International Network for Cultural Diversity
Vol. 7 No. 2
Contents:
1. INCD News and Announcements
INCD Annual Meeting – 21-23 November 2006, Rio de Janeiro
Planning in now underway for the seventh annual meeting of the International Network for Cultural Diversity, to take place from 21-23 November 2006 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The meeting is being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the International Network on Cultural Policy. The closing dinner on the final night is always a highlight of the event. It is also the welcoming dinner for the world’s culture ministers, whose meeting starts the next morning, and is thus a wonderful opportunity for civil society delegates to interact informally with the ministers. More details about the meeting, including a preliminary agenda, will be provided in the next newsletter.
Meanwhile, if you have any ideas about topics for the agenda or potential speakers who could be invited, please send them to the INCD secretariat.
INCD Steering Committee Elections Set to Begin
INCD is a democratic membership organization managed by a Steering Committee elected in a web-based process. Over the next few months, INCD will be selecting a new Steering Committee, whose core membership is to be elected on the following regional basis. Additional members will be chosen by the elected Committee.
South America 2
North/Central America/Caribbean 3
Europe 4
Africa 4
Middle East 2
Oceania 1
Asia 4
If you are an INCD member who is interested in serving on the Steering Committee, or if you would like to nominate a colleague, please let the secretariat know. The Nominating Committee will soon begin its work and all suggestions will be taken into account.
INCD Africa Advocacy Project
At a meeting in Brazzaville, Congo on 21-24 February, INCD and the Danish Center for Culture and Development agreed on the terms of a partnership to build an advocacy network in sub-Saharan Africa. The Network will work to promote the ratification of the UNESCO Convention, to encourage countries to include a cultural component in their Poverty Reduction Strategy Programs and to organize a conference on creative industries in Africa. The Congo meeting was held within the framework of UNESCO’s Global Alliance on Cultural Diversity and more than 30 organizations took part. DCCD will also sponsor several other African Networks with the following objectives:
Watch the Newsletter for more information as the work progresses, or contact Ibrahima Seck, INCD West and Central African Coordinator, who is responsible for the network, at iseck@yahoo.fr.
2. UNESCO Convention Ratification Process
The campaign to ratify the terms of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is now underway. The Convention will come into force when 30 countries have ratified it.
In November, Canada became the first country to notify UNESCO of its decision to join the Convention and it was followed recently by Mauritius. In December 2005, African culture ministers called on all African states to ratify the Convention (see Vol. 6, No. 9). On 27 April, the European Parliament approved the Convention and final ratification is expected at the May meeting of the Council of Europe. European member states have also started to take the necessary steps to ratify the Convention and are at various stages in their domestic processes. Under European rules, all Member States and the Commission must deposit their instruments of ratification with UNESCO at the same time.
If you have any information about the ratification process in your country or elsewhere, please inform the international secretariat so that we can keep track of developments and provide assistance.
3. WTO Developments
As we have reported in the past two Newsletter issues, recent developments at the World Trade Organization are causing alarm in the global cultural diversity movement. The WTO Doha Development round of trade talks was given a boost by the December 2005 meeting of trade ministers in Hong Kong and by the announcement by the U.S. and the EU that they would marginally reduce agricultural subsidies over the next decade. Trade negotiators also have a real deadline for the talks, as the so-called Fast Track negotiating authority given by the U.S. Congress to the President is set to expire in mid-2007.
Negotiations to further liberalize trade in services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have moved into a new phase. As reported in the last Newsletter by Professor Jane Kelsey, governments seeking to open up services markets have filed a number of “plurilateral” requests in a process that WTO has implemented to speed up the negotiations and to put more pressure on member states to “improve” their services offers. This process involves like-minded countries joining in a collective request to other countries, thus putting additional pressure on them to comply. “Improved” offers in response to these requests are to be tabled by 31 July, with final offers due in October 2006. At least two of these requests are important for culture – the one covering Telecommunications and the one covering Audiovisual services.
Telecommunications. The telecommunications request has been put forward
by nine countries, including the United States, as well as by the European
Communities. It has been directed at 23 other member countries. This proposal
seeks the complete liberalization of telecommunications services, with the
removal of all government laws, regulations and measures that in any way limit
the market access of foreign companies. The proposal seeks the removal of all
limits on foreign investment in the domestic telecommunications sector, an
interesting development given that two of the countries demanding this
elimination, Canada and Korea, currently maintain ownership limits of domestic
telecommunications firms.
