The Nation-State and Media Globalisation: Has the Nation-State Returned — Or Did It Never Leave?

Abstract

Like that of Mark Twain, reports of the death of the nation-state in the face of globalisation have been greatly exaggerated. The papers in this collection variously address what has been described as the ‘return of the state’ as an important factor in the consideration of the changing climate for global communications. The intellectual context for this has been the currency of debates about the globalisation of the media which, in the past, have tended to conclude that the combination of deregulatory state policies, the capacity for online communications to ignore national borders, the rise of large transnational media organisations and the expansion in transnational trade in media products have led to a media environment in which the significance of the nation-state has been dramatically reduced. This position has not gone uncontested: Sabina Mihelj, for instance, has protested that ‘the perception of globalization as a threat to nation-states and national culture is far too simplistic to account for the nature of interaction between the global and the national in the contemporary world’ (Mihelj, 2011, p. 1), and I have taken a similar position elsewhere as well (Turner, 2009; Pertierra and Turner, 2013). Nonetheless, the assumption of the increasing powerlessness, indeed the irrelevance, of the state within the new order of media and communications has been one of the orthodoxies underpinning a number of influential narratives of media development, particularly in the West, over the last decade or so.