Mapping BRICS Media

Kaarle Nordenstreng, Daya Kishan Thussu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135445362
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Mapping BRICS Media is the first comprehensive and comparative study of the emerging media landscape in the world's most dynamic and fastest growing markets. This pioneering collection focuses on one of the key topics in contemporary international relations - the emergence of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) - a grouping that includes some of the world's largest populations and fastest growing economies.

The volume brings together leading scholars, mainly from the BRICS nations, to examine how the emergence of the BRICS media will impact on global media and communication. Contextualizing the rise of the BRICS nations within the broader shifts in global power relations, the chapters investigate the unprecedented growth of the BRICS media within a 'multi-polar' world, evaluating the media landscapes in the individual BRICS countries, their histories, and their journalism practices, as well as analyzing emerging inter-BRICS media relationships.

Accessible and comprehensive, the book provides a critical guide to the complex debates about the impact of the 'rise of the rest' on the media globe and how far this poses a challenge to the Western-dominated world order and its media systems.

Part I Debates and concepts

Introduction

The rise of the BRICS configuration has evoked much interest among policy makers and the corporate world, as it includes the world’s fastest growing economies. How will their ascendance impact on global power relations and international communication and media? Chapters in this part of the book tackle this question from a range of perspectives, encompassing international relations, critical communication studies and cultural studies.

In an overview of the BRICS phenomenon, Jyrki Käkönen, a Finnish international relations expert with expertise on Euro-Asian relations, considers how the BRICS grouping might influence global politics. He reviews the role of the BRICS countries as an organization in international relations, drawing on official documents. The major question he raises pertains to whether their fast economic growth and interest in a multi-polar international system would make BRICS a coherent and effective international actor. It is apparent that all BRICS members have their own national interests and have realized that BRICS is a useful idea for advancing those interests. On the other hand, Käkönen argues, the five BRICS members are a diverse combination of countries with very different civilizational and cultural backgrounds. It is not easy to assume, the chapter suggests, that BRICS would be an organization able to change the international system when its members have varying expectations and ideas about how to reconfigure the world order. For Käkönen, the most important BRICS countries are China and India, given their size and scale for current and future economic growth, coupled with their civilizational attributes. However, both nations have contrasting political systems and competing and even contradictory interests with regard to a new multi-polar international order.

In his chapter, Colin Sparks – a British media scholar currently based in Hong Kong – examines characteristics of the BRICS countries in order to explore whether they constitute a unified group or are simply a convenient label for what he argues is essentially a geo-political category. In terms of scale, there are vast differences between the countries, he notes, with China and India having media systems that are much larger than those of the other BRICS members. The balance within those systems is also uneven, particularly with regard both to the penetration of new media and the role that they play in the different societies. Economically, while all of the BRICS media systems are funded primarily by advertising revenues, the balance between expenditure differs from country to country. The chapter highlights the differences among the BRICS five in terms of freedom of the media, security for journalists and levels of political intervention. Sparks notes that the evidence suggests that many of these characteristics are common across developing countries, and that the BRICS grouping does not display sufficient differentiation to constitute a coherent and distinct category.

The differences within the BRICS configuration are also highlighted in the chapter by Yuezhi Zhao – a Chinese scholar on international communication working in Canada with another base in Beijing. Her chapter considers how the neo-liberalized and reconstituted states of the BRICS formation are shaping a new international communication order in the context of the profound crisis and power shifts in the global economy. Drawing upon both original empirical research and secondary literature, Zhao provides an overview of the roles of the BRICS states – both in their singularity and in their potential collective action – in transforming the existing global communication order. Her analysis focuses on three recent Internet-related cases in an attempt to discern emerging trends and patterns that may be indicative of shifting power relations and/or normative orientations in global communication: the Chinese-initiated Internet Roundtable for Emerging Countries in September 2012 in Beijing, which managed to secure the formal participation of only four of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa); the respective roles and positions of the BRICS states at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai in December 2012; and, finally, the Brazilian project to build an undersea cable to link BRICS nations and its hosting of the April 2014 NetMundial conference about Internet governance.

The final chapter in this part, by Joseph Straubhaar – a US media scholar specializing on Brazil – examines the role of the BRICS countries as emerging media powers at the regional, transnational and global levels. Having written extensively on the globalization of media cultures, Straubhaar starts with a theoretical review of the concepts behind the idea of emerging media powers – using BRICS countries as examples – such as critiques of dependency and imperialism, as well as national and global policy debates about measures to change one-way flows. He also examines the move to exporting national content to geo-cultural regions and transnational diasporas, or cultural-linguistic spaces and current perspectives on large emerging nations as part of the global and transnational structures of contemporary media. The chapter then briefly compares and contrasts the BRICS countries in their distinct paths as emerging regional, transnational and global media powers. Together, the four chapters offer a macro-level analysis of some of the key implications of the rise of the BRICS nations on the global scene – from international politics to global media and from Internet governance to global cultural flows.

Chapter 1 BRICS as a new constellation in international relations?

Jyrki Käkönen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726212-3

The original designation of Brazil, Russia, India and China as the ‘BRIC’ countries was the idea of a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to promote the four growing economies as promising investment opportunities for global investors. It also made a clever acronym.¹ In 2009 BRIC changed from an abstract concept into an institution in world politics, with the Russian invitation for the heads of these four countries to come together for their first summit in Yekaterinburg. In 2011 South Africa joined the group at the third summit in Sanya, China, and the acronym became BRICS.

