The US was last week isolated in its opposition to a new UN international convention seeking to protect cultural diversity, notably by controlling trade in cultural goods and services, writes David Tresilian from Paris Memories of past disagreements were re- awakened at UNESCO, the United Nations agency having responsibility for education, science and culture, at a meeting of the organisation's General Conference in Paris last week when the United States, almost alone among the UN body's 191 member states, voted against a proposed international convention on cultural diversity, following sometimes acrimonious earlier attempts to block it. The convention, steered through by France and Canada, aims to help protect the world's cultural diversity, thought to be under threat in a globalising "world that is becoming more and more uniform and more and more at the mercy of commercial exchanges," in the words of Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the French minister of culture. US opposition to the convention recalls events in 1984, when the US, followed by the United Kingdom, withdrew from UNESCO following disagreement over several of the UN agency's programmes, including a UNESCO decision to support a "New World Information and Communication Order" that the US said was anti-Western and supported censorship and state control of the media, as well as concerns over inefficient management in the UN body. As a result, the then US president, Ronald Reagan, took the decision to withdraw from UNESCO, the US only rejoining in 2003, following an announcement made the previous year by president George W Bush at the United Nations in New York. Though US opposition to the present convention, whose full title is "Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions," is unlikely to lead to a second US withdrawal, it demonstrates how out of step the US is with world opinion on a text intended to help protect cultures threatened by the homogenising effects of globalisation, particularly in the developing world. Of those countries voting on the convention at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris last week, 148 voted in favour, with four countries, Australia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Liberia abstaining, and only two countries, the United States and Israel, voting against. Even the United Kingdom, not ordinarily known for its disagreement with the United States, voted for the convention, its ambassador, Timothy Craddock, speaking for it on behalf of the European Union. The convention text will now go through a ratification process by the governments of the UNESCO member states, 30 states being required to ratify it before it can come into force. In a statement released after the vote, the US ambassador to UNESCO, Louise Oliver, said that the United States was "the most open country in the world to the diversity of the world's cultures, people and products," but that it could not support the UNESCO convention, which, hastily drafted and sloppily conceived, far from helping to protect cultural diversity "could undermine" it. She said that the convention could be used "to control -- not facilitate -- the flow of goods, services and ideas," the US being committed to "the free flow of diversity in all its forms". Furthermore, she said, states could use the convention "to control the cultural lives of their citizens... to control what citizens can see, what they can read, what they can listen to and what they can do" by interfering with the free market and "the right of all people to make these decisions for themselves". Oliver's comments echoed those made by the US delegation to UNESCO in June, when in a "Final Statement" it said that the convention, in apparently seeking to control the free trade of cultural products and services, was "fundamentally incompatible with UNESCO's constitutional obligation to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image." The convention was not about culture at all, the US statement said, but was "actually about trade." As such it exceeded the mandate of UNESCO, trade issues being the responsibility of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). If passed, the convention could "set back progress towards the economic liberalisation that has done so much to increase prosperity throughout the world, particularly in developing countries." Though the issue was not dwelt upon by either the convention's supporters or its opponents, the US currently enjoys overwhelming superiority in the international trade of cultural goods and services, most of the world's media conglomerates responsible for film and television production being based in the US, for example, and bringing in nearly two-thirds of the estimated $250 billion in revenues generated by the media industry worldwide. During the accession talks to the WTO, set up from the earlier GATT world trade system in 1994, the European Union, at French insistence, had argued for a "cultural exception" to normal trade rules in order to prevent a flood of US cultural products, including films, television programmes and music, driving domestic production out of business and having a deleterious effect on national languages and identities. Under this exception, cultural goods can be treated as a special case, allowing France, for example, to erect trade barriers and to set up a system of quotas and subsidies designed to control US imports and to support national cultural industries. It is in large part owing to such protective measures that France continues to produce around 150 films a year while other national film industries have collapsed in the face of cheap US imports. The present UNESCO convention, pushed through by France, seeks to generalise this idea through a UN instrument and to introduce it into international law. Under Article 6 of the convention, for example, states signatory to it may provide subsidies for domestic cultural production and distribution, practices ordinarily seen as interfering with the operations of the free market under WTO rules. Article 20 of the convention also states that "when interpreting and applying the other treaties to which they are parties or when entering into other international obligations, parties shall take into account the relevant provisions of this convention," which may affect negotiations on cultural goods at the WTO. However, the same article states that "nothing in this convention shall be interpreted as modifying rights and obligations of the parties under any other treaties," indicating that world trade rules may in practice still take precedence. Opinions on this final point differ. While Jean Musitelli, a French member of the committee set up to draft the UNESCO convention, told the French newspaper Le Monde that the convention for the first time recognised "the specific nature of cultural activities, goods and services," allowing states signatory to it to "retain and adopt policies and measures that they consider appropriate" to protect their cultural identities, other countries voting for it, such as the United Kingdom, have taken a more limited view of the convention's significance, seeing it as a largely symbolic gesture and one that merely registers concerns at the dominance of US culture worldwide. While the UNESCO vote is unlikely to affect the dominance of US film and television around the world, with "Hollywood movies accounting for 85 per cent of movie tickets sold worldwide," according to Donnedieu de Vabres, it has intrigued observers of the Paris-based UN organisation, raising questions regarding the role that the US intends to play within it. As Le Monde commented in its coverage of the UNESCO debate last week, US efforts to block the convention on cultural diversity have ironically only drawn attention to the dominance of US cultural products in the international marketplace and to the right of states to protect their own cultural industries and products from competition. It would be ironic, the newspaper said, if US efforts to block the convention and to marginalise UNESCO "in the end only gave the convention a resonance that it would not have had otherwise."
