The movement at UNESCO for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO) was a radical effort to revolutionize international communications, its imperial foundations, the racial relationships that they mediated, and their monopoly on human affairs writ large. Championed by Tunisian information minister Mustapha Masmoudi, stewarded by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and implemented by UNESCO, NWICO called for the “decolonization of information” monopolized by the so-called “Big Four”: Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse. The long-lost twin of the better-known New International Economic Order, the NWICO’s principal objective was to intervene in a global cultural economy that capitalized on racial misrepresentations and exclusions, buttressed a “will to dominate,” and empowered imperial ways of seeing in both the global North and South. Generally seen to have failed, NWICO was, until recently, largely forgotten except by scholars of the history of communications and of intellectual property, who evaluated its legacies in terms of those disciplines.
This paper explores a lesser known—but perhaps more impactful—long term consequence of UNESCO’s NWICO: the universalization of the idea of decolonization in the late 1970s. Based on untapped UNESCO and NAM archival materials, in concert with political commentaries published in Tunisia, India, Cuba, Canada, and France, this paper unearths how the NWICO declaration was integral to the universalization of the idea of decolonization and how it, in turn, provincialized contemporary European understandings of national independence in former colonies. Insofar as NWICO sought to use international media networks and world news to decolonize minds, the project reveals how UNESCO (as the global forum on intercultural relations) empowered the reorientation of understandings of the phenomenon of decolonization as being centered in individuals’ experiences of imperial relationships in the world, rather than being merely an issue of the existence of post-colonial nation-states.
