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Conclusion
of its former empire has been easing closer to a united Europe. Other areas, such as the Middle East and China, have been identified in the past decades as the hot buttons of global economy and security, legitimated as such by U.S. economic and political interests and the U.S.-led war on terror. This book is certainly not the result of a nostalgic yearning for the Cold War, when the area studies attention, supported by state department research money, was lavished on the Soviet empire. On the contrary, it is an argument against naturalizing a vision of globalization determined by neoimperial power interests. The area studies paradigm issued selected questions and found the selective answers it was paid to find. Globalization is not and should not be construed as a zero-sum game, a turf war among the peripheries for the attention of power centers. Rather, it is a dispersed and inscrutable set of political and economic games that are no longer played exclusively among nationstates. The “game” model usefully complements existing metaphors of globalization, such as “flow,” “scape,” and “network.” The play/game metaphor underscores the increasing recognition that media flows are not simply one aspect of globalization but part and parcel of all transnational economic, political, and cultural exchanges. Media globalization implies that the power games of transnational corporations are inseparable from consumers’ collective and individual identity games. Political science alone is inadequate to map the complexities of such multilayered games, whose rules are permanently subject to shifts. It needs to be complemented by media and communication studies, an inherently interdisciplinary set of inquiries informed by cultural studies and the social sciences. As I emphasize in these chapters, the need for an interdisciplinary understanding of media globalization is particularly true for the post-Wall transformations in Eastern Europe. The play and game model allows one to analyze the changing aesthetic of postcommunist television, film, and new media practices as they are intertwined with the ideological and economic interests that motivate the power games behind simplistic evocations of globalization. Now that the Balkan wars have ended, the news cameras have turned away from the postcommunist region. However, the subsequent erasure of the forty-year experience of communism, and the failure to process the unprecedented historical experience of the transition from late communism to late capitalism in its complexity, is depriving our understanding of media globalization of valuable lessons. Rendering these events irrelevant or too obscure for navigating the unstoppable flow of capitalist globalization