THE GLOBAL MEDIA AND THE EMPIRE OF LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM, CIRCA 1910-30

摘要

This article briefly sketches the rise of the global media system after the mid-1860s before turning to the transformation of that system during the First World War and until the end of the 1920s. In particular, we look at how technological changes, especially the development of wireless and, by late 1926, short-wave radio, were dealt with by the companies that ran the world's vast network of undersea cables, news organizations and governments. We show that responses to new technologies varied greatly, with some trying to blunt their impact while others embraced them. Mergers and acquisitions were a key response to the new technologies and to the worldwide economic boom of the 1920s. However, by the end of the decade, the economic logic behind these changes was eclipsed by a discourse of technological determinism, nationalistic corporate patriotism and imperial security. These ideological discourses underpinned a series of mergers throughout Europe and Britain, most notably the formation of Cable and Wireless in 1929. Similar pressures were at play in the USA, notably in RCA and the International Telephone and Telegraph Company's own bid to create a global multimedia conglomerate, although restrictions on cross-media ownership in the Radio Act (1927) and Congressional concern about the formation of a military-communications-media complex stymied the attempt. Altogether, however, the reorganization of the global media business at the end of the 1920s reflected and reinforced the collapse of this early era of globalization - the empire of liberal internationalism - and the rise of a new geopolitical-economic regime based on the struggle for the control of global communication, virulent nationalism and relative autarchy, not to be reversed until the revival of globalization in our own times.