Born in the Lebanese countryside in 1951, by 1980 Ghassan Salame had obtained PhDs in literature and politics, a masters in Lebanese and French law, and any number of qualifications in the arts. He has been Lebanese culture minister (2000-2003), advisor to the Lebanese parliament and government (1984-88; 1991-95), spokesman of the Arab and Francophone summits (March 2002; October 2002) and senior advisor to the United Nations secretary-general (since 2003). Yet he hasn't stopped teaching in Lebanon and the United States as well as Paris where he is currently international relations professor at the Institut d'études politiques, since the mid-1970s. A firm believer in Arab culture and Arabic, he is proficient in Latin and Greek as well as French and English, and through his work as board member of, among many others, the International Crisis Group, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Arab Anti Corruption Organisation, Le Haut Conseil de la Francophonie, the regional Commission for the Mediterranean at the French Commissariat du Plan, the Scientific Council of the Tunis Research Institute on the Contemporary Maghreb, as much as his French media appearances, he has embodied a dynamic and cosmopolitan notion of cultural identity, one that "you can reinvent anew", as he puts it, "every morning while you brush your teeth". Last month, Salame was in Cairo for a three-day meeting of the board of trustees of the newly founded Arab Fund for Arab Culture (AFAC), an inter-Arab resource for the arts now registered and based in Amman but working across the Arab world and beyond, which he chairs. Interview by Youssef Rakha The Arab Fund for Arab Culture (AFAC) was established in his absence, Ghassan Salame explains. We are in the VIP lounge of the Nile Hilton, he is formally dressed, as I suspect he always is, but his instantaneous warmth and willingness to communicate belie the courtly atmosphere. The initiative of a group of about 10 people from different parts of the Arab world, he goes on to say, AFAC -- in Arabic the acronym means "Horizons" -- came into being in response to a lack they all felt: the lack of institutional, including financial support for Arab culture. And fidgeting a little in the fauteuil, Salame warms to his theme. "These people have one thing in common," he elaborates in quiet, smooth flowing tones, almost a whisper, instinctively underlining the operative words as he goes along, the way people with a gift for teaching always do: "that they're undertaking genuine activity in the society they are in. What was the idea? The idea was that, first of all, the Arab governments now in office only support cultural activities that have to do with the country ( al-qutr ) itself, all in all. Whereas there is a contradiction or at least some tension between this exclusively national orientation ( tawajjuh qutri, as opposed to qawmi or watani, either of which may refer to the Arab world as a whole) and the unity of Arab culture, or the fact that creative agents address Arabs in general. Cultural products like a film or a song, even a painting, are not subject to national ( qutri ) borders. And the proof is satellite channels, best-selling books -- where in Lebanon the best-seller will be a Moroccan writer or an Egyptian writer and vice versa. That is the proof. And so this fund's first adjunct is that it is Arab. No, no, no," he is quick to respond to the suspicion of an Arabist ( 'uroubi ) -- ideological, as opposed to simply Arab ( Arabi ) -- realist logic, "the idea is the existing integration of the Arab cultural market in terms of consumption, and the fact that it should be integrated in terms of production procedure as well. But you're setting out from an economic reality, not an ideological statement. And any Arab is welcome, from Maghrib and Mashriq alike," he insists in response to another question: holders of Israeli passports as well as those living outside the Arab world. "Secondly, there is the simple fact that when governments provide support -- and I was a minister, so I know this -- it is hard for any government to eschew political or even party considerations in making a cultural decision. So there will always be those creative people who may be marginalised because of their loyalties or associations, or because of the way they think. So the second issue we are concerned with, after Arab continuity, is cultural independence, meaning that political or party considerations should have absolutely no bearing on any cultural decision -- one result of which is the predominance of corruption and the culture of corruption." Ghassan Salame fidgets some more, but does not pause. "The third issue of concern is the fact that attention is being paid to the creative agent but not enough attention is paid to the donor. If you want to work in the cultural sphere, you have to convince the donor of taking an active interest, beyond signing a cheque and forgetting about the whole thing. So one of our principal policies is to obtain support from individuals, whom we give priority over institutions. This is extremely exhausting work, because you want to convince each person, and explain your