments and official political actors toward what is known as “civil society.” Sean MacBride used to point this out during his commission's work by referring to “a change in the gravity of power” about factors influencing public opinion: from official state to unofficial civil society. By the 1990s the civil society framework was even extended to international relations – next to globalization – and the concept of global civil society emerged as a framework for studies in international communication (Nordenstreng & Schiller, 1993, p. 463).

These developments were in conformity with the idea of NWICO, but civil society was a poor party to struggle against the corporate-driven Western offensive. For example, the MacBride Round Table was hardly known among academic and professional communities, whereas the WPFC and other Western media lobbies went on with their visible campaigns – often supported by UNESCO. Moreover, the legacy of NWICO had naturally a strong element of governmental influence from NAM and the former socialist countries, reducing its intellectual attraction under the new conditions.

The subtitle above suggests that NWICO was frozen in the 1990s. Actually this is an exaggeration, and the concept did survive, especially in the academic world, as demonstrated by readers such as Golding and Harris (1997), and Bailie and Winseck (1997). However, toward the end of the decade it had a much lower profile than before – largely because it was no longer the target of such an intense political struggle. One could have expected quite the contrary – a flourishing debate once the political heat had gone. In any case it is fair to say that NWICO was offset by two winds of the 1990s: globalization and civil society. All this makes the narrative of the NWICO debate quite paradoxical.

In conclusion, we may quote Claudia Padovani's (2008) entry on NWICO in The International Encyclopedia of Communication:

Yet international communication issues have again been discussed in world forums fostered by the UN-promoted World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005). Nonetheless a major historic silence was evident: no mention was made of previous international efforts (from the MacBride Report to the 1985 Maitland report on telecommunication policies and development priorities, promoted by the International Telecommunication Union). According to some observers (Padovani & Nordenstreng, 2005), this lack of historical depth in facing contemporary global communication challenges reflects a problematic tendency to understand them as complete novelties, thereby fostering superficial policy approaches. Much was learned through the NWICO experience that is of great relevance to contemporary world communication realities (Padovani, 2008).

Reflections and Lessons

The preceding review of the NWICO history is based on the work of the present author (see note 7) and his experiences as an actor in the process (Nordenstreng, 2011b). The narrative is largely the same in other reviews, notably that by Ulla Carlsson (2003). The overall picture of NWICO remains the same in a leading textbook on international communication (Thussu, 2006). Another textbook on global communication (McPhail, 2006) includes several passages on NWICO, but covers the topic with a Western bias as a scheme for government control – a reminder of the controversial nature of the topic.

Even if no longer actively pursued, NWICO remains an indispensable chapter in media history in general and the history of international media policy in particular. For example, in their study on media policy and globalization, Paula Chakravartty and Katharine Sarikakis (2006) name the call for NWICO history as “the most significant struggle over international communication policy in the Fordist era” (p. 30), while its demands for redistribution of communications resources and cultural sovereignty were swept aside in the post-Fordist era by “a kind of ‘reregulation’ of neoliberal governance” (p. 36). A more cynical view of NWICO is presented by Colin Sparks (2007) in his synthesizing work on globalization, development, and the mass media, where NWICO and the MacBride Commission appear in a chapter on “the failure of the imperialism paradigm” (pp. 105–125). Admittedly, Sparks has a point in placing NWICO in the second cycle of intellectual history of the field: the dominant paradigm of propagating modernity was followed by the paradigm on cultural and media imperialism as well as the paradigm of participation; after these followed the globalization paradigm. But he misses that NWICO also included elements of the participatory paradigm as part of the civil society orientation.

Several lessons can be learned from the NWICO history.

First, NWICO was not really about media and communication but basically about “high politics.” The determining factors boosting the concept into such a high status were socioeconomic and geopolitical forces rather than intellectual and moral arguments. In other words, power rather than reason set the rules of debate. However impressive your facts, and however persuasive your arguments, you will not gain recognition in the arena of global debate unless you are backed by significant forces – and respectively opposed by significant forces. The rise of NWICO in the 1970s was facilitated by a combined force of the Second and Third World; its fall in the 1990s was likewise a consequence of their disintegration. This said, however, we have to admit that intellectual reflection does influence the course of political events. Yet, in the final instance, it is the political that determines the global agenda.

The anti-NWICO campaign itself serves as an instructive case of Orwellian double-talk: NWICO was attacked as a curb on media freedom, whereas the concept was designed to widen and deepen the freedom of information by increasing its balance and diversity on a global scale. In reality, NWICO was an idealistic instrument of diplomacy, and Third World dictators did not need it as an excuse for suppressing media. The anti-NWICO campaign was an ideologically apologetic exercise by private media proprietors, and it became effective only because of the unforeseen power with which it was waged. In this sense it is justified to call the campaign a “Big Lie.”

The second main lesson is in fact inspired by a critical assessment of the anti-NWICO campaign and its effects: a global idea is the more durable, the more articulate its substance in public discourse. In other words, c onceptual clarity fuels resistance to changing political winds. It is essential, then, that a progressive idea should be articulated not only as a political slogan but as a resolution, law, or even as a scientific theory. A poorly conceptualized idea can be easily suppressed once the political forces behind it decline, whereas an idea which is grounded in in-depth analysis and is widely known to the general public is quite resilient. For example, environmental issues would have been removed long ago from the public agenda by the strong forces of finance and commerce, were it not that environmentalism was such a well-articulated field (thanks to Greenpeace, etc.).

