Globalization, Culture, and Development

The UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity

Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Pyykkönen, J. Singh, Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Pyykkönen, J. Singh, Christiaan De Beukelaer, Christiaan De Beukelaer, M. Pyykkönen, J. Singh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349679607, 9781137397621
• eBook ISBN: 9781137397638
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Biological Sciences

This edited collection outlines the accomplishments, shortcomings, and future policy prospects of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, arguing that the Convention is not broad enough to confront the challenges concerning human rights, sustainability, and cultural diversity as a whole.

Part I

Culture

1

Confusing Culture, Polysemous Diversity: “Culture” and “Cultural Diversity” in and after the Convention

Yudhishthir Raj Isar and Miikka Pyykkönen

Introduction

Like all norm-setting instruments elaborated by international organizations, UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005a) is based upon concepts that are well-established keywords in the contemporary zeitgeist. However, this international treaty is an intriguing instance not only of how one of those concepts – cultural diversity – has been given a special meaning by an international organization, but also of how different stakeholders, be they governments or non-state actors, greatly stretch the envelope of meanings they in turn assign to it. By yoking, in fact subsuming, cultural diversity to the notion of “cultural expressions”, the drafters of the 2005 Convention sought to impose their selected special meaning in international public discourse. Yet they also felt the need to ensure, discursively, that the language of the Convention provided space for the several other, more common, understandings of the term. This assemblage of meanings includes several strands of the broad “anthropological” idea of cultural diversity, aesthetic readings of it as well as “cultural and creative industries” understandings. This is the principal cause of the semantic confusion that surrounds the 2005 Convention.

Furthermore, as is the case with most intergovernmentally adopted normative texts, the concepts used in the Convention and/or the relationships between them are polysemous and leave room for multiple interpretations. This is not accidental. As argued in more detail by Saouma and Isar (Chapter 4), such treaties are the outcome of often laborious negotiations among member states, whose representatives bring to the table the meanings of terms used or given special ideological resonance in their own national settings (as well as the different interests these meanings represent). The solution generally adopted by the international organization secretariat officials who actually draft the texts is to take on board as many meanings and interests as is grammatically possible so as to arrive at a sort of international common denominator. Often, these manoeuvres stretch the grammar, not just the patience of the reader. It is illusory to even imagine that an intergovernmental organization would be capable of hewing to, or choose to enunciate, unitary understandings of concepts.

Academic analysts often miss this intrinsic feature of the normative texts elaborated by international organizations. Scholars themselves tend to work with unitary understandings, often even quarrelling among themselves over whose is “right”. Thus they often make the mistake of judging intergovernmental organization texts as if they possessed the conceptual coherence of academic writing. In the case of the 2005 Convention, since civil society activists were also involved in the drafting, an even broader set of actors has had a stake in the terms.

This polysemous quality results in a certain amount of vagueness and feeds ambiguous or overlapping implementation practices. In some cases, these practices even contradict each other. Thus, some use the Convention and its terminological toolkit exclusively in relation to the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods and services, while other actors deploy it to eke out spaces for cultural difference per se, or for free expression or new forms of it. In other words, the conceptual blur has eminently practical and actor-position implications.

The concepts we explore in this chapter, both individually and in their intrications, are “culture” and “cultural diversity”. First we examine the ways in which “culture” has been conceptualized over the years by UNESCO and in the 2005 Convention itself. We focus on the ways in which it is being interpreted or reconstructed in the implementation of the Convention, in different contexts, and by different social or cultural actors. After describing and explaining the diversity of the conceptualizations and significations, we reflect upon their real and possible consequences.

We ourselves have not sought to work with any fixed understanding of either “culture” or “cultural diversity”; instead our purpose is to analyse the emergence and nature of the conceptual variations. From this position, we have set ourselves a deconstructive objective, that of uncovering the contextual nature of the concepts in their practical and teleological use. We should be aware of what kind of “culture” is being evoked in different discursive and practical contexts. The same applies to “cultural diversity”: it is diversity of the arts, of class-based understandings or differences that stem from pluri-ethnic conditions? In our conclusions we shall indicate why we consider such distinctions to be so important. For the purposes of this deconstructionist approach we propose five intersecting categories of contexts or foci – economic, artistic, participation, heritage, and multicultural – in and through which the 2005 Convention is implemented, and, hence, can – and should – be taken as the analytical framing.

“Culture” and “cultural diversity” in UNESCO usage

Culture

Culture is the “C” in the acronym UNESCO, whose constitution, adopted in November 1945, opens with a sentence of great rhetorical resonance: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” The 1945 Constitution went on to state a commitment to, inter alia, “the wide diffusion of culture”, “the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind”, “the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth”, and “the free exchange of ideas and knowledge [ … ] for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives”.

The 1945 Constitution also established that it was UNESCO’s mission to “maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge by assuring the conservation and protection of the world’s inheritance of books, works of art and monuments of history and science” and “by encouraging co-operation among the nations in all branches of intellectual activity” (UNESCO, 1945).