logic to each person. But look at its advantages: that you won't accept a person's donation until you have made that person actively interested in what's being done with his money and so you will ensure that your donors maintain a permanent interest in the cultural sphere as a whole, not simply make a one-off donation as it were; that you will protect the independence of the fund by ensuring that over half of its revenues are coming from individual Arab sources -- up to the present we have managed to collect approximately $1.5 million, most of which -- more than half of which was donated individuals, middle-class people and cultural enthusiasts as well as businessmen, yes -- which is draining work... "Of course," he adds, "we will not refuse any support from Arab governments or international organisations, but only so long as it is unconditional: where receiving support is contingent on spending it on a specific country, for example, we will refuse that support. The same holds for any political, regional or party conditions donors might want to impose. Whatever institution is happy to contribute within a truly independent set-up, we're happy to receive support from. But since this approach is relatively new, at the present stage we are not particularly enthusiastic about government funds." There is no irony in his voice as he says this, though there could well be, all things considered. "At this point we are more eager to establish ourselves and the way we work..." Salame mentions, in addition to the "two first adjuncts" of AFAC, the board's emphasis on young people -- once again a policy less ideological than economic, in the sense that the established have an unfair advantage over the start-ups; he also mentions transparency, visibility and structure -- every penny is recorded and announced, and board trustees receive nothing for their services on principle. Finally, he speaks more specifically of the need for such a fund in the light of the continuing failure of "the nationalisation of culture which took place in the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s", a failure reflected in both the increasing inability of Arab culture ministries to play the role required of them and the rising disillusionment on the part of intellectuals and creative agents with the effects of nationalisation on the ground. Yet the fund "complements without replacing the work of ministries of culture", he says, "simply rectifying, the way it also rectifies the vulgar logic of the market through specific grants that we are convinced are needed". There are those areas -- protection of monuments and film production, for two examples -- that must remain in the hands of governments and producers, respectively. "What you do is that you rectify a little bit here, a little bit there, while remaining a third party yourself." Nor is the point about Arabness as opposed to Arabism to be taken lightly. "Culture is now the main cause of local conflicts and civil wars," Salame told the UN General Assembly on 11 May this year, critiquing what he calls "culturalism" as well as primordialism: "according to those we call primordialists, such as Kaplan, Luttwak or Kaufmann, who believe that civil wars are mainly caused by a deep, trans-historical mistrust and ancient hatreds among groups and those primordialists' remedy for civil wars is terribly simple: forget decades or centuries of peace and cooperation among these groups and separate them through the partition of territories and organised ethnic cleansing. 'Culture matters', we are now told repeatedly, very often by those who a few years ago did not even mention culture in their scholarly sophisticated models. Culture has become the summa causa for good and bad things. Culture which used to be the camera bianca par excellence is now, thanks to its intensive ideological and political overuse, becoming a sort of camera oscura... "Who is entitled to speak in the name of Islam and who for the West? What is the process by which we can identify the legitimate representatives of a civilisation? How are they selected? Where are the borders among civilisations? How are borders demarcated and upon which criteria are civilisations constituted? Why are so many conflicts raging within civilisations rather than among them? Why should we conceptually substitute the civilisation (in the singular form) the way it has been described by the Encyclopédie or more recently by Sigmund Freud or Norbert Elias as a single universal process for the civilisations [in the plural form] as competing monoliths? To these and other questions, the proponents of the civilisations-as-players have no convincing answers. No. Culture is not the Rosetta Stone that explains everything on everything. It is primarily a language in which malaise and conflict, aspirations and frustrations, are now couched in order to tackle with issues which had been expressed, until yesterday, in terms of strategic competition, ideological divides or conflicting interests." By choice, Salame lived through the worst of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990; he was in Lebanon in 1978-1985). He had been studying in