Appendix 6 - International Music Council

and venues could not survive without support and would no longer be accessible, because
they would have to sell incredibly expensive tickets. It is also a fact, that the training in
classical music is very demanding concerning time and money! The loss or decrease of
classical music being practiced would be a hard loss for musical diversity.
MARKET AND QUALITY: EU, GATS AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY
Throughout Europe, the implementation of the GATS-agreements is often seen as a
problem. A very good description of the problematic can be found in a text about the
meaning of the UNESCO-Convention of the protection and preservation of the diversity of
cultural expressions for the media, written by Dr. Verena Wiedemann. We would like to
insert a detailed quote here:
The European Union and its member states consider cultural goods and services to be
unlike any other commodities, because of the fact, that they play a unique role in their
societies for cultural identity and diversity. The Community and its member states have
developed a great number of measures and policies protecting and promoting its national
and local cultures and the diversity of cultural expressions (s. Section 4). Thus the EU is
against trade liberalisation in the cultural sector, because such liberalisation would
endanger cultural diversity, which is crutial for the European identity.
The EU argues against the WTO negotiations, that the European markets are open and its
policies in the cultural sector and in the audiovisual services in particular are not
protectionist. The Community is pointing at the high market share of US audiovisual
productions in Europe. In 2000, the overall market share of US audiovisual programmes on
European TV channels amounted to 69%. In the same year, the EU trade deficit with the
United States in the audiovisual sector amounted to 8.2 billion US $. This evidences that the
lack of liberalisation commitments of the Community under GATS does not represent a
market barrier for foreign audiovisual service suppliers in Europe.
If the liberalisation in the cultural sector would be enforced, following limitations of the
nation's rights to promote local and national culture sector would arise:
1. Because of the Most Favoured Nation clause of the GATS all EU subsidy programs for
the inner European cooperations in culture and the promotion of European cultural
products would become meaningless.
2. The National Treatment Principle would force national quota regulations (e.g. in
France) to be dropped.
3. The Subsidies Clause, if adopted, might lead to the extinction of public service
broadcasters as such, since they might be considered as distorting trade in services
4. Once European regulations of the audio-visual media will be subject to the test of
transparency and proportionality of domestic regulation in the GATS, all regulations,
including measures safeguarding media pluralism would in principle be subject to the
scrutiny of a GATS dispute settlement body.
The European Community is also against the proposal brought up by the United States at
the present round of the WTO trade negotiations to liberalise all new audio-visual services
delivered on-demand as well as all multimedia content delivered over the Internet. This
approach would make all EU regulatory framework for culture irrelevant, since in a few
years all audiovisual services will be produced in digital and delivered electronically ondemand.
The Community insists on the principle of technological neutrality, which means
that the technology used to transmit an audio-visual programme does not make any
difference with respect to the content and the rules governing this content.
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