This mission was based on a kind of “high arts understanding” of culture, in other words the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity and heritage (Williams, 1985). This understanding was the reigning conception of that epoch and of the elites among the core group of founding nations, the Western “Allies”. It was much later, in the 1960s, the decade of decolonization, that UNESCO began the shift towards the “ways of life” understanding of culture. This shift was a worldwide trend that UNESCO followed rather than led, yet the organization played a key role in making it “stick” internationally. This shift meant envisioning the cultural principally within a paradigm of representation, as a key marker in the politics of difference and recognition, rather than within a paradigm of aesthetics or history.

The shift also involved an awareness that the concept of “development” used by UNESCO at that point needed to be revisited as a plural project, parsed in terms not just of the abstract universal idea of “culture” or “western model of development” but also and above all in terms of distinct ways of life, each with its own distinctive developmental path (Maheu, 1973). This meant that the reigning gross national product (GNP), commodity-centred, and linear development paradigm of the period had to be contested. This contestatory stance was expressed at UNESCO by the notion of the “cultural dimension of development” introduced in the mid-1970s, as UNESCO mounted a series of intergovernmental conferences on cultural policies in different world regions. No single, specific definition was ever actually provided, but language such as the following put across what was meant: “balanced development can only be ensured by making cultural factors an integral part of the strategies designed to achieve it; consequently, these strategies should always be devised in the light of the historical, social and cultural contexts of each society” (UNESCO, 1982a).

This claim for voice and recognition expressed by, from, and for the non-Western world, was largely the result of political emancipation and new nationhood, which led many “peoples” to challenge the frame of reference in which a single system of values alone generated rules assumed to be universal. It was also determined by other coterminous attitudes, tendencies, and postures: burgeoning culturalist claims; the upsurge against the economistic dogmas of industrial society; the revolt against the priesthood of technical expertise and the world view of mainstream economics; the positions of “Third World” ideology, driven as much by the neo-utopian imaginings of Westerners as by the nativist affirmations of the formerly exploited and oppressed. And so, as underlined by Marshall Sahlins (1994), peoples and communities across the world found themselves replicating the process that in Europe first brought the culture concept itself into being, as the German bourgeoisie affirmed the notion of Kultur against the French Enlightenment concept of civilization, with Herder among others opposing ways of life to stages of development and a social mind to natural reason. On the one hand these new “non-Western” demands increased the polysemy of the meanings of “culture”, but, on the other hand, they also spread and globalized the Western liberalist/Hegelian understandings of “culture”.

A combination of usages prevails today. “Culture” for UNESCO is both “arts and heritage” and “ways of life”. The two understandings are also often conflated, both in UNESCO and in general usage. Hence when fostering the first is advocated as an imperative, the advocacy is not deployed for the sake of the arts and heritage themselves, but because they embody and/or are the vectors for the values and symbols of “ways of life” that risk being eliminated by the pressures of globalization. This often leads to the kind of confusion that Sahlins warned about: “If ‘culture’ is the total and distinctive way of life of a people or society it is meaningless to talk of ‘the relation between culture and the economy’, for example, since the economy is part of a people’s culture” (cited in WCCD, 1996, p. 21). UNESCO has undoubtedly contributed to this confusion, notably through the famous Mexico City definition of 1982 and by routinely deploying both the narrow and the expansive meanings simultaneously.¹ Yet all governmental discourses tend to do the same: while almost all governments claim, rhetorically, to interpret culture in the vexingly expansive, so-called “anthropological” sense, none of their ministries or departments of culture deal with anything but a particular kind of arts and heritage.

The drafters of the 2005 Convention built upon these open-ended conceptual foundations. There is no definition of culture in the Convention, but given its focus on cultural goods and services, the text cannot but privilege the arts and artistic expressions that are at the heart of the cultural and creative industries sector, as well as that sector itself. Yet, unsurprisingly, the Convention also links culture to international and national development policies and cooperation, poverty reduction, economic growth, social cohesion, traditional expressions of minorities and indigenous peoples, interaction, and creativity. It also sees culture as an instrumentality in achieving certain political, social, and economic goals, while cultural expressions are important both for their market value and as adjuncts to better governance systems (Pyykkönen, 2012; Singh, 2011b, pp. 100–107).

Cultural diversity

We focus here on the term “cultural diversity” as it figures in the text of the 2005 Convention. We remind the reader at the outset that the treaty was not designed primarily to cover cultural diversity per se, understood as cultural differences between human groups. Its purpose was not to support the “right to be different” (or “right to be treated the same” regardless of the differences) of many different categories of individuals and/or groups placed in some way outside dominant social and cultural norms (e.g. disabled people, religious groups, gays and lesbians, ethnic groups, women, as well as the poor and the elderly). Nor did its drafters want it to focus upon ethnic differences and the affirmations of ethnic minorities in the face of dominant majorities and/or the homogenizing tendencies of “national” cultures. Language in the “Preamble” refers to all these contemporary pieties, but the operative articles of the Convention certainly do not.

