INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL AFFAIRS:
A 14 Country Survey

Harry Hillman Chartrand ^© 
Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society 
Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 1992

Alas there has been no serious effort to sponsor research in the field of cultural relations. Because governments and other major bodies concerned with funding cannot see any obvious application or 'pay-offs' for such investigations, they simply have not been carried out.
J.M. Mitchell, International Cultural Relations,1986, p. x.

Preamble

The times, they are a changing. The bipolar world of East and West is fading into history. The North-South split is becoming blurred on the eve of Canada-Mexico-U.S. free trade and as 'developing' countries such as Brazil, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand emerge as industrialized nations. A common biosphere and its thinning ozone layer is now visible from space becoming a shared perceived problem of all humanity.

In this vortex of change, it is not only geopolitics, economics and ecology that have acquired a new configuration. Cultural affairs are being transformed from an internal domestic concern into an external security question involving national identity, sovereignty and survival; in foreign policy, they are becoming a preferred instrument of international relations; and in economics, the United Nations has declared culture critical to economic development with its call for: The Decade of Cultural Development: 1986-1996.

Examples of the increasing importance of cultural affairs abound. 'Ping-pong' diplomacy plays a growing role in establishing relations between formerly hostile nations such as the United States of America and the People's Republic of China; the Canada Cup serves as a symbol of 'friendly' competition between the Soviet Union and Canada. Hollywood and 'rock and roll' eroded the Berlin Wall as a global youth culture spread in spite of parental protest around the world. Young people dance to the same rhythms in Accra, Buenos Aires, Chicoutimi, Cincinnati, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney and Yokohama. The second largest net export of the United States, after defense products, is entertainment programming (The Economist, 1989) while, at the same time, the internationalization of American cultural enterprise continues.

IS CULTURE DIFFERENT?

A fundamental characteristic of cultural goods and services is that they are essentially carriers of 'values' rather than utilitarian function like a coffee pot, automobile or bank account. The importance of 'values' is apparent in the ongoing debate about 'cultural sovereignty'. One side argues that national and regional identity is based upon a distinct set of values embodied in cultural goods and services. Even in the United States, some are now raising the argument as American cultural enterprise is increasingly acquired by foreign interests. Some point to the rising tide of regionalism within formerly unified states such as the Soviet Union and Canada as evidence of the importance of cultural sovereignty. These regional cultures, sometimes called 'the little sisters' '(Vettraino-Soulard 1984), contend with a homogenizing, standardized global 'Big Brother' culture.

The other side of the debate is made by those who argue for the 'universality' of human values. This 'global village' argument contends that experiences shared on a global scale through communications media will eventually transcend differences among citizens of separate nations or regions. Some observers suggest this vision is becoming a reality and point to developments in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China as responses to values of freedom, dignity and prosperity transmitted through penetrating networks of global mass media and communications.
The vehicle for transmission of these 'global values' is the international media conglomerate with international interests in television, film, music, video and print media. The five largest firms had combined revenues of $45 billion in 1988 accounting for 18% of the total $250 billion worldwide media industry. They include: the News Corporation of America, controlled by Australian-born Rupert Murdoch; Time-Warner of the USA; Bertelsman AG of Germany; Sony Corporation of Japan; and Hachette SA of France (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1990)

A twin question arises: Can national arts industries, which compete with such multinational giants, be vehicles for conveying distinctly national traditions and cultures; or, does explicit pursuit of profit compromise their cultural products in international trade? Canada, the European Community and other nations have, in effect, argued commercial arts industries are essential elements in cultural sovereignty. The USA, on the other hand, argues pursuit of profit makes such industries subject to trade liberalization.

But if cultural goods and services are different from other commodities, do existing international treaties and trading agreements recognize this difference? Yes! First, international trade, by definition, concerns commercially traded goods and services. Given that many cultural goods and services are not commercial products, they are not subject to the terms of trade agreements. Nonprofit services as dance, orchestral music and theatre as well as cultural products such as collections of public galleries and museums are the subject of a very different type of international legal instrument - the international cultural agreement including Unesco conventions and covenants such as the Florence Agreement eliminating barriers to the flow of educational, scientific and cultural materials including books and conventions protecting national patrimony from illegal export.

