Globalization, Culture, and Development

The General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005a) ten years ago at its 33rd session on 20 October 2005. For the last two decades, cultural diversity has been one of the key driving forces of UNESCO’s work on culture, development, and education. Although stemming from UNESCO’s paradigm of approaching culture and cultural diversity within the relatively wide scope of human activities, the 2005 Convention also restructured UNESCO’s focus on them — the arts, artistic products, and expressions of heritage are now salient:

The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is a legally-binding international agreement that ensures artists, cultural professionals, practitioners and citizens worldwide can create, produce, disseminate and enjoy a broad range of cultural goods, services and activities, including their own. It was adopted because the international community signalled the urgency for the implementation of international law that would recognise:

• The distinctive nature of cultural goods, services and activities as vehicles of identity, values and meaning;
• That while cultural goods, services and activities have important economic value, they are not mere commodities or consumer goods that can only be regarded as objects of trade. (UNESCO, n.d.)

The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions can be viewed as safeguarding group identities as understood through cultural expressions. Equally, the Convention protects the economic interests of member states in commercially produced cultural expressions such as film and television programmes. This dichotomy has led to vociferous trade versus culture debates in international cultural policy-making; but, seen as a facet of global deliberation, this may be an enduring contribution from UNESCO to global norm formation. Despite the importance of cultural issues within UNESCO, until the 2005 Convention culture had remained relatively marginalized from discussions among post-Second World War global institutions. The emergent global issues of culture, cultural identity, and cultural expressions therefore, need some historical context. Without this context, the vocabulary of the UNESCO Convention seems technocratic, limited to debates between commerce versus culture, and devoid of connections to historical trends.

The critical celebration of ten years of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005a) coincides with the 20-year anniversary of that other global policy institution dealing with trade and culture, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Possibly both celebrations will be rather tempered. On the one hand, the fairly rapid negotiation of the 2005 Convention has been followed by slow implementation. On the other hand, WTO members appear unable to find sufficient common ground to finalize the Doha round of negotiations that began in November 2001. In terms of their interinstitutional dialectics in the field of trade and culture, or particularly on the issue of audiovisual services as they are called in the WTO, hardly any change has apparently been realized. This chapter therefore looks back to and takes stock of competing ideas and perspectives on media and cultural diversity in global trade within UNESCO and WTO. In tracing the development of different perspectives on trade and culture, we reconstruct the history of the WTO/UNESCO interinstitutional dialectics by focusing on a number of milestone events and debates. Drawing on Douglass North’s conceptual framework for understanding institutional change, and the persistence of informal rules especially, we argue that notwithstanding the trade and culture debate’s complexity, manifold tensions, and often deeply competing perspectives, the final analysis is not that complicated and allows for optimism.

This chapter combines the experience of the lead author, Galia Saouma, who writes as a practitioner, and the more academic perspectives of the second author, Yudhishthir Isar, who has had a foot in both camps. The first served as the Secretary of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity, from its entry into force in 2007 until the end of 2011, after a long professional career as an international civil servant in the cultural department of UNESCO. The second author was also a cultural official of that organization for almost three decades, but has been an academic analyst and independent cultural policy advisor since 2002. Both authors draw upon their previous praxis yet also stand back from it analytically, as they trace the itinerary of the term “cultural diversity” in UNESCO.

It is increasingly recognized both by policy-makers and scientists that cultural diversity and biodiversity are not only equally significant for sustainable development, but are also interrelated. International policy documents such as UNESCO’s Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) and Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005a), and the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) (UN, 1992), refer to the linkages and analogies between the two, as do the writings of many scholars. In this context, the focus is mainly on the indigenous people, their knowledge, and their role in the maintenance of biological diversity, with cultural diversity often reduced to a few specific cultural practices or symbols, such as languages.

For a great variety of so-called non-trade issues, such as human rights, public health, the environment, or labour standards, the assumption expressed by the negotiators by way of general exceptions enshrined in trade agreements was that they are different from trade and commerce and, therefore, ought to remain outside the spectrum of international trade regulation. The same can be said about culture in general and various cultural concerns in particular. However, the case of culture appears to take a more privileged role, which is rooted in the comprehensive, cohesive, and dynamic nature of the concept as it was also recognized by the Preamble of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. This means that culture, because it can be understood to form an amalgam of experiences and problems of social life, constitutes the most comprehensive approach in various attempts to successfully tackle the problems discussed in the course of the trade-linkage debate (Garcia, 1998a) — a debate addressing various individual “trade and […] problems” as outlined above with a view of realizing the reconciliation between their respective policy objectives (Garcia, 1998b; Lang, 2007; Trachtman, 1998, 2002). This means that, in recent years, “linkage” issues have not only moved from the periphery to the centre of the trade agenda (Dunoff, 1998, p. 347) but also that the “culture and trade” link has taken an increasingly important role among them (Stein, 2000, p. 314).

