At the United Nations meeting on climate change, COP-26, in November 2021, I went to get a COVID-19 test at Glasgow Airport. There was a long line, with a group of men standing in front of me. They were talking rather loudly and boisterously. One man turned to me and asked, ‘What did you think of the COP’, and when I told him it was interesting, he asked, ‘why did you come’. His question was not hostile. He seemed genuinely interested. These men were executives of an oil services company from Texas, and they had come to be part of the main COP26, talking about the ‘green initiatives’ of their company. I told him that I had come to offer reflections of what I had been reporting about, namely the war in Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique (in south-eastern Africa). Two Western energy companies – Total from France and ExxonMobil from the United States – controlled a massive natural gas project off the coast of Mozambique’s poorest province. No gains from the wealth generated there came to the people who could see the offshore rig and the massive infrastructure built near their homes to facilitate the energy companies. The protests of the people went unheard both by the energy companies and the government of Mozambique, and eventually the discontent became an uprising. Terrible violence was used against the people – including by a thousand troops from Rwanda, who arrived after Rwanda made an agreement with France. The story of this war in Mozambique was not being covered anywhere, except by Globetrotter (which had published my dispatches). The men turned to listen to me as I spoke, and several of them seemed concerned. One of them said, ‘I had not heard about any of this. What you say is true, but,’ he said, ‘nobody cares’.
I have spent the past few years thinking seriously about the attitude of these oil executives. They seemed to be very nice people, and the man who spoke did not say anything offensive. He is right regarding all three things he said:
• First, that the information about such wars is simply not available to anyone. • Second, that the war is horrible, and the world should simply not be organised to benefit oil companies at the expense of ordinary people who live beside the wealth. • Third, that nobody – or at least nobody in the countries that have power – care about these kinds of events.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one sees that, has the tree fallen? It is remarkable how much the media gets to define what happens in the world. And even more remarkable how it is the media of certain countries that shapes what counts as matters of record. It is beyond argument that the conflict in Ukraine has accelerated changes in the world, showing the fragility of the Western states, revealing the strength of China, and of course of the emergence of a ‘non-alignment from above’ in the Global South. Along the many vectors of power, the Western states have seen great attrition of their power; these vectors include their control over finance, their control over resources, and their control over science and technology. However, the Western warrior states retain considerable authority in two areas still: their control over weapons systems and their control over information. In this presentation, I will go over the five key controls of the neo-colonial international structure – first developed by Samir Amin – to assess these shifts, spend some time on the control over information and then provide an analysis of the challenges that confront those of us who work in the world of ideas.
The Five Controls of the Neo-Colonial International Structure.
The neo-colonial international structure was built during the decolonisation period, with the advantages gained by the Western states during the colonial era at the heart of the new structure. Colonialism meant the total subordination of the sovereignty of large parts of the world, with the colonial powers owning all the resources of the colonies. The process of decolonisation forced the colonial powers to relinquish – at least formally – political power over the colonies. Rather than seek full ownership of the newly independent world, the Western states exercised control over key aspects of political and economic activity. Five main controls shaped the neo-colonial structure:
- Control over finance. Through the Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF and the World Bank – as well as through other institutions of the post-war financial order (such as the SWIFT network and the London and Paris Clubs for international finance), the Western systems sought to exercise their control over finance. When a newly independent state sought development financing, for instance, they had to go through the Western institutions, which used finance as an instrument – through debt – to maintain authority over the new states. With the rise of the locomotives of the South – the BRICS, for instance – there are now new institutions that have circumvented the West’s control over finance and have therefore begun to contest what appeared as the eternal power of the IMF-Dollar-Wall Street complex.
- Control over resources. In the first decades of the post-war period, Western multinational corporations allowed states and companies in the Third World to own their own resources as long as control over these resources was exercised by the multinational firms and the Western states. The resources had to be sold to these Western entities at prices set by the West and to its advantage. An attempt to create a New International Economic Order in 1974 was cut down. Now, with the rise of the locomotives of the South, there has been a serious challenge to the Western oligopoly over the world’s resources, and there has therefore been an attrition of Western control over resources.
- Control over science and technology. In the 1990s, the Western states and corporations changed the definition of intellectual property rights. They argued that no longer must intellectual property be based on the patenting of processes but on the patenting of the final commodity. This allowed the Western firms to preserve their monopoly over major scientific and technological gains. However, what these firms did not predict was that in the decades to come, many of the major countries of the Global South – led by China – developed a scientific and technological capacity that equalled or even went beyond the Western tech gains of an earlier era. To counter this, the US began a trade war against China – exemplified by the attack on Huawei and now on semiconductors. The New Cold War imposed by the US is partly due to the West’s decline of control over science and technology.
