Highlights:

Vol. 1, No. 3, October 2003

The Debate Begins:
UNESCO General Conference Under Way; Italy, Philippines, Group of 77 Back Convention on Cultural Diversity; U.S. Calls Proposal ‘Bad Idea’

Italy and the Philippines were among the first countries to go on record at the UNESCO General Conference in favour of having the agency take on the development of a convention on cultural diversity.

Speaking on September 29, the opening day of the bi-annual conference, Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo stated that “we support UNESCO’s drawing up of an international instrument on cultural diversity.”

On the same day, Italy’s President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi expressed his country’s support for the convention by stating that “Italy hopes to see approved a legal instrument for cultural diversity that reflects the need of all countries to protect their historic identity.”

The 32nd General Conference is scheduled to run through to October 17. At this meeting, UNESCO’s 190 member states will decide whether to green-light a proposal that the United Nations agency undertake the development of an international convention on cultural diversity. By Saturday, October 4, more than 150 member states were to have delivered their opening plenary statements.

The proposal will be debated October 13 and 14 in the Commission IV (Culture) session, with a decision to made in plenary on October 16. While the outlook for a favourable decision is positive, it is not a certainty.

Prospects for the convention proposal were strengthened significantly when the Philippines Ambassador to UNESCO, speaking during the Executive Committee meeting held immediately prior to the General Conference, spoke on behalf of the ‘Group of 77’ developing countries to express their support for the proposal.

However, a major question mark—how the United States would choose to react to the proposal, which it is known not to favour—was resolved when an American government representative came out squarely against the convention proposal during the same session.

On September 17, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard Terrell Miller, head of his country’s observer delegation during the Executive Committee, stated bluntly that for the American delegation the proposal for a convention on cultural diversity was a ‘bad idea appropriate only if one wants to control the content or flow of cultural ideas or products.”

(Regarding the U.S. position, Paris’s Le Monde Diplomatique monthly did not fail to note the irony of this line of argument coming from a country noteworthy for its lack of openness to cultural goods and services from outside its borders--less than 2% of cultural products consumed in the United States come from foreign sources.)

Sources indicate that the United States position remained a distinct minority view heading into the General Conference, although it was lobbying many countries aggressively to build support for its stance.

However, the address delivered by Laura Bush, wife of President George Bush, on behalf of the U.S. during the opening plenary session made no reference to the issue, focusing instead on education-related issues.

The United States is returning to UNESCO after a 19-year absence and will be arriving with a financial contribution of in excess of $120 million for the years 2004-2005 ‹equal to 22 per cent of the agency¹s budget.

As this issue of Coalition Currents went to publication, it was unclear if the U.S. opposition to the convention meant that a vote on the proposal—rather than a consensus decision to move ahead—is inevitable. The likelyhood of a vote has without question increased, however.

The United States is returning to UNESCO after a 19-year absence and will be arriving with a financial contribution of in excess of $120 million for the years 2004-2005 —equal to 22 per cent of the agency’s budget.

In such a scenario, it becomes critical that the resolution to proceed with the convention carry with the strongest possible majority. This will be essential to ensure that UNESCO’s Director General is given an emphatic mandate to proceed with development of a true, legally-binding convention on cultural diversity, and to avoid its been fatally diluted or delayed.

For this reason, this remains a timely moment for professional organizations from the cultural sector to write their country’s ambassador to UNESCO as well as their ministers responsible for foreign affairs and for culture urging them to give their country’s support for the convention proposal.

With the Commission IV debate set to begin October 13, and the plenary decision to be made on October 16, the time to send such a letter is now. A sample letter is attached.

• Nemesio Juarez, President of the Argentinian Film Directors’ Association and an Executive Member of the Forum for the Defense of Cultural Industries (The Argentine Coalition) discussed the essential way in which culture is different from other goods and services and should therefore not fall in the sphere of international trade agreements.
  
