The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy

Victoria Durrer, Toby Miller, Dave O'Brien, Victoria Durrer, Toby Miller, Dave O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138857827
• eBook ISBN: 9781317512882
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Cultural policy intersects with political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics at all levels of society, placing high and often contradictory expectations on the capabilities and capacities of the media, the fine, performing, and folk arts, and cultural heritage. These expectations are articulated, mobilised and contested at – and across – a global scale. As a result, the study of cultural policy has firmly established itself as a field that cuts across a range of academic disciplines, including sociology, cultural and media studies, economics, anthropology, area studies, languages, geography, and law. This Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy sets out to broaden the field's consideration to recognise the necessity for international and global perspectives.

The book explores how cultural policy has become a global phenomenon. It brings together a diverse range of researchers whose work reveals how cultural policy expresses and realises common global concerns, dominant narratives, and geopolitical economic and social inequalities. The sections of the book address cultural policy's relation to core academic disciplines and core questions, of regulations, rights, development, practice, and global issues.

With a cross-section of country-by-country case studies, this comprehensive volume is a map for academics and students seeking to become more globally orientated cultural policy scholars.

1 Towards global cultural policy studies

Victoria Durrer, Toby Miller and Dave O’Brien

• Bulgarian: Единство в многообразието
• Croatian: Ujedinjeni u različitosti
• Czech: Jednotná v rozmanitosti
• Danish: Forenet i mangfoldighed
• Dutch: In verscheidenheid verenigd
• English: United in Diversity
• Estonian: Ühinenud mitmekesisuses
• Finnish: Moninaisuudessaan yhtenäinen
• French: Unie dans la diversité
• German: In Vielfalt geeint
• Greek: Ενωμένοι στην πολυμορφία
• Hungarian: Egység a sokféleségben
• Irish: Aontaithe san éagsúlacht
• Italian: Uniti nella diversità
• Latvian: Vienoti daudzveidībā
• Lithuanian: Suvienijusi įvairovę
• Maltese: Magħquda fid-diversità
• Polish: Zjednoczeni w różnorodności
• Portuguese: Unidade na diversidade
• Romanian: Unitate în diversitate
• Slovak: Zjednotení v rozmanitosti
• Slovene: Združeni v različnosti
• Spanish: Unida en la diversidad
• Swedish: Förenade i mångfalden

European Union Motto, adopted 2000—https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/motto_en

For 40 years cultural policy has had close connections with the complex interaction of political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics at all levels of society. This relationship has placed high and, at times, contradictory expectations on the capabilities and capacities of the media, the fine, performing, and folk arts, and on cultural heritage.

These expectations are well illustrated by the European Union’s motto, quoted above in its official languages. ‘United in Diversity’ represents the ways in which culture is assigned the role of fostering cooperation whilst symbolising and celebrating individuality and difference. However, this motto, like much of culture and cultural policy, has to do with power, distinction, and protectionism as well as common citizenship, alliances, and bonds. This is due to the global context confronting cultural policies: regional unions, nation-states, and citizens. Consideration, then, of a global sense of cultural policy has much potential to illuminate the social and political world, and has been our goal with this Handbook.

The Handbook of Global Cultural Policy sets out to explore numerous traditions and histories of culture, policy, politics, and globalization, along with their relationship to one another. This introduction sets out our position in relation to the endeavour to articulate a ‘global’ cultural policy. We begin by considering the core terms ‘culture,’ ‘policy,’ and ‘globalization,’ giving them some history, theory, and contour. We then reflect on the hybrid that is cultural policy studies. The introduction subsequently turns to an explication of the chapters that make up this collection and the hopes we have for fostering a wider, more global conversation on cultural policy.

Culture

Culture has a weird and wired heritage. It derives from the Latin colere, which describes subsistence and slave agriculture. Under capitalism, this understanding of culture bifurcated, as farming and forms of taste took different directions (Adorno 2009: 146; Benhabib 2002: 2). With the spread of literacy and printing, customs gave way to the written word, and cultural texts became important guarantors of authority. Anxieties about cultural imperialism also appeared, via debates over Western domination that occupied intellectuals, politicians, and moral guardians, particularly in what is often referred to as ‘the Muslim world’ (Mowlana 2000; Briggs and Burke 2003; Kraidy 2010).

The work of Immanuel Kant explains and indexes these changes. He argued that culture ensured ‘conformity to laws without the law’ and that aesthetics could generate ‘morally practical precepts,’ schooling people to transcend particular interests via the development of a ‘public sense, i.e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation … to weight its judgement with the collective reason of mankind’ (1987; also see Hunter 2008). Kant envisaged an ‘emergence from … self-incurred immaturity,’ independent of religion, government, and commerce (1991: 54).