Given the convergence between telecom, broadcasting, cable, satellite and broadband forms of delivery, telecommunications policies and regulations are increasingly having an important affect on cultural content. If music, television programs and other artistic works delivered by the telephone companies are merely considered value-added telecom services and subject to GATS commitments, as they would be under the plurilateral request, the latitude of states to implement cultural policies that affect this content would be curtailed severely.
Audiovisual Services. Perhaps of more immediate cultural concern, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Mexico and the United States have put forward a collective request in the audiovisual field. It has been directed against 27 other WTO member countries. This is a wide-ranging request covering motion picture production, distribution and exhibition; promotion and advertising; and sound recording services, and covers a number of specific sub-sectors.
The request seeks commitments in Modes 1 and 2 (that is, cross-border trade in services and the consumption of services abroad) that “reflect the level of de facto openness.” In other words, government measures and programs that in any way limit or constrain the import or export of these audiovisual services, including films, television programs and sound recordings, would be frozen at their current level, and they could not be changed in any way that would make them more favourable to local artists and cultural producers. In Mode 3 (covering foreign direct investment in a business), the request is seeking the elimination of content quotas, foreign equity restrictions, nationality or residency requirements, discriminatory tax treatment, local production or employment requirements, and other policy measures. In other words, foreign firms should be free to set up in any market and to operate without restrictions and government measures designed to promote cultural diversity.
The request also seeks to “reduce the scope and number of MFN (most favoured nation) exemptions,” that have been used by a number of countries to maintain their film, television and new media co-production treaties.
Clearly this request is an aggressive attempt to undermine government policies and measures that favour local artists and cultural producers working in music, film and television productions and the commercial field.
In the next few weeks, the INCD will complete a major study on GATS and culture, look for it at www.incd.net.
4. Culture Treaty Couldn’t Save Korea from Hollywood
Luke Eric Peterson is an Ottawa-based writer and consultant.
This is an article he wrote for Embassy Magazine and is reprinted with permission.
As a negotiation strategy, it wasn’t exactly one for the Korean textbooks. Before free trade talks were officially launched this month between the United States and South Korea, Asia’s third largest economy had already caved to U.S. pressure, agreeing to gut a popular policy which has been credited for nurturing Korea’s celebrated film industry. Since the late 1960s, Korean law dictated that local cinemas screen domestic films for a minimum of 146 days per year. The policy has long been in the crosshairs of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which objects to the marginalization of U.S. films in Korea. With Hollywood wielding enough political clout to bar the door to trade talks with the United States, a reduction in the Quota-system was always going to be the price of admission for Korea.
And, after resisting U.S. pressure for years, the Korean government announced (in late January) that it would agree to halve its screen quota immediately. Further reductions in the quota are widely expected. Remarkably, Korea’s capitulation to MPAA demands comes mere months after the conclusion of an international treaty which was supposed to strengthen the hands of governments in protecting local cultural industries.
The UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity was concluded last October to great fanfare, with only the U.S. and Israel failing to sign on to the agreement. Yet, the newly minted Convention proved impotent in preventing Korea from abandoning its own successful cultural policies. Ultimately, a free trade pact with the United States proved too tantalizing a prospect for a Korean government, which has aspirations to be the economic hub of Asia. Government economists are already tallying up the potential economic gains of a deal with the United States. They’re also promising the cultural sector a massive injection of new cash in an effort to compensate for the lost protection of the screen quota policy.
But don’t count on Korea’s cultural community to fall silent. While the country’s films enjoy international prominence, Korea is also no slouch when it comes to street performance.
Sometimes the spectacle can be tragic, as was the case when a Korean farmer stabbed himself to death at a 2003 rally against global trade talks. At other times, the performances are worth their weight in PR gold, as has been the case with a succession of carefully choreographed appearances by Korean screen idols to picket outside government buildings. The Korea Herald reports that one such picket had to be shut down after a crush of fans turned out to catch a glimpse of the country’s top movie star, Jang Dong-gun….
Meanwhile, Korea’s highly-subsidized farmers are also gearing up to oppose U.S. trade talks which threaten to reduce barriers to foreign food imports. The farmers scored a victory of sorts (in February) when they shut down a public meeting where officials were to discuss the proposed trade deal.
With so much public opposition, the U.S. - Korea negotiations won’t be easy to conclude. Negotiators have less than a year to sew up a deal, before U.S. President George W. Bush loses his fast-track negotiating power — after which the U.S. Congress will once again reassert its right to examine every clause of the proposed trade agreements with a fine tooth comb….