In this regard, the USA has continually recognized a nation's sovereign right to control its communications networks and cultural policies. In negotiations, however, the USA has attempted to limit this cultural exemption to production of materials that reflect the specific traditions and cultures of its trading partners. It objects to creation of measures to achieve economic or industrial objectives under the pretext of protecting cultural sovereignty (Card 1987).

Second, commercial cultural goods and services such as film and television programs, recordings and books constitute what in Canada are called the 'cultural industries', in the United Kingdom the 'arts industries' and, in the United States, the 'entertainment industry'. Traditionally, economic protection and regulation of the cultural sector in many countries have not distinguished between what is cultural and what is entertainment. Rather, they have afforded protection generically on cultural grounds (Andruszkiewicz, Skok 1990).

Third, existing international trading agreements also distinguish between commercial cultural goods and services from other types of goods and services. With respect to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), there are four provisions that permit such a distinction to be made. For example, under Article XX sub (a), restrictions are permitted to protect public morals. To the degree public morals form a distinct part of national culture, then to that degree foreign cultural goods threatening public morals can be restricted. The most obvious example is Islamic societies which hold fundamentally different values from the West concerning portraying relationships between men and women. But continuing controversy in many Western nations concerning sex and violence in books, film, video and TV programming has traditionally been used to justify restrictions on cultural goods imported from more 'liberal' countries.
In the case of Article XX sub (f), exceptions to trade liberalization are allowed for the protection of artistic, historic and archaeological treasures. In principle, this provision could be extended to the cultural industries to provide protection of cultural identity. Similarly, Article 36 of the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, exempts cultural treasurers from the general prohibition on quantitative restrictions on trade. This exemption is, however, the subject of ongoing controversy within the EEC as the 'Single Market' of 1992 approaches (Chartrand 1991).

International Cultural Affairs

As a national foreign policy instrument, cultural affairs embrace academic relations including the sciences, the arts and cultural activities such as broadcasting and information services as well as recreation and sports activities. International cultural affairs can be defined as activities conducted or directed by a given nation to an audience outside its borders as well as the activities of other nations conducted or directed within a nation's borders. The United States recognizes this definition by its requirement that all motion picures paid for by a foriegn government shall be exhibited with a legally required disclaimer as foreign propaganda. Similarly, the United States Information Agency is legally prohibited from operating with the United States itself. Thus, the proposed definition of cultural affairs includes broadcasting targeted at foreign audiences, e.g Radio Free Europe. International, as well as the 'footprint' of domestic broadcasting services extending into neighbouring countries, e.g. Finnish domestic television received in the western part of the former Soviet Union.

While there is general consensus on the set of activities which make up international cultural affairs (with the exception of external broadcasting traditionally treated as a distinct activity), there is less agreement on motivations for engaging in such affairs. Motivation evolved through time. Progressive revisionism has led to three contemporary motivations: cultural diplomacy, cultural relations and cultural sales. Like most definitions in cultural matters, the categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive; they are a question of degree, not of kind..

Cultural diplomacy is essentially the business of government. It is called different names in different countries and in different periods. In the United States, it is called 'public diplomacy'; in the United Kingdom, 'alternative diplomacy'. Prior to World War II, it was known as 'propaganda'. Negative connotations lead to revisionism similar to the change, after the war, of the 'department of war' to the 'department of defense'.

Using whatever term, cultural diplomacy is an official activity intended to obtain advantage in a foreign country, often from a short-term political perspective. It seeks to impress, to present a favourable image so that diplomatic operations, as a whole, are facilitated. It has two levels of meaning. The first involves negotiation of cultural treaties, conventions, agreements and exchange programs, bilateral or multilateral, between governments to permit, facilitate or prescribe cultural exchanges. The second involves execution of such agreements and the activities flowing from them. These may be the responsibility of government or may be delegated to specialized agencies or institutions.

Cultural relations, on the other hand, are neutral and mutual in their intent and impact. Like cultural diplomacy, they employ public resources and benefit from international agreements. But the purpose of cultural relations is not one-sided advantage but mutual understanding and cooperation. Cultural relations are often carried out by 'arm's length', autonomous or independent agencies with a long-term cultural perspective, for example the British Council and the Japan Foundation.