Gradually, the neo-colonial grip on the first three controls has depleted, with new financial channels being built, new ideas emerging about the control and use of resources, and new possibilities have come to the table largely due to the technological developments in the locomotives of the Global South (led by China). But the neo-colonial structure remains in place regarding the Western control over weapons systems and over information.
- Control over weapons systems. Our Tricontinental text on Hyper-Imperialism shows that world weapons spending is now $2.868 trillion, with the West’s spending alone $2 trillion or 74.3% of the world’s military spending. The US has developed some of the most sophisticated weapon systems to annihilate human populations. Other countries have indeed developed weapon systems, but no country has the capacity for mass annihilation that rivals the systems controlled by the United States.
- Control over information. Finally, it is an incontestable fact that the Western powers have almost absolute control over information systems. This control is exercised through the Western domination of the infrastructure and human networks of information production – such as undersea cables – and through the ideological power of the Western media establishments, power that was set in place during colonial times and that remains intact.
The West’s domination of information and its critique.
To understand the information complex, one has to look at two distinct but related aspects: hardware and software.
The international hardware system of information transfer is almost entirely dominated by Western corporations (and by the United States military). There are currently 436 submarine cables that run over 1.3 million kilometres. These cables carry 95% of the data flows, which includes personal communications to bank correspondence. The companies that dominate this arena are Alcatel Submarine Networks (a subsidiary of Nokia), SubCom (United States), NEC (Japan), and Huawei Marine Networks (China). Increasingly, private tech giants such as Meta (Facebook) and Google are either taking ownership of the cables or control the operations of them. For instance, currently Facebook and Google own 20% of the cables, with Google owning the Curie cable that connects Chile to the United States (to get a scale of Facebook’s power, it currently has 2.9 billon users out of the 3.9 billion people who are online). There are roughly 4550 satellites in orbit. Of these, 2804 are from the United States, which means that almost two thirds of all satellites are US owned. For comparison, China owns 467 satellites, while the US company – Elon Musk’s SpaceX – has 1655 satellites (three times the number of Chinese satellites).
Control over the cables and the satellites gives the West a decisive advantage over the transmission of information. Western companies can prevent information from certain countries to enter the system or to slow down their uploading to social media. There is no need to censor content in a public way when shadow censoring can easily be done through the control over these information hardware systems. This has an important and often ignored impact in the Global South, where the only hardware available is through these Western companies. SpaceX, for instance, has developed the StarLink network, which places a web of satellites about 500 kilometres from the earth’s surface; this StarLink network has been positioned to provide network access across the African continent and therefore create a hardware monopoly there.
Currently, in terms of the West’s hardware monopoly over information flows, there is barely any international debate. There is some discussion now about the Western media’s ideological grip over the information and idea flows, their often very partial views entering the media landscape around the world as the universal story. For instance, the Western media’s coverage over the conflict in Ukraine has shown itself to be totally uninterested in attending to the viewpoints of a range of Ukrainians – apart from the government – as well as the viewpoints of the Russian government, different Russian intellectuals, and the views of people outside the West. This suffocating coverage – to take, let us say, NATO’s Secretary General at his word and broadcast that as the news without putting his statements into conversation with others – has now shown the limits of the Western news paradigm. The theoretical challenge to this realisation was made several decades ago by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their classic 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media. Their analysis of the ‘essential ingredients of our propaganda model’ pointed to the centralisation of ownership of media, the role of corporate advertising in shaping the media narrative, and the reliance upon Western state officials as experts.
Concern about the control over information flows had been near the top of the agenda in the decolonisation process that took hold of the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the immediate post-World War 2 era. The colonised populations in these countries fully well knew the role played by Western media firms and wire companies. When Jawaharlal Nehru of India was imprisoned by the British in 1934, he was startled to discover that the Reuters correspondent in India – John Strachey Barnes – was a fascist, and that Reuters had arranged with the British government to cover British colonial power favourably. The new nations of the Third World both tried to build national news services as well as used the platform of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to develop their critique of the lack of the ‘free flow of information’ (as the 1945 UNESCO Charter put it). In 1953, UNESCO conducted a study of the seven major daily newspapers and showed how their reporting had been shaped by Western news agencies. Reliance upon the Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Agence France-Presse, and others continued to shape the new national press services (whose personnel either previously worked for these agencies or who had been sent to train with them). To break with this calcified neo-colonial structure of information was not easy.