Even if negotiations between the U.S. and Korea should fall apart, Hollywood has already secured its prize. The MPAA, in a press release, adds that its “ultimate goal is a global market for films and filmed entertainment unimpeded by the artificialities of government policies.”
There may be a lesson here for the global movement of non-governmental organizations and culture vultures who long championed a global treaty on cultural diversity, only to see that treaty rendered irrelevant by hardball U.S. trade negotiating tactics. Joining hands to conclude feel-good treaties at UNESCO is of little consequence if countries are left isolated when it comes to engaging in global trade negotiations.
Indeed, the more salutary experience of several Eastern European governments — which recently wriggled out of onerous trade commitments with the United States — provides a stark contrast with Korea’s recent fate.
When the European Union added ten new member-states in 2003, the trading bloc demanded that new entrants like Poland and the Czech Republic amend their existing economic agreements with the United States. While the United States balked, the EU insisted that the agreements either be amended, or torn up altogether.
The European Commission, the EU’s powerful Executive branch, didn’t like that these old economic agreements tied the hands of Central and Eastern European governments when it came to introducing audio-visual policies which favoured local TV, cinematic or musical productions.
After a brief diplomatic stand-off, the United States quietly agreed to revise its lop-sided agreements with the new EU member-countries, rather than risk seeing the agreements terminated at the insistence of EU officials.
In other words, thanks to the negotiating muscle of the powerful European Union, a number of Eastern and Central European governments once again enjoy the freedom to introduce cultural policies which carve out a place of prominence for local content — the very same sort of policies which are now being torn down in Korea.
The lesson for other governments should be abundantly clear. In fact, it’s one that you can readily glean from one of my favorite U.S. television exports, The Sopranos: If you want protection from bullying tactics, you need to join a crew.
5. INCD Responds to Korean Crisis
INCD has spearheaded a submission to the Office of the United States Trade Representative in response to its call for public comment on the decision to launch negotiation for a Free Trade Agreement with Korea.
The Brief was put forward on behalf of the INCD and Free Press (www.freepress.net), a national non-partisan U.S. organization with over 225,000 members working to increase informed media debate. The submission had the support of the Korean Coalition for Diversity in Moving Images and was endorsed by the Media Alliance of California (www.media-alliance.org) and Reclaim the Media (www.reclaimthemedia.org).
The following extract summarizes the key points in the brief, a full copy of which is on the website:
“We are writing to express our concern about recent developments connected with the launch of free trade negotiations between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea. In January 2006, Korea announced it is reducing its movie theatre screen quota system by 50 percent, effective July 2006. Within days, the office of the United States Trade Representative announced the launch of free trade talks with Korea. We believe the agreement to reduce the screen quota arrived at between the United States and Korea interferes with the democratic will of the Korean people to have their political representatives protect and promote Korean culture.
“These developments highlight the wide gulf that exists between U.S. policy and the international community. Last October, over the opposition of the United States, UNESCO adopted a new convention on cultural diversity. The convention is designed to confirm in international law that cultural goods and services are vehicles of identity, values and meaning, as well as having economic value; to recognize the link between culture and development; and to affirm the sovereign right of states to maintain, adopt and implement policies relating to arts, culture and the media.
“We urge the United States government:
To further support the campaign of the Korean film and television community to maintain the original screen quota, INCD Executive Director Garry Neil will be in Korea June 8-12 for a series of events.
6. Events and Announcements
If we have missed your organization’s event, please contact the Secretariat at incd@ccarts.ca for inclusion in the next newsletter.
The Politics of Arts & Culture: International Perspectives
Columbia University
May 23 to June 8, 2006
New York – USA
Third World Summit on the
Arts and Culture
June 14-17 2006
Newcastle Gateshead, England
22nd European Group for
Organisation Studies Colloquium
European Group for Organisation Studies
July 6-8, 2006
Bergen – Norway
32nd Annual Conference on Social Theory, Politics and the Arts
July 9-11, 2006
Vienna – Austria
Fourth International Conference on Cultural Policy Research
ICCPR
July 12-16, 2006
Vienna – Austria
http://www.iccpr2006.com
International Conference on the Arts in Society
Common Ground
August 15-18, 2006
Edinburgh – Scotland
The INCD would like to thank the Government of Canada for on-going financial support. We wish also to thank the Swedish International Development Agency, the Government of France and the Flemish community for providing important contributions to our work.