France when the war broke out: "not many people did, but my obsession with my country drove me to go back, even though I had work where I was, and so I lived through seven years of sometimes merciless war." The year he returned, Salame's eldest daughter was born under extreme conditions when the neighbourhood of Ras Beirut, where he still keeps a house, was being bombed; he had married before going back, but he had both his children in war- torn Beirut. In 1985, he says, things became particularly difficult for children, and particularly difficult in the western half of the city, and particularly difficult for Christians there. Daily life was next to impossible, abductions were frequent, "so we returned to migration," he goes on. He never joined in the actual fighting -- "unfortunately" he says -- but he was interrogated and, on more than one occasion, abducted. Besides teaching, he supported the Palestinian cause -- "not an easy task in the community I came out of... not Maronite, no, but Christian and conventional" -- and he is proud of the fact that he never moved out of West Beirut in the end. Perhaps more significantly, in addition, "and for different reasons", he was active in "the process of seeking a way out of the Lebanese war"; every single peace initiative in the history of the war, he says, starting with the Rally of Christians Committed to the Palestinian Cause, of which he was a founding member in 1975 and down to the 1989-90 Taif Accords which eventually brought the war to an end, Salame was part of. He never says it in so many words, but it is this process of belonging to where you come from -- without for a moment closing yourself off to other, even incompatible loyalties -- that defines culture: refusing to move from Ras Beirut, for example. And like the inclusive Arabness posited by the fund -- and unlike political Islam, for one example Salame does not give -- culture is to be understood as a specific human response to the world which has products, beautiful or sublime, to show for itself -- products, not simply commodities. Perhaps in reaction to the failure of nationalisation schemes in the Arab world, people continue to rant and rave about state-sponsored culture, Salame says. There will come a time, however -- "and I hope it will be soon" -- when people register the limitations on the market. It is indeed absurd to say that cultural products are not commodities; they are, and they are because their producers want them to be: a writer wants to sell, a filmmaker wants millions of people to watch his movie, a painter wants to make substantial sums for his works. But once cultural products are thought of as commodities like any others, what you end up is not culture but entertainment. And culture ministries must learn that they are "servants, not benefactors" of culture. But there remains a different side to the story. "A cultural product is like Janus," Salame says. "It has two faces, and before you can deal with it you have to understand its dual nature." The first face is that of the market: it is a commodity keen on being sold. The second, however, is that it is "the expression of the identity of a people". This is a quality that makes it, quite literally, invaluable. If it is subjugated to the logic of the market, cultures will die, there will remain only entertainment in a more debased sense. "You want to remind governments that the cultural product is a commodity, but at the same time you need to remind the market that it is not a commodity like any other. It is a commodity that carries substance. The refrigerator that you buy has no substance," no meaning beyond its function. "A novel is different..." Within the cultural sphere, therefore, the need for "independence" is more crucial than it has ever been before, but "independence" -- the answer most frequently posited to the tyranny of the market on the one hand and the blindness of the state on the other -- is not simply or essentially a set of procedures. It is a way of working, a commitment, and it requires both efficiency and complete transparency. It can co-exist with neither corruption nor identity politics, to mention but two threats it must face. As culture minister, Salame was under the dual obligation of trying to cut down government spending -- a policy he wholeheartedly supported in the Lebanese context -- and expanding the scope of cultural funding itself, for which he was directly responsible. "So how did I get out of this dilemma?" he says. "I did so in exactly the same way as the fund hopes to work. I did not address myself to the state. From the private sector, rather, from foreign governmental bodies and international organisations, I managed to collect many times the value of the Culture Ministry budget. Both the Arab and Francophone summits, which I was assigned to organise, I funded entirely from outside the Lebanese state." It is, he implies, the only viable modus operandi for culture at present, even "state-supported" culture -- and it should work on a much bigger scale, too, however much more difficulty is involved. Not only did Salame obtain funding from outside, he also relied on "hundreds of young