Cultural relations, as a concept, has humanistic, altruistic roots. Based on the premise that understanding leads to tolerance and hence to peace, cultural relations requires sharing each other's culture to create mutual respect and understanding. But just as the change from department of war to department of defense cannot hide the fact that sometimes 'the best defense is an offense', the best and most subtle cultural diplomacy is often veiled as cultural relations. If an activity appears fostered by government (domestic or foreign), intellectuals and other opinion leaders often view it as propaganda rather than an altruistic effort at mutual understanding. Thus, for many years, support of the Voice of America by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States was veiled behind a cover 'foundation'.
In the last century, culture meant 'High Culture', that is the cultural forms and activities of the educated elite. Both cultural diplomacy and cultural relations tended to be exclusively concerned with prestige and influence. The idea that culture was for sale was unaccepted and unacceptable.

Today, mass or popular culture is a very big international business and forms the third leg of the cultural affairs triangle: cultural sales and services. The worldwide entertainment industry including publishing had sales of over $US 250 billion in 1986. The five largest international entertainment conglomerates control nearly 20% of world wide sales. The second largest net export of the United States, after defense products, is entertainment programming.
Beyond global commercial markets, there are three other signiifcant issues involved in cultural sales - co-production agreements, international property rights and theft, including illegal export, of movable cultural property. International co-production agreements for motion picture and television programming have become a common feature of international relations. Partially motivated by potential profits from foreign sales, such agreements also reflect the economic reality that, with the exception of the United States and India, no country has a domestic market large enough to produce world class entertainment programming. Co-production agreements provide the capital and markets necessary for many countries, even developed nations such as France and Germany, to generate production standards required by a domestic audience spoiled by world class Hollywood 'bloc busters'.

Copyright and other forms of intellectual property provide the legal foundation for the industrial organization of cultural activities. Until the current Uruguay Round of GATT, intellectual property rights were not the subject of international trade negotiations. Rather, trade in intellectual properties was subject to international conventions such as the Berne and Rome Conventions concerning copyright. These conventions require 'national treatment' but not harmonization of rights granted under different national legislation. Accordingly, if a nation chooses to provide limited protection to its own creators, then no greater protection is available to foreigners. Furthermore, a number of countries including many former Soviet Bloc countries have not signed international conventions and are not obliged to protect the rights of foreign creators. Weak domestic laws and refusal to sign international conventions has permitted widespread piracy and copyright infringement particularly in South East Asia and the Eastern Bloc.

In fact, beyond agriculture, current General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations are floundering because of disagreement over intellectual property rights. GATT discussions have run up against differing concepts of 'creator's rights' in English common law and European civil code traditions. The civil code recognizes creators have inalienable rights extending far beyond those recognized by common law copyright. These rights limit the power of corporate entities to exploit intellectual properties. The American position in GATT negotiations is that civil code rights granted to individual creators should be extended to corporate copyright holders. The Europeans disagree (Unesco 1991).

Beyond copyright piracy, theft of art works and fraud are now major international problems, reflecting, in part, their enormous increase in value. Between 1969 and 1989, the average rate of return on art as investment was significantly higher than all other forms of capital investment in the USA. Coins provided the best return and gold the worst - demonstrating the investment potential of a combination of aesthetic and scarcity value (Chartrand June 1990).
Thomas Hoving, former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now president of Hoving Associates, is on contract with the Turkish government to investigate and limit plunder of antiquities. He recently estimated that $250 to $300 million a year is plundered from Turkey because most empires of the ancient and medieval worlds were, at one time or another, resident in Turkey. He outlined the Mafia or organized crime connections in what has become the most lucrative of all international crimes. According to Hoving, ounce for ounce, art is more valuable than heroin; it yields this higher rate of return at less risk and faces significantly less punitive criminal punishments. Germany and Switzerland were identified as the 'laundry' for stolen art and plundered antiquities (Chartrand 1992).

There has been increased international effort to mitigate the problem. In the public sector, there has been a notable development with creation of national databases of stolen objects. In 1990, a UNESCO Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders was held at Havana, Cuba. A recommendation was approved to extend existing cooperation between UNESCO, INTERPOL and the International Commission on Museums (ICOM) in relation to stolen goods.