BRICS members are all seen as having growing economies in contrast to the traditional centres of the world economy in the West, which, since the 2008 global financial crisis, have all experienced slow or non-existent growth. Therefore the discourse around BRICS has been mainly economic (Sharma, 2012: 9) and BRICS members themselves have contributed to this focus on economic aspects: the first report by BRICS experts was essentially about the global economy and the economies of the member countries (BRICS Report, 2012).

Although there is disagreement on the sustainability of this growth, it seems clear that BRICS countries will occupy a leading, even a dominant, position in the world economy in the coming years (Wansleben, 2013) and it is self-evident that individual BRICS countries, if not BRICS as an institution, are ‘part of [the] global geopolitical landscape’ (Laidi, 2011: 1). Furthermore, BRICS members understand themselves as actors in a world that is ‘undergoing far-reaching, complex and profound changes’ (Joint Statement by the 3rd Summit, 2011). It is possible that the concept of BRICS would have little meaning if it were not for the challenge that these so-called rising powers pose to the international order constructed by the West since the Peace of Westphalia in the mid-seventeenth century on the basis of national sovereignty and non-intervention. Therefore, discussing BRICS countries and BRICS as an institution means discussing a change in the international order and the relative decline of the US’ dominant position in that order. The issue here is to discuss whether BRICS has a role in changing the international order and, if so, what kind of role it might have.

The idea of changing the international order is supported, for instance, by US National Intelligence Council’s global trends reports. The latest report does not predict how the international system will look in the future, but it takes it as given that in 2030 the system will no longer be the same as we know it today (US National Intelligence Council, 2012). Analysts like Jacques (2012), Kupchan (2012) and Tharoor (2012) support this view, although from different perspectives. In any case, BRICS represents major emerging states (with the exception of Russia) and in this sense it could be an agent of change, even for the transition of power from the North to the South. Therefore the question is whether BRICS as an institution is willing to change the rules of the international system.

Theories of international relations, such as world system analysis, power transition theory, the theory of hegemonic war and the long cycle theory, predict that the rising powers will challenge the predominant order (Barma et al., 2009: 257). Changing the international order is closely connected to the issue of peace and war in international politics (Green and Kliman, 2011: 33) and so the issue of the role of BRICS assumes great significance. The rise of China alone has produced many studies evaluating whether it will be peaceful or lead to major conflicts in the international system. In addition, history suggests that new powers, particularly if autocratic, do not rise peacefully (ibid.: 33). However, Green and Kliman (2011: 34) also remind us that there are scholars who suggest that power transitions do not necessarily result in conflict: the probability of conflict depends on the nature of the existing order.

If the existing order is hegemonic, the rising power does not have much of an option other than war to secure its interests. But if the order is rule-based and has well-developed processes – e.g. there are international institutions which can provide the ascendant power with options to increase its voice and influence – then war is not inevitable, although the rising power will have an interest in creating a new order that is more conducive to its preferences (ibid.).

To be an effective organization – either in changing the world order or in increasing its voice in the existing order – BRICS has to fulfil several criteria. As a first criterion, BRICS already represents several emerging states, but whether there is sufficient trust between members for them to be capable of collective action (Brütsch and Papa, 2012: 6), remains to be seen. To survive as an institution, BRICS should also be flexible enough to minimize intra-coalition frictions (ibid.: 5). Furthermore, the aim here is also to try to find out whether BRICS really is an organization for advancing the collective interests of the emerging states or whether it is more an institution used by its members for advancing their individual interests. If the latter, BRICS is hardly a new major player in international relations.

BRICS as an international organization

According to BRICS’ first expert report, BRICS countries accounted for more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and around 25 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010 (BRICS Report, 2012: ix). In this sense, it is more representative than the G7, which plays a determining role in world politics and the world economy. However, it is worth pointing out that it is often China that accounts for BRICS’ statistics. For instance, BRICS’ share in global output is 15 per cent, of which China contributes 61 per cent (Cameron, 2011: 2). If current economic trends are sustained, BRICS will represent the majority of the world economy in the future. According to different estimations, BRICS’ share of global GDP will already surpass that of the G7 by 2020, or 2032 at the latest (Goldman Sachs, 2007: 157; Brütsch and Papa, 2012: 1; Jacques, 2012, 163). Again, China’s economy is the key player: China is already expected to be the largest national economy by 2017 in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). At the same time, BRICS countries are responsible for about 30 per cent of total global CO2 emissions, thanks to China (Goldman Sachs, 2007: 106).

From the members’ perspective, BRICS is currently ‘a platform for a dialogue and cooperation amongst the member countries’ (Joint Statement by the 4th Summit, 2012). But in order to be something more than this, BRICS needs institutions (BRICS Report, 2012: 177). The idea is that BRICS should be more than an annual meeting for discussion. In the South African Summit a goal was agreed to develop BRICS into a fully-fledged mechanism of current and long-term coordination on a wide range of key issues of the world economy and politics (Joint Statement by the 5th Summit, 2013).

The objectives of BRICS

The following analysis is derived from the reports of BRICS annual summits and sets out how BRICS members see the purpose of their cooperation, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Epigraph
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: contextualizing the BRICS media
• PART I Debates and concepts
• PART II Media systems and landscapes
• PART III Comparative perspectives
• Index