About this Edition — Issue 3/2005
 
    
  

The media shape politics. Headlines in the tabloids and good performances on talk shows make or break careers. In a developed society politics without the media is unimaginable: politicians need the media in order to achieve their aims and use the media to get their message across. And the media in turn use politics and politicians for their own purposes, whether commercial or ideological.

The focus of this issue of INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND SOCIETY is a medium whose political significance has been under discussion for only a short time , the Internet. After initially being reserved above all for communication between academics its triumphant march, after economic life and the private sphere, has now also reached politics. The rules of the game have It has already changed the rules of the game on many levels of the political process: it makes access to information easier, offers new possibilities for propagating one’s opinions, and allows participatory and interactive public debates which are bound by no geographical and socio-cultural limits. For many enthusiastic observers the transition from e-commerce to the e-agora appears already accomplished or almost.

The hopes that the Internet would boost democracy, particularly in the countries of the South, were correspondingly great. However, reality has not been able to keep up with expectations because in the Third World the Internet is still largely the province of the elites. This may benefit democracy if counter elites are able to utilize the Internet as a means of triggering democratic changes, as described by Eun-Jeung Lee in relation to Korea. These elites are becoming part of what Amitai Etzioni calls the transnational society which can rely on common moral norms and engages in lively debate.

For the great majority of the world’s population, however, the Internet is less relevant than, for example, satellite television, the mobile telephone, or good old radio, when it comes to expanding horizons, rapid political mobilization, and access to information adequate to its needs. On the one hand, in many countries of the Third World neither the technical nor the economic conditions are in place for a rapid expansion of the Internet, while on the other hand, the contents of the World Wide Web are often only relevant to elites. This applies mostclearly to Africa, as Hendrik Bussiek explains with many examples in his contribution. However, even in Latin America the conditions are not much better. H owever, here in the wake of the privatization of state telecommunications monopolies in the 1990s the Internet has spread quickly. There was little in the form of state regulation, as Bert Hoffmann emphasizes, to get in the way of expansion, neither for providers nor for users. Things are very different in the Arab world, where authoritarian regimes control both the supply of and access to the Internet. However, here the Internet is a “playground for political liberalization,” as Albrecht Hofheinz points out in his contribution: in the Internet new societal free spaces are opening up which for the time being appear rather private, but are reshaping relations between individual, family, and society in a way which is also becoming politically significant.

Therefore, while in democratic, open societies the Internet is merely an additional element in politics which does not effect any major qualitative changes, in “closed,” if not to say authoritarian regimes it offers the possibility of more open and broader access to information and of developing a public counter-discourse. And this to an extent and with a speed which would be scarcely imaginable without this medium. Accordingly, it is precisely here – for example, in China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia – that we see the most determined efforts to control Internet use. How this happens in detail can be seen in the contributions by Shi Ming, Bert Hoffmann, and Albrecht Hofheinz.

There is a need for regulation of this crossborder medium beyond national boundaries, as Jeanette Hofmann argues. For a number of years the various stakeholders – national governments, business representatives, and civil society – have been negotiating within the framework of the UN World Summit on Information Society about legitimate procedures of Internet governance. There are indications that the outcome will be a trengthening of the role of states and tighter control of unregulated free spaces.

At the margin of our theme Stefanie Hürtgen analyses the specific production conditions in the Eastern European electronics industry and the possibilities for trade union interest representation, and Peter W. Schulze considers Russian foreign policy after the “loss of the Ukraine.” Paul Pasch establishes why the way out of the North Korean nuclear crisis leads through Beijing, and Winfried Veit in his Review Essay asks whether the search for a European identity can also contribute to a solution of the European constitutional crisis.

 

     
 
     
 
 
     
© Friedrich Ebert Stiftung  net edition: Gerda Axer-Dämmer| 07/2005   Top