The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is a landmark document in establishing the recognition of governments around the globe of the essential role of cultural diversity both for its own sake, and for its role in maintaining peace within and between nations, and in contributing to the now key notion of sustainability. It is also a document that, a decade after its introduction, requires contextualization in the light of the expanding power of globalization, the persistence in the world of violent conflicts (many of them sadly based on issues of culture and religion), and the intensification of forms of social change that were perhaps less visible in 2005 than they are today. This chapter is accordingly an attempt to place the 2005 Convention in this broader context and to assess its viability, not as a statement of entirely laudable aims, but as a potential basis for inspiring the kind of cultural work necessary to remake national and global civilization in a way congruent with other major declarations of the UN, including its founding Charter and, very significantly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the various sub-treaties and declarations to which it has given rise.

Cultural rights form one of the “categories” of human rights. This categorization of human rights mainly stems from the titles of two international human rights treaties that were adopted in 1966: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR: UN General Assembly, 1966a, entry into force 23 March 1976) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR: UN General Assembly, 1966b, entry into force 3 January 1976). Although cultural rights are mentioned in the title of the ICESCR, the text of this treaty does not make clear which provisions in the treaty belong to the category of cultural rights. In fact, none of the international legal instruments provides a definition of “cultural rights” and, consequently, different lists could be compiled of international legal provisions that could be labelled “cultural rights”.¹

The practices of intangible cultural heritage are central to the cultural heritage of humanity, which comprises practices from a plethora of different cultures as well as monuments listed as world cultural heritage. These oeuvres and practices play an important role in the cultural identity of human beings: “The ‘intangible cultural heritage’ means the practices, representation, expressions, knowledge skills — as well as the instruments objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith — that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage” (UNESCO, 2003a, Article 2). These practices are manifested in the following domains:

(a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; (b) performing arts; (c) social practices, rituals and festive events; (d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; (e) traditional craftsmanship.

(UNESCO, 2003a, Article 2; italics original)

In 2015, the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions celebrates its tenth anniversary. During its first decade of existence, it witnessed an unprecedented revolution of the audiovisual landscape. Negotiated at a time when radio, television, film, and recordings on CD or DVD format were dominant, the Convention must now deal with the reality of dematerialization and the digitization of traditional cultural offer, the emergence of new tools and modes of creation, and the development of new cultural practices. The effects of digital technologies on the diversity of cultural expressions are far from neutral.

Cultural diplomacy is not explicitly mentioned in the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. However, the Convention itself can be viewed as a classic normative instrument of multilateral cultural diplomacy harbouring, nevertheless, a potentially transformative metanarrative of accepted patterns of diplomatic relations. The Convention, dealing with the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions and emphasizing balanced partnerships between developed and developing countries, as well as making links between culture and other policy areas, challenges traditional cultural diplomacy, often associated with the uniform representation of discrete cultural nation-states and their imbalanced relations in narrowly defined areas. The Convention presents a unique opportunity to transform cultural diplomacy.

The 2005 Convention explicitly requires member states to involve civil society in its implementation. Indeed, the ConventionConvention “is the first international instrument of its kind to recognize the very specific nature of cultural goods and services, having both an economic and a cultural dimension” (UNESCO, 2013a; see also Merkel, 2012). A main objective of the ConventionConvention is to combine economic approaches to culture and creativity with a perspective that values culture in its own right, and to reaffirm the responsibilities of member states to develop appropriate cultural policies.

The 2005 UNESCO Convention provides an explicit link between the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions and sustainable development in Article 13 and development cooperation in Articles 14–18. However, the Convention leaves out broader notions of cultural diversity, which include culture as a way of life and cultural rights (for latter, see Donders, Chapter 8). Therefore, we argue, the reductionist understanding of culture does not necessarily or intrinsically have the potential for sustainable development that is claimed in the 2005 Convention. As a result, the link between the diversity of cultural expressions and sustainability has limited potential for transformative action towards sustainable development.

The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions provides an international policy lens for analysing broad debates on issues of cultural globalization and development. The authors in this volume bring to the fore an interdisciplinary set of understandings while examining cultural globalization conceived in terms of artistic expressions and entertainment industries, or broadly portrayed in an anthropological way, as the rituals, symbols, and practices of everyday life. The broad gamut of theories, methods, and evidence collected in this volume outline UNESCO’s accomplishments, shortcomings, and future policy prospects.