In other words, if readers could interpret art, literature, and drama in logical, emotional, and social ways—and comprehend the difference between them—they could be relied upon to govern themselves. Hence Kant’s renowned blend of anthropology and aesthetics. This blend has coloured the social-science and humanities dualities of understanding culture: simultaneously and coevally as custom and text, population and interpretation, number and noumen, organization and language, laboratory and library.

By the time of an emergent consumer society, culture became valuable as a means of binding together the social order through custom and keeping people happy through entertainment. However, it was not read or framed as being significant economically, at least not as directly as it is today. Positive discourses about culture saw it elevating people above ordinary life, transcending body, time, and place, or settling us into society through the wellsprings of community, as part of daily existence (Frith 1991).

A further transformation has occurred in the past three decades: from social cohesion to economic contribution. These days, it is close to the heart of that economy, thanks to the replicable and hence marketable nature of culture via analogue and then digital techniques of capture and transmission. Nations recognize that a prosperous economic future lies in selling pleasure and ideology rather than agriculture and manufacturing—seeking revenue from innovation and intellectual property, not minerals or masses. This is a moment at which the Global North uses culture as a selling point for deindustrialized societies, and the Global South does so for never-industrialized ones. Here, governmental and corporate manoeuvres alike have internationalized the sale of culture as part of the growing trend towards globalization, as we explain below.

Thus, culture is now more than textual signs or everyday practices, more than objects of subcultural appropriation and re-signification. It offers important resources to markets and nations. Crucial to advanced and developing economies alike, culture can also provide the legitimizing ground on which particular groups claim resources and seek inclusion in national and international narratives (see Yúdice 2002 on Latin America; Kraidy 2010; Pahwa and Winegar 2012 on the Arab world; Yang 2009 on China). This struggle over legitimising ground and economic value, accelerated by technological change, is a crucial animating force for policy associated with culture.

Policy

Policy refers to a regularized set of actions based on overarching principles. All entities, not just governments, make policies, in the sense of regularized plans of actions and norms that they follow. The authority of a policy is founded in transparent rationality rather than in ancestral tradition or individual charisma (Weber 1978). Yet, how culture is articulated and operationalised within policy is historically loaded with socio-political and economic meanings, beliefs, traditions, and values that find both similarity and difference when considered on a global scale. This section thus explores the meaning of cultural ‘policy’ in this wider context.

Because culture’s organic law and lore, and their textual manifestations, represent each ‘epoch’s consciousness of itself’ (Althusser 1969: 108), audiences, artists, cultural producers, governments, and corporations make extraordinary investments in cultural policy. Across the globe, states function through two modes of control: an indirect one, which operates through regulation, taxation, and incentives, particularly of business and markets; and more formal, direct cultural production.

Cultural policy therefore applies to both private and public concerns. Although a strict private-public distinction may be problematic, policies are developed and implemented by businesses as often—if less publicly—as by governments. The same applies to the third sector. Thus, culture lives a hybrid life as a creature of the state, commerce, and civil society. In cultural policy scholarship, this has manifested itself as an implicit/explicit division in characterising cultural policy (Ahearne 2009).

Because culture increasingly transcends both state boundaries and commercial rents, it is often managed by international organizations. This phenomenon is neither new nor entirely dissociated from national citizenship. Away from the utopic hopes of world government on a grand scale, international organizations have been working for a long time, sometimes quietly and sometimes noisily, to manage trans-territorial, cultural, and culturally related, issues from postage to religion to sports. Their business is sometimes conducted at the state level, sometimes through civil society, and sometimes both. This configuration is a core concern for many authors in the collection.

Cultural policy and ‘the global’

Cultural policies have informed imperial rapaciousness for a very long time. Spain’s conquista de América, Portugal’s missão civilizadora, and France and Britain’s mission civilisatrice created global anxieties about foreign cultural domination. That has never subsided, and it has been exacerbated by the entertainment dominance of the US over the last century, the co-option of culture for ‘soft power’ purposes within foreign relations (Nye 2002), and the continued hegemony of post-colonial powers in their former possessions (Mowlana 2000).

Conversely, and indeed for many authors in our collection, culture still holds the promise of transformation for citizens, places, nations, and the world. That promise has been an ongoing feature of the policy discourse on culture—that what may appear to be grounded in particular spaces can transcend them and make for universal understanding, as per Kant’s notion of shared critical principles. Despite the equal ability to do the exact opposite, cultural objects, symbols, and processes have thus been imbued with faith that they may foster greater equality on a global scale.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, this tension found expression in public-policy debates through such sources as the Non-Aligned Movement and then the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Global South (known then as the Group of 77, after the number of post-colonial states at the time) lobbied for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to match the wider search for a New International Economic Order. UNESCO set up an International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems to investigate North-South flows and power (1981). It reported on the need for equal distribution of the electronic spectrum, reduced postal rates for international texts, protection against satellites crossing borders, and media systems that would serve social justice rather than capitalist commerce (Mattelart and Mattelart 1998: 94–97). However, UNESCO soon assumed a more problematic status, confronted with US power, Cold-War stereotypes of freedom, and the contradictions of balancing a universalist idea of cultural pluralism with the Organization’s basis in nation-states.

