Fall 2005 - Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

C U L T U R A L H E R I T A G E P O L I C Y
In anticipation of the vote on UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection
of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions, two
members of the Center staff reflected on the Convention’s purpose, its
definition of cultural diversity, and its implications for cultural policy.
UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization, voted overwhelmingly on October 17 to adopt the new
Convention despite the strong objection of the United States government
(the vote was 148 in favor and 2 against, with 4 abstentions).
Real-Cultural-Politik: A New World
Is Possible If We Imagine It So
b y J A M E S E A R LY, D I R E C TO R , C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E P O L I C Y
Now that the first stage of the UNESCO
Convention for the protection of cultural expressions is
concluded, U.S. arts and cultural organizations should
step back and review what has developed and why, in order
to prepare for constructive engagement in the next round
of global cultural policy discourse and negotiation.
UNESCO’s Constitutional principle, “preserving the
fruitful diversity of cultures,” and its obligation “to recommend
such international agreements as may be necessary to promote the free
flow of ideas and images by word and image” establish historical
context for new cultural regulatory policy for promotion
of the diversity of cultural expressions. The 1998
Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for
Development (Stockholm, Sweden) stated a Commitment
to Pluralism and emphasized that plurality occurs in the context of
increasing economic and cultural globalization, which leads… to a homogenization.
Consequently, in response to the perceived threat
of global market homogenization to the free flow of ideas
and images from culturally diverse sources within and
among nations, UNESCO adopted a Universal Declaration
on Cultural Diversity and an Action Plan (2001), obligating
States in an ethical commitment that for the first time
recognizes cultural diversity as “the common heritage of
humanity,” and a means of “humanizing” globalization.
Concerns about the deleterious effects of globalization
became so grave that many UNESCO members
decided that the philosophical Declaration of
2001 needed to be reinforced with a legally binding
Convention. The UNESCO Convention thus reflects a
real-cultural-politik struggle in the context of neoliberal
economic philosophy and policies that impede government
intervention in the economy and social and cultural
life. The Convention attempts to counterbalance the
dominant role and negative consequences of World Trade
Organization (WTO) policy that promotes deregulation,
privatization, and monocultural consumerism detrimental
to local and national cultures (imaginations, languages,
identities, aesthetic and artistic traditions) within the
Commons of developed and underdeveloped nations.
Contestation over a new cultural diversity governance paradigm
sets a cultural approach to the market in opposition
to a market approach to culture.
Due to the pressures and compromises exerted among
nations engaged in realpolitik, the Convention is disappointingly
weak. Regrettably the Convention fails to
articulate the import of cultural diversity to spiritual and
material wellbeing, and the need to promote and evaluate
the quality of life using non-market registers.
However, despite serious shortcomings, important
principles, concepts, policies, and action plans that mark
a turning point for protection and promotion of cultural
diversity have been formally advanced and institutionalized
by progressive citizen-artists-cultural workers
and cultural ministers. The International Network for
Cultural Policy (Ministers of Culture) and civil society
arts and culture organizations like the International
Network for Cultural Diversity and the International
Liaison Committee of the Coalitions for Cultural
Diversity are among the important actors who have
launched a global real-cultural-politik that posits culture
as the goal of development and challenges the sway of fundamentalist
market principles.
Section III Article 4-Definition: For the purpose of this
Convention, it is understood that cultural diversity refers to the manifold
ways in which the cultures of groups and societies find expression. These
expressions are passed on within and among groups and societies. Cultural
diversity is made manifest not only through the varied ways in which the
cultural heritage of humanity is expressed, augmented and transmitted
through the variety of cultural expressions but also through diverse modes
of artistic creation, production, dissemination, distribution and enjoyment,
whatever the means and technologies used. (my underline)
Although the Convention defines cultural diversity in
broad anthropological and artistic-expressive terms and
employs trade terminology, the main policy motivation and
scope of particularly intense contention among UNESCO
Member States is the expansive, defining reach and ownership
concentration of media technology and the consequent
potential for control by media-rich States and monocultural
corporate entities over values, ideals, symbolic representation,
and market share. A contending paradigm has been
established in real-cultural-politik that asserts that enrichment
of cultural diversity should be the end product of
development and not a mere instrumentation or commodity
like other goods and services, and that States thus have the
right to maintain or adopt cultural policies and appropriate
measures for the protection and promotion of cultural
expressions. Assistance to developing countries is proposed
as a “cardinal principle”—and should be extended to include
“underdeveloped,” and “developing communities” in all
countries. The most contested clause and defining issue of
future debate and negotiation deals with the authority of this
Convention over other treaties bound by the commercial
orthodoxy of the World Trade Organization.
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