volunteers": transparency and persuasiveness, he says, work for both young people and the rich. A young writer would come to him and ask for $15,000 to publish a book, and he would find the money at a bank, an insurance company, an international organisation, and the process would be "perfectly transparent", with Salame asking both parties not to go through him as minister, and checking on the progress of the deal later on. "Thank God," he says persuasively, "it was possible to collect many million dollars." In this way he was able to promote culture as minister without recourse to state funds. "So I was being civil society from within the government, and now," he refers to AFAC, "I'm doing the same thing, differently." The structure of the fund, which Salame goes on to describe, lends further credibility to the notion of corruption-free Arab cultural continuity -- a post-nationalist gesture of self assertion best read as a process of collective self discovery free from duress -- a worthy objective if ever there was one. Perhaps more interestingly, though, much of what Salame has to say about the fund crystallises his own experience as a man who set out from a left-wing and Arabist standpoint of what, in the present-day world, such ideas might viably imply. Salame's perspective is particularly engaging in that he has always juggled academia with politics, theory with practice, and his concern with culture emanates from a genuine sense of commitment to who he is -- as an Arab, yes, but also as a Christian and, beyond that, as a student of Plato, an amateur opera singer, a French as well as Lebanese citizen -- all he is. "Respect," Salame told UN General Assembly members, "invokes minimal interaction." Like reserve, like "consideration", it is largely a matter of leaving people alone: "I do have respect for your values, your beliefs, your idiom as long as you remain at a distance. But the predicament of this age is that distance is less of an option than any time in the past. Of the Other, we are constantly reminded: migration brings him to our neighbourhoods, and governments can do little to stop his legal and illegal quest for a better life. Tourism, transformed during the past century from an individual adventure into large mass movements, brings him to the heart of our cultural heritage, to our downtown souqs, to our sacred places and no high walls can really protect him from us and protect us from his gaze, not even those walls now circling tourist enclaves in the most turbulent parts of the world. Information technology bring[s] his different, often threatening image, into our bedrooms. Globalisation... makes our industry dependent on his, our spending habits on his productivity, our peace on his stability..." Yet neither respect, at best "a form of cultural cold war" already difficult to engage with under globalisation (one -- paradoxical -- effect of which is to trigger "cultural and social disintegration while pushing for deeper and deeper financial and economic integration"), nor tolerance -- defined as "a form of balance of power among unequal parties: the strong tolerates the weak as long as the weak does not challenge the power of the strong" -- are sufficient conditions for inter- cultural dialogue, the subject of Salame's address to the UN General Assembly. Besides these two "moral attitudes", dialogue requires "three basic concessions... or rather recognitions": an "active learning experience" by which "the Other's otherness" is engaged with; the Other's right to that otherness -- since "dialogue can only be based on the legitimacy of every group to remain attached to its belief system, to its values, or language or religion"; and "a psychological predisposition" to let the process alter not only "the Other's views and values but possibly... yours... as well." "Dialogue is not the opposite of struggle; it is a form of struggle. In conflict, you struggle against the Other; in dialogue you struggle against yourself so that you come to accept the Other's otherness, to recognise its legitimacy and to embark on an adventure that could alter your view... of yourself, that is your own identity." A very demanding process, in other words, which "culturalist" attitudes render impossible: it requires, rather, taking your cultural adversary for his word, rather than assuming that only your discourse is true -- on the pretext of "objectivity"; it requires a multiplicity of viewpoints, fairness and "multilateralism"; and it presupposes cultural diversity, and the existence of international organisations: "Respect for each other's faith should be promoted but without putting in danger the basic freedom of expression [whether] on religious [or] other issues. More importantly, the UN should... stand against making contact with the Other a taboo, just because you do not like his politics or because you are not happy with the government he has... elected." Salame fidgets more still. He is evidently pondering the meaning of culture. "Surely identity is not something that's fixed," he says suddenly, "something that you never question. Don't you yourself reinvent your identity every morning on waking up?"