• Gi Hwan Yang, General Director of Korea’s Coalition for Cultural Diversity (KCCD) explained how strong domestic production capacity and efficient distribution systems within individual countries are essential pre-conditions for a true cultural diversity making possible a balanced exchange of cultural goods and services at the international level.
  
• Ndiawar Mboup, General Secretary of the Coalition for Cultural Diversity (Senegal) spoke of the importance of supporting developing and least-developed countries in their efforts to participate fully in this global cultural exchange by helping them to build domestic production and distribution capacity and policies that promote this.
  
• Australian screenwriter Ian David of the Australian Coalition for Cultural Diversity discussed pressures arising from trade negotiations on countries to make liberalization commitments in the cultural sector, with the resulting need for a counterweight to trade rules that would make it possible to establish a cultural standard for assessing policies designed to promote cultural diversity.
  
• Paulo Slachevsky, a Chilean book publisher and President of the Chilean Coalition for Cultural Diversity spoke of the need to reaffirm and legally enshrine the fundamental right of countries to maintain and develop policies intended to preserve and promote cultural diversity, and establish a frame of reference concerning questions of cultural diversity for governments and inter-governmental organizations.

Cultural Professional Organizations in Senegal
Latest to Establish Coalition for Cultural Diversity

More than twenty organizations representing cultural professionals in Senegal have joined together to form the newest coalition for cultural diversity.

The Coalition for Cultural Diversity (Senegal) was established in May in the wake of the Second International Meeting of Cultural Professional Organizations held in Paris February 2-4, 2003. It was formally established at a meeting following the first-ever meeting of ministers of culture from Asia, the Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP) held in Dakar June 20.

In September, the coalition’s President Nicolas Sawalo Cissé and its General Secretary Ndiawar Mboup travelled to Paris to attend in the second meeting of the International Liaison Committee of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity (ILC), and to help present a special seminar in favour of the proposed convention on cultural diversity, which was held at UNESCO headquarters on September 12.

Chilean publisher Paulo Slachevsky was the official spokesperson from the cultural sector for the first-ever formal consultation with civil society regarding the treatment of cultural industries in the context of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations.

The roundtable was held September 23 in Santiago, Chile. Slachevsky’s presentation urged countries to refrain from liberalization commitments that could affect culture in the FTAA talks and support the process to develop an international convention on cultural diversity through UNESCO.

Slachevsky was joined by Robert Pilon, Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Cultural Diversity (Canada), who made an intervention in support of his presentation.

The roundtable on culture was part of a broader consultation on services in general. Approximately 200 people attended the session, including trade officials from 20 of the 34 States participating in the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations, as well as numerous Chilean non-governmental organizations.

Few non-Chilean NGOs were present for the session. Aside from the Coalition, the only other organizations attending were the Motion Picture Association and AOL Time-Warner. In his presentation, the MPA representative took up arguments identical to those advanced by U.S. government representatives at UNESCO, opposing the proposed convention on cultural diversity on the grounds that would risk limiting the circulation of cultural goods and services rather than promoting their circulation, and arguing that there was more than enough flexibility within the WTO framework to enable countries to protect and promote their cultures.

The consultation was held in preparation for the FTAA ministerial meeting scheduled for November 20-21 in Miami.

Declaration on Cultural Diversity Issued at Cancun

Against a backdrop of talks stalemated on the key issue of subsidies for agriculture during the September 10-14 WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, the German Public Broadcaster ARD organized a September 12 forum on the theme of cultural diversity. ARD organized the conference in cooperation with the German Culture Council, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the INCD.

At the conclusion of the forum, the participants issued the Cancun Declaration on Cultural Diversity calling upon WTO members “to take all necessary steps in ongoing GATS negotiations and in any negotiations that might commence about investment, competition policy or government procurement to ensure that cultural policies aimed at preserving and fostering cultural diversity are neither compromised nor weakened as a consequence of the application of international trade rules.”