As part of the Non-Aligned Movement process, the countries and regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America developed their own national and regional news formations: a UNESCO seminar was held in Quito (Ecuador) in 1958 that established a journalism training school in 1960 (International Centre of Advanced Communication Studies for Latin America or CIESPAL), pressured to a great extent by the establishment by the Cuban Revolution of Presna Latina across Latin America in March 1959; a meeting was held in Bangkok in 1961 that created the Organisation of Asian News Agencies; and a conference was held in Tunis in 1963 that created the Union of African News Agencies. These agencies tried to propel the voices of the Third World into their own media, but also – and unsuccessfully – into the media houses of the West. Alongside this concern for the ideological side of the media, the Soviets put forward a resolution in the United Nations on ‘A Declaration of Guiding Principles for the Use of Satellite Broadcasting for the Free Flow of Information, the Extension of Education, and the Development of Cultural Exchanges’; Western state, led by the United States, opposed this call for democratisation and popular control of information flows. Conference after conference from Bangkok to Santiago took the issue of the democratisation of the press seriously, but there was little advancement possible.
At the Non-Aligned Meeting in Algiers in 1973 – where the Third World put forward their proposal for a New International Economic Order – the final declaration had an interesting proposal: ‘Developing countries should take concerted action in the field of mass communications on the following lines in order to promote a greater interchange of ideas among themselves,’ and then offered some of these lines –
a. Reorganise communication channels ‘which are the legacy of the colonial past’. b. Revise cable rates to facilitate ‘faster and cheaper intercommunication’. c. Expedite the process of ‘collective ownership of communication satellites and evolve a code of conduct for directing their use’. d. Increase contact between mass media, universities, libraries, and other institutions to ‘exchange experience and expertise and share ideas’.
These proposals would go into the proposal by the Third World to establish a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), an idea proposed to the UN agencies. The idea of the New World Information Order shaped the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, set up by UNESCO in 1977; the Commission, led by the Irish politician Seán MacBride, published a report in 1980 called Many Voices, One World. The report assembled the evidence about the cartel of capitalist media outlets based in the West, and how this cartel shaped and controlled information. At a 1976 meeting in Delhi, Chanchal Sarkar, the director of the Press Institute of India said, ‘So much of what we learn about the world has been filtered through London or New York. There’s bound to be distortion from our point of view’. For instance, he said, during the 1973 struggle over oil prices, ‘most of the people in my country thought that the Arabs were being unreasonable’. They saw the events in the Arab world through the eyes of London or New York, not Baghdad or even Delhi. ‘This only shows how brainwashed we are’ by the Western news agencies, said Sarkar. Such views grounded the MacBride report.
In 1984, the United States withdrew from UNESCO, with the US government saying that they were motivated by the talk of a New World Information Order and the New International Economic Order. The United Kingdom followed. With active attacks by the West, the MacBride report began to gather dust. Furthermore, the privatisation of the media and its consequent centralisation in a few hands, killed off any attempt by the Third World to create media networks – even if these were anti-communist (as with the Asia-Pacific News Network, established in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1981). This privatisation and centralisation of the media has the rise of the cable news networks at their centre (Cable News Network or CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, both founded in 1980); these media giants suffocated the ‘free flow of information’ and the dream of a new order for information flows. The last gasp of this Third World attempt to create a ‘free and balanced news flow’ were a series of now largely forgotten declarations:
- Windhoek Declaration on the African media (1991).
- Alma Ata Declaration on the promotion of an independent and pluralistic Asian Media (1993).
- Santiago Declaration on Media Development and Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean (1994).
- Sana’a Declaration on the Arab Media (1996).