True, these two main lessons are somewhat contradictory: One stresses politics over the intellectual, the other vice versa. Nonetheless, this is the complex and sometimes paradoxical nature of the history of important ideas. Exemplifying this, the NWICO debate provides us with a particularly paradoxical case, simultaneously containing conceptual clarity and poor intellectual elaboration. The MacBride Report itself is typical in this regard, containing at one and the same time a wealth of factually accurate description and analytically incisive distinctions of the world's communication conditions, but also conceptually mediocre and poorly defined accounts of media reality.

The third lesson here is that NWICO's significance lies in the debate and its lessons rather than in the actual phenomena of communication and related global structures. The whole history of NWICO offers little in terms of changing media structures and flows – except, perhaps, “in reverse” with increasing concentration, imbalance, etc. – whereas it offers a lot in terms of conceptual thinking and awareness about the role of the media and their relation to global forces.

To be sure, some media realities have changed toward the NWICO objectives. For example, alternative news and feature agencies have emerged and survived; regional and subregional centers have somewhat diversified the global patterns of one-way flow; and journalists in the North have been sensitized to appreciate foreign cultures. Or is this really so? Aren't there countertrends with ever greater ethnocentrism in “fortress Europe” and other new regional blocs? Obviously there are conflicting trends, including paradoxical developments, and hence it is hard to generalize and to be dogmatic.

Yet it is safe to say that the issues raised by the NWICO debate by and large remain valid in the contemporary world. Take the very title of the 1978 Mass Media Declaration: “concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War.” All aspects, except apartheid, are still relevant. In point of fact, the question of racism and xenophobia in the media is much more topical today than two decades ago – the Council of Europe and the European Union passing declarations with a less liberal tone than provided by the UNESCO compromise. Ethnic and religious “hate speech” as well as war propaganda are not just words in political resolutions but bitter realities around the world – not only in pockets of war and terrorism but also in the centers of the North.

Likewise, the issue of information sovereignty is far from resolved or obsolete. The difference is only that it is no longer a simple confrontation of the West with the East and the South, but today it is also a West-West confrontation, notably between the United States and Europe over TV program quotas. In general, the prospects of the “information superhighway” in the West, combined with developments in the newly liberalized East, raise pretty much the same old questions, although mostly with a new rhetoric.

NOTES

1 The movement of non-aligned countries started in an Asian–African conference in Bandung in 1955 and was consolidated in the first NAM summit in Belgrade in 1961, with a key role played by Presidents Sukarno of Indonesia, Nehru of India, Nkrumah of Ghana, Nasser of Egypt, and Tito of Yugoslavia. After the collapse of communism, Yugoslavia has ceased to exist, while South Africa entered as a new member, hosting the 12th summit in 1998, followed by summits in Malesia 2003 and in Cuba 2006. The 15th summit was held in Egypt 2009. See http://www.namegypt.org/en/Pages/default.aspx

2 See http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/071/94/IMG/NR007194.pdf?OpenElement

3 See http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/000/92/IMG/NR000092.pdf?OpenElement

4 Finland's President Urho Kekkonen addressed a symposium on the international flow of television programs held at the University of Tampere in May 1973. The materials of this symposium were used by the Tunisian hosts when preparing the NAM symposium on information in 1996. Finland had the status of “invited guest” at NAM and thus attended the Tunis symposium as an observer, represented by the present author.

5 Regarding terminology the NAM resolutions refer to “international order” whereas the UN and UNESCO resolutions later call it “world order.” Evidently, this difference does not represent a significant strategic move. However, the theory of international relations and established diplomatic phraseology suggest the word “international” although “world” may sound more elegant. Moreover, the phrase “world order” may be used as a device to dissociate the concept of new international information order from the concept of new international economic order (Nordenstreng, 1979). As to “information” and “communication,” the original NAM resolutions use the term “information,” sometimes accompanied by “mass media” or “mass communications.” Similarly, the language of international diplomacy favors “information” as a generic term referring to all kinds of media and all types of content. On the other hand, there are those – especially from the Spanish-speaking hemisphere – who consider “information” to be too limited and opposed to the democratic idea of participatory, two-way communication. Therefore the solution was to use both terms: “new international information and communication order” or, as in the 5th NAM summit document, “new international order in the fields of information and mass communications.”

6 This book contains a detailed account of the preparation of the declaration, including its various drafts and related debates at UNESCO. The present author had an insight into the process as a member of the Finnish delegation in an intergovernmental meeting in 1975 and as a member of a three-person negotiation group appointed by UNESCO's director-general to prepare a compromise draft in 1977.

7 This and the following section are based on chapter 1 of Nordenstreng (1984a: 3–77). Versions of it appeared also in Nordenstreng (1995, 2010), and Vincent, Nordenstreng and Traber (1999). Detailed source references can be found in these publications. A short and concise version of the NWICO debate until the early 1980s is provided by MacBride and Roach (1989). For a more recent review, linking NWICO to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), see Mansell & Nordenstreng (2006).

8 See http://www.wpfc.org/index.php?q=node/10. The WPFC initiators were US newspaper publishers with the support of their international affiliates the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEJ; later the World Association of Newspapers, WAN), and respective commercial broadcasting associations (NABA, IAB). The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) dissociated itself from the Committee.

9 This was the opening statement of a prominent report to the Senate Committee (by Kroloff and Cohen, November 1977). Another central reference of the day was a major study called “The United States and the Debate on the World ‘Information Order’” (by Gunter, August 1978), prepared by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) for the US International Communication Agency (USICA). A manifestation of the topic entering the scholarly world was the Spring 1979 issue of Journal of Communication devoted to “International Information: A New Order? Third World News and Views.”

10 “Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights, and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War.” Retrieved from http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13176&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

11 Retrieved from http://ethicnet.uta.fi/international/international_principles_oi_professional_ethics_in_journalism

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