The other site for cultural policy and ‘the global’ has been trade. There has been a remarkable evolution of global cultural trade since the Second World War. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization, sought to reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers to free trade. This was in the context of differing versions of culture, whether as just one more set of tradable commodities or a sui generis human activity. This latter narrative was associated with a defence of public broadcasting and national cinemas to express national identity. This position has continued even in the context of laissez-faire evangelism, because sovereign-states continue to include culture as a vital part of belonging, for example, relating citizenship to language skills, knowledge of culture and history, or the embrace of a particular national way of life.

This moment of cultural policy as national identity gestures towards the question of citizenship in a globalised world. The idea of loyalties split through hybrid cultural identifications has long been difficult for citizenship theory and practice, which tends to require unity rather than diversity. Multiple citizenships institutionalize split subjectivity. The impact goes further than querying voting, military service, and diplomatic assistance. It gets to the heart of an affective relation to the sovereign-state and provides a clue to the fragility of citizenship.

Liberal philosophy long held that the integration of migrants would follow from the acquisition of citizenship and a non-discriminatory, culture-blind application of the law, once successive generations mastered the dominant language and entered the labour market as equals with the majority. But, the patent failure to achieve this outcome has seen governments recognizing cultural difference, intervening to counter discrimination in the private sector, and imposing quotas for minority hiring. Migration, and more substantively the challenges of the refugee crisis, shows the limits of cultural policy, citizenship, and globalization.

Cultural policy studies

So how can this weird, wired world be understood? How might we theorise and analyse global cultural policy, if it is both the source of exploitation and the promise of liberation? Cultural policy studies had a marginal, if safe, life within the arts management side of political science, represented by the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society and an associated annual conference, and in economics, as per the Association for Cultural Economics (now known as ‘International’) and its Journal of Cultural Economics. Then, cultural policy gained status within the humanities. This was a natural, if problematic, location, thanks to a tendency within the hitherto anti-statist, social-movement-oriented field of cultural studies.

Stuart Cunningham suggested 25 years ago that:

Many people trained in cultural studies would see their primary role as being critical of the dominant political, economic and social order. When cultural theorists do turn to questions of policy, our command metaphors of resistance and opposition predispose us to view the policy making process as inevitably compromised, incomplete and inadequate, peopled with those inexpert and ungrounded in theory and history or those wielding gross forms of political power for short-term ends.

(1992: 9)

He called for cultural studies to displace its ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ with a ‘reformist vocation’ that would draw energy and direction from ‘a social democratic view of citizenship and the trainings necessary to activate and motivate it’ (1992: 11). This engagement with policy could avoid a politics of the status quo because cultural studies’ ongoing concern with power would ground it in radicalism. Angela McRobbie responded that cultural policy might offer a ‘missing agenda’ for cultural studies, a pathway to change (1996: 335), and Jim McGuigan made the case for a counter-public sphere and citizenship rights as core values (2004: 21).

This trend within cultural studies, seeking to propel the field into cultural policy, took off at various sites. In late-1980s Australia, it involved both locals and scholars who had departed Thatcher’s Britain.¹ In Latin America, similar engagements materialized in the work of Néstor García Canclini (2004) along with many others.² In Britain, cognate practice was underway at the Greater London Council (Lewis 1991). In Canada, policy was never far from the concerns of people who are uniquely placed to value and criticize cultural imperialism and its nationalistic counters and who inherit a rich blend of economic and textual analysis.³ Numerous prominent figures in US cultural studies were similarly dubious about safely side-lined critique. They were either supportive of critical developments or autonomously involved in equivalent tendencies and operated across anthropology, law, sociology, education, political science, feminism, and literary, area, and communication studies.⁴

Cultural policy studies gave rise to the more problematic creative-industries discourse, which differed radically from cultural studies’ initial theorisation of policy. This discourse offered those who had been involved in cultural policy a place at the central table of economic policy-making. Although most governments regarded the arts as outside inner-cabinet discussions and quite marginal, communications had always been central. This is due to the vast amounts of money involved in infrastructure and the gravitas of those populating it (engineers versus the sociologists and literary critics of cultural policy). Creative industries magically blended these elements and appeared to guarantee a place at the top table. With the business nous of its intellectual founder, Richard Florida, and the imperialis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Routledge International Handbook Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Towards global cultural policy studies
• PART I Situating cultural policy
• PART II Regulating cultural policy
• PART III Rights and cultural policy
• PART IV Practice and cultural policy
• PART V Global issues, regional cultural policy
• PART VI Development and cultural policy
• PART VII The nation state and cultural policy
• PART VIII Conclusions
• Index