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Preserving the vibrancy of cultures

The adoption of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions by UNESCO last month is unlikely to keep the communication and content industry out of global trade negotiations. A sequel to the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, the Convention was backed by 147 states and opposed by the United States and Israel. Its main premise is that the defence of a plurality of ways of life is an ethical imperative on states, so long as social practices that violate human rights are not countenanced in the name of preserving diversity. It calls upon states to view cultural expressions, as distinct from ordinary merchandise, as embodiments of myriad ways of life and identity of communities. This is in some ways a continuation of policies pursued in many countries that allow a guaranteed minimum duration of screening time for domestic films. The consensus — known as the cultural exception — reached in the 1994 Uruguay Round of trade talks enables countries to exclude imports of audio-visual products. But France and Canada, leading sponsors of the Convention, have long sought to remove cultural services and products from the remit of the World Trade Organisation in view of the growing pressure to liberalise global trade in services.

This legally non-binding Convention cannot however override the obligations that countries undertake in bilateral and multilateral agreements. The U.S. — the biggest exporter of audio-visual products — which once advocated the need to regulate trade in creative works (in the 1950 Florence Agreement) has opposed the recent treaty fearing that the cultural exception clause could undercut revenues amounting to billions of dollars annually. The importance of special guarantees to protect marginalised cultures can hardly be overstated, both in terms of their historical value and the need to contain the homogenisation of tastes and lifestyles in a rapidly globalising environment. The emphasis on promotion and protection of domestic cultural products should be considered a programme of positive discrimination in the international sphere. The differences over promotional and restrictive measures in the sphere of cultural products and services should not be interpreted as reflecting a clash of cultures but treated as one that results from the asymmetry of technological and commercial power among nation states.

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