These articles concern the diversity of “those expressions that result from the creativity of individuals, groups and societies, and that have cultural content”. The Convention’s core object is at once the products of the cultural and creative industries and the right of sovereign states to promote and protect them. “Cultural activities, goods and services”, as stated in the Convention:

refers to those activities, goods and services, which at the time they are considered as a specific attribute, use or purpose, embody or convey cultural expressions, irrespective of the commercial value they may have. Cultural activity may be an end in itself, or it may contribute to the production of cultural goods and services.

(Article 4)

The principal intent of the Convention is stated in Article 6, which affirms that “within the framework of its cultural policies and measures as defined in Article 4.6 and taking into account its own particular circumstances and needs, each Party may adopt measures aimed at protecting and promoting the diversity of cultural expressions within its territory”. An unequivocal illustrative list of measures follows.

As mentioned already, although the main focus of the 2005 Convention is clearly on the diversity of cultural expressions in the cultural and creative industry format, in the “Preamble”, as well as in the language of its “Objectives and Guiding Principles”, the Convention embraces all the differing diversities imaginable. These rhetorical segments of the text are in fact based on the language of UNESCO’s earlier Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001), which was designed to cover all the possible facets of cultural diversity, and thereby not only transform the notion from an observed human reality into a normative metanarrative, but also and above all validate “cultural exception” thinking (Isar, 2006). The broad scope of the 2001 Universal Declaration provided solid ground for taking the next step, the real purpose, which was to draft an international treaty pertaining to the rights and responsibilities of national governments as regards the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods and services. The 2005 Convention actually echoes the earlier broader reading by making the following grand claims for “cultural diversity” tout court, which:

forms a common heritage of humanity and should be cherished and preserved for the benefit of all. [ … ] creates a rich and varied world, which increases the range of choices and nurtures human capacities and values, and therefore is a mainspring for sustainable development for communities, peoples and nations.

(UNESCO, 2005a)

In Article 4, “Definitions”, however, the Convention text gets to the heart of the matter as far as its drafters were concerned:

Cultural diversity is manifested not only through the varied ways in which the cultural heritage of humanity is expressed, augmented and transmitted through the variety of cultural expressions, but through diverse modes of artistic creation, production, dissemination, distribution and enjoyment, whatever the means and technologies used.

The terms creation, production, dissemination, and distribution all reveal the central focus on cultural products (activities, services, and goods), in other words on commodified forms of culture. That this would turn out to be the case was obvious from the start, since the Convention was designed to be a counterforce to the free trade rules pertaining to commodity trade (as well as of other forms to be sure) of which the World Trade Organization is guardian and guarantor. Although it is a kind of “counter-hegemonic instrument”, the 2005 Convention text ends up following the same rationalities, operational logic, lexicon, and even practices as its “enemies”, because it has to operate with and within the same discourse, concepts, and logic of action – in this case the logic of the market economy (Pyykkönen, 2012, p. 547; Singh, 2011b, p. 107).

This takes place especially in connection with “Cooperation for development”. Thus Article 14 states that: “Parties shall endeavour to support cooperation for sustainable development and poverty reduction, especially in relation to the specific needs of developing countries, in order to foster the emergence of a dynamic cultural sector.” The means it identifies with a view to doing so include: (a) the strengthening of the cultural industries in developing countries (for which a variety of market-related measures are envisaged); (b) capacity-building; (c) technology transfer; and (d) financial support (see also De Beukelaer and Freitas, Chapter 13).

Multiple dimensions, multiple challenges

The different understandings of cultural diversity that run through the 2005 Convention emerge from multiple reference points without any clear hierarchy or even relation between them. The text refers to (i) the diversity of collective, ethnicity-linked, or nationality-specific cultural traditions; (ii) the diversity of arts (styles, genres, modes, sectors, and so on); (iii) the diversity of artistic and cultural expressions as products, that is, the diversity of markets of immaterial and material cultural expressions. This breakdown does not make for clarity, particularly since these different dimensions are not self-evidently compatible. Indeed, they can even contradict each other: claims for recognition on the part of national or ethnic entities rarely factor in any kind of internal diversity, stemming sometimes from arts and markets, but often from subcultures, minority cultures, social classifications, identities, and so on. In other words, the Convention’s “diversity” does not mesh in – at least not very clearly – with the hybrid nature of all cultural entities, things, and phenomena.

This reading of diversity runs the risk of being a static idea, not rooted in the ongoing production of diversity as a process of change but as a conservationist notion of preserving what has already been created, a paradox when the goal is to foster the dynamism of contemporary cultural production rather than play a preservationist heritage-oriented role. This is partly because the concept is built upon unquestioned, undeconstructed discourses of nationhood. Precisely because its object is cultural diversity among nations rather than within them, it does not hasten the adoption of any kind of truly cosmopolitan agenda in which cultures are no longer seen as fixed, given,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction: UNESCO’s “Diversity Convention” – Ten Years on
• Part I: Culture
• Part II: Diversity
• Part III: Convention
• Part IV: Looking Ahead
• Conclusions: Theories, Methods, and Evidence
• Appendix: The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions
• References
• Index