Out of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, came the World Press Freedom Day, held on May 4. Otherwise, nothing is remembered of these declarations that hoped to create space against the centralisation of private media. The 1997 World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Basic Telecommunications liberalised privatisation and centralisation across borders. Two meetings took place in 1998 to prevent the onslaught of a handful of media firms globally: one held in Ottawa that had countries such as Brazil and Italy at the table to set rules to protect their cultural industries from Hollywood, and a second held in Stockholm by UNESCO to allow cultural products a special exemption in trade negotiations. Neither could stop the bulldozer of privatisation and centralisation in the hands of Western-dominated, largely US-based, media and cultural corporations. In the name of press freedom and along the principles of privatisation, the US media houses attacked any overt government intervention into the media – which has been essential in the Third World – as authoritarian, and it has championed the privatisation of media as press freedom. Any liberal anxiety about private capital constraining the freedom of the press is hastily set aside by a feverish attack on government media of any kind. Furthermore, the infrastructure of information flows has been overwhelmed by the blurring of lines between entertainment and the production of news and analysis. The merging of entertainment and news – as well as video game platforms – has not only negatively impacted the content of the news coverage, but it has disrupted the form of news literacy. People who turn to the information channels are bombarded by images and sounds that merge the mere entertainment from the democratic need to know what is going on in the world.
I have recounted this history to remind us that the Third World did struggle to establish a different kind of information order, but that struggle died off at the hands of the Western attack on UNESCO and through the social process of globalisation. New, in this neoliberal landscape, was merely a commodity. In 2012, Vineet Jain, the managing editor of India’s largest newspaper, Times of India, said quite plainly, ‘We are not in the newspaper business. We are in the advertising business’. But this is not entirely accurate. As the media openly disavows a public interest, it becomes easier for media houses to dedicate themselves to entertainment and to the corporate interests as well as to offer their services to powerful entities that protect them from democracy. This is the landscape of the media today: largely controlled by Western behemoths who are subordinate to the profit motive and to the entertainment impulse, but also who are eager to please powerful political interests to protect themselves from criticism.
Our Three Challenges.
Thus far, what have we established:
- The West continues to exercise control over the flow of information.
- This control is exercised mainly through the large transnational media corporations, which have an intimate relationship with the Western states.
- Attempts by the Third World to establish a free flow of information have created important international resolutions, but they have not been able to create an alternative to the Western controlled process for the transmission of information, or their own networks of publishers and media producers that make the exchanges possible.
So, where does this lead us? To take the analysis forward, we must first establish three concepts:
(a) Battle of Information. How do we both generate factual information and then establish it as credible? (b) Battle of Ideas. How do we elaborate dialectical theories of the world that best approximate reality and how do we establish these theories as credible? (c) Battle of Emotions. How do we generate an emotional template that provides people with the possibilities of a socialist society that is not governed by the norms of private property/social inequality?
For the Battle of Information, it is important to return to the conversations in the 1970s about the creation of news networks. We need to build transnational news agencies such as the News Pool established at the New Delhi Conference of Information Ministers in July 1976, but subsequently inoperative. The News Pool was developed as an inter-governmental project, which will only be possible if governments take leadership to build it. What we are able to build today is a news pool that links friendly media projects to each other to share – without any commercial burden – stories that each of them produces for each other’s readers. A news wire, built in collaboration by any number of relatively aligned media projects, is vital for our time. Peoples Dispatch – currently available in English and Spanish – produces news content that is available to any publication for reuse; this project could become the hub of a newswire for our times.
For the Battle of Ideas, it is important to build a global news and opinion service that syndicates stories and opinion pieces for the existing world media. Over the course of the past few decades, most private media houses are struggling to cover world news or they have effectively cut back on international news reporting. About ten years ago, a group of us created Globetrotter, a news syndication service in English, Spanish, and translated into over six other languages, that builds news and opinion stories that are offered for free to almost 500 publications worldwide. These stories – including my own series on the battle in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique – appear around the world and offer a worldview to the readers that is not defined by the US State Department. It is out of syndication services and media exchanges that our information networks can develop independently and outside of the Western framework.
The repressive imperial legacy of the West is still fully expressed. It defines our understandings of each other – the ways one former colony state perceives another. We will see each other more truly, and our paths to solidarity more easily when we have our own frameworks of understanding.
For the Battle of Emotions, it is important to learn to lift up stories of people doing impressive things to solve the dilemmas of humanity at different scales (either at the level of entire countries or in small communities). The centralised privatised news industry constructs a news agenda that creates futility, diminishes the capacity of people to believe that they are historical actors and makes them spectators of history. We want to produce a news agenda that highlights the work of ordinary people to make a difference in the world.
The oil executives in Glasgow spurred on these reflections, but so has thirty years of active journalistic work. When I reported the stories from Mozambique about the insurgency fuelled by the natural gas companies, I tried to interest some of the corporate media houses to cover the story. None were interested. The stories appeared through the Globetrotter syndication service. They ran in hundreds of publications around the world.
We are building our own media landscape. We cannot rely on anyone to do that work for us.