THE SURVEY

Changes in global and domestic environments made it appropriate for the Government of Canada, through the International Cultural Relations Bureau (ICRB) of the Department of External Affairs and International Trade Canada, to conduct a comparative policy assessment of different national practice and experience concerning international cultural affairs. It is with the permission of the Director General of the Bureau, Mr. Alain Dudoit, that results of the survey are reported in this article.

In the conduct of the comparative policy assessment, five steps were followed:

a) establish the context of change, global and domestic, by reference to current Government of Canada efforts and policies concerning competitiveness, the constitution and the foreign policy framework;

b) develop a survey instrument about ICR efforts by countries allied with, important or similar to Canada;

c) consult and share differing national practice and experience with foreign cultural attaches resident in Ottawa and, through them, their governments;

d) consult and share with Canadian cultural attaches resident abroad, representatives of the Canadian cultural community and ICRB HQ personnel, information about findings to date, perceived weaknesses and strengths of Canadian ICR, and to brief Canadian attaches about domestic cultural developments; and,

e) assess the changing role of business in international cultural affairs as expressed at the 1992 World Economic Forum.

Between May 1991 to January 1992, I was engaged to develop, process and report results of the survey and to construct a conceptual framework for assessing the impact of ICR on domestic and foreign policy objectives. Drawing upon the Unesco Framework for Cultural Statistics, the efforts of the European Community (Ca'Zorzi 1989) and Canadian experience (Chartrand 1988), an exploratory survey questionnaire concerning international cultural affairs was developed. Fourteen countries were requested to complete the resulting standardized questionnaire - Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Eleven agencies likely to be engaged in ICA were initially identified: Arts & Science Councils, Overseas Broadcasting Agencies, Ministries of Communication, Culture, Education, External Affairs, Heritage & Conservation, Sports & Recreation, Trade & Industry, External Cultural Relations Foundations and a catch-all category 'Other'. Seven ICA activities were identified: Academic Relations, Arts, Cultural Industries, Heritage & Conservation, Nature & Environment, Sports and 'Other'.

To make the survey manageable, only direct expenditures by public institutions, at the national level, were requested; international cultural expenditures by provinces or cities were not requested. Tax expenditures, such as tax exemption of charities engaged in international cultural affairs, were not requested, nor was private sector spending, an increasingly important component of contemporary international cultural affairs.

In spite of restrictions, the survey instrument was extremely complex. Completion required information from many different agencies and departments of government. It was anticipated that necessary information for some countries could not be obtained within the limited timeframe available. Ottawa-based cultural attaches for the thirteen foreign governments were contacted and asked to recommend who in their home country would best be able to complete the questionnaire. Canadian cultural attaches, in the thirteen foreign capitals, were then notified of these recommendations and requested to use their good offices to identify other possible contacts. Canadian data was developed, in Ottawa, using the Public Accounts of Canada.

In addition to Canada, nine countries responded, fully or in part, to the survey. These were: Australia, France, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. In addition, the Library of Congress in the USA has undertaken to complete the survey on behalf of the Canadian Embassy in Washington. Library researchers were intrigued by a question which had not previously been raised to their attention. Results were not, however, available in time for this assessment.
On November 18, 1991 a consultation was held in Ottawa at the Canada Council. Foreign cultural attaches from the countries surveyed were invited to respond to survey findings to date, to encourage their governments' fuller cooperation, and to share differing national practice and experience. Representatives of other federal government departments and agencies with responsibilities for cultural affairs were also invited to participate.

Between December 2-4, 1991, a consultation was held at the National Arts Centre of Canada. Canadian cultural attaches resident abroad, representatives of the Canadian cultural community and ICRB HQ staff were invited to respond to findings to date, determine perceived weaknesses and strengths of Canadian ICA; and to brief Canadian attaches concerning domestic developments.

Between January 29 and February 6, 1992, through a grant from ICRB, I was able to accept an invitation to the World Economic Forum and to assess the changing role of business in international cultural affairs expressed at, and by, the Forum.

Finally, the completed comparative policy assessment was prepared drawing upon survey results, Canadian and foreign consultations and an assessment of the changing role of business in international cultural affairs as expressed at, and by, the World Economic Forum.