ABSTRACT
The most remarkable issue to arise in UNESCO in the twentieth century was the controversial debates on the role of communication in the post-war international system. UNESCO’s forays continue into the present century with deliberations on the parameters of the information society and the digital divide. While the rise of democracy is intimately linked with the freedoms associated with the spread of information, never before had an organization debated the contours of this issue at the global level and tried to outline its implications for the very existence of the international system. The Soviet Union did not join UNESCO until 1954 because of the particular hue issues of media and journalism freedoms took with the push from the United States. The United States left the organization in 1984 partly because of communication debates at UNESCO, which were supported by the Soviet Union. Global orders must have ordering principles or patterns such as a hegemonic power, a balance of power, perpetual peace among nations, or international law.1 UNESCO brought issues of communication into humanity’s quest for a global order. Communication in UNESCO debates has broadly and variously
included the flows of messages and information, the content of the messages, the levels at which communication takes place from individuals to the global, the social and other stratifications through which it passes, and the infrastructures that enable its passage. UNESCO may have had limited success with the signing or enforcement of global treaties and conventions in communication but at an intangible level, its communication norms have resonated with both the thrusts of intellectual input and the expressed needs of societies and nations. Unfortunately, though, in shaping these communication norms, UNESCO itself has been deliberately politicized or it has taken a non-neutral position as a UN organization in aligning itself with political coalitions. It is important, therefore, to distinguish between the intellectual
ideas and the politics underlying the communication norms that UNESCO has tried to foster. While there is a symbiotic relationship between ideas and politics, it is useful to keep them separate. Ideas can both shape and hinder politics or vice versa. In terms of the debates described below, for example, the ideational case for the role of communication in post-colonial societies was in large part made through UNESCO and related organizations, even if the politics at UNESCO prevented the case from being materialized into institutionalized norms. The ideas continue to resurface in other forms to the present day although the politics that enabled or hindered them have faded. There have been three phases in UNESCO’s debates on shaping com-
munication norms. Earlier in UNESCO’s history, the United States and United Kingdom pushed the organization to argue for press and media freedoms as the lynchpin of democracies and human rights. A second phase began in the late 1950s as post-colonial countries began to consider the role of communication modernization in their societies, which soon led to questioning the role of global media firms, mostly Western, in their territories. It culminated in the calls for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in 1978. The current phase has UNESCO playing a large role in disseminating ideas of the “knowledge society” that have been translated, to some extent, in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
