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New International Debates on Culture, Information, and Communication
One of the main changes in recent years in the fields of culture, information, and communication has been in the topography of the places in which their status is negotiated, in relation to their increasing appropriation by private or corporate interests. UNESCO, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have all been involved in setting this international agenda. Notwithstanding the division of tasks assigned to them in the United Nations system, a guiding principle runs through the themes that each organization deals with: cultural diversity, liberalization of services and audiovisual flows, the information society, intellectual property.
The topography of the agents has also changed. A new configuration of sociopolitical and professional players has emerged and is making itself heard in these institutions: industry trade associations and lobbies exerting pressure to break down public regulations in the name of freedom of trade and self-regulation, as well as the multiple components of civil society. For example, the international coalition of professional organizations promoting culture for cultural diversity, relayed by a network of national collectives; the collective of networks against neoliberal globalization, CRIS (Communication Rights in Information Society), participating in debate on the architecture of information and communication networks and Internet governance; the collectives against the intrusive technologies of mass surveillance and registration; and the world network of cities and local authorities committed to participating in the struggle against “digital exclusion.” This new motley configuration of actors from organized civil society has moreover given itself new agoras: the world social forums of Porto Alegre, Brazil, since 2001, are one example among many. Finally, there has also been the creation, by collectives of citizens, of permanent critical watchdogs known as “observatories” of the cultural industries and the media.
To fully grasp the changes that have occurred concerning the place of the culture–information–communication triad in the debates of international institutions, the first part of this chapter considers the process that culminated in UNESCO’s adoption, in October 2005, of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The idea is not to analyze it in detail, but to point out some elements of its genealogy, and to highlight its strengths as well as revealing its blind spots. More so than the others, this case affords the opportunity to put things into perspective. Why? Because this convention was the first major political battle waged by UNESCO since the 1980s. It took place more than 20 years after the achievements of the particularly fecund debates on cultural and communication policies, held within this institution, had been shelved – 20 years that coincided with the unfolding of the international process of dismantling public regulations, started with Ronald Reagan’s United States and Margaret Thatcher’s Britain walking out of the institution in 1984–85. In the second part of the chapter, I examine the philosophy guiding the new sociopolitical actors in their intervention in all these places where the status of the triad is debated and decided.
The UNESCO Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions
Who controls the concepts?
The projection of culture, information, and communication into the debate on the new architecture of the world order has highlighted contrasts between social projects and between value systems. Increased jamming of the semantic field of these key concepts attests to the significance of the battle over the meaning of words. To be sure, this is nothing new. In 1974 Michel de Certeau noted, in La Culture au pluriel, that: “Any talk about cultural problems advances on the ground of unstable words; it is impossible to determine a conceptual definition of these terms: their meanings depend on their functioning in ideologies and disparate systems” (Certeau 1974, 189). But the phenomenon of impoverishment of language has intensified with the tendency of the market of words to be reduced to the words of the market. In this respect the notion of information, spawned by communication engineering, has been a Trojan horse. And it seems that the spirit of commerce has done the rest: not the one of Immanuel Kant who thought that trade was a factor of peace between people, the base of a world community, but one of the distant disciples of classical political economics. By severing itself from culture, as a production of meaning and memory, the notion of information has short-circuited all the other terms of the triad. Hence, there is nothing surprising about a technical organization like the ITU being promoted host of a summit on the future of “society,” via the intermediary of information. And what could be more natural than the WTO classifying “culture” under “services” and demanding prerogatives concerning it!
It cannot be stressed enough that the “ground of unstable words” carries with it mental and institutional tools that shape the norms, classifications, nomenclatures, and schemas of perception and interpretation on which action models, strategies, and policies are aligned. This instability also paves the way for amnesic neologisms destined to be converted into logotype concepts; closed concepts that produce “effects of reality,” precisely through the action models that they frame and legitimize as the only possibilities. An eloquent example is the role played by the black box of “globalization.” Put into circulation in the first half of the 1980s – the heyday of challenging the public sphere, with the deregulation of finance networks, telecommunications, and big advertising groups – it contributed to producing a vision of a world reorganized on the basis of fatality. The multisecular movement aimed at world unification found itself stripped of its history and its conflictual geopolitics. Reduced to a phenomenon that was no older than two or three decades, it was proof that erasing traces of the production of words is concomitant not only with forgetting history, but also with historical revisionism.
The “quarrel with the short-term” launched by Fernand Braudel in the 1950s against anthropologists and sociologists seduced by the mathematical model of linear causality, is no less relevant today. The social sciences, noted the historian, have got into the habit of “putting themselves at the service of the present” and confining themselves to “only those actors who make themselves heard.” But the social is a “game with a different kind of cunning” (Braudel 1958, 35). The historian of the Annales school encouraged a revival of the plurality of social time and the “dialectic of duration” by turning the hourglass both ways: from the structure to the event; from freedom to belonging, with the constraints that any construction of identity entails; from the universe to the place and diversity (Braudel 1958). This need to escape the race for the present, for “presentism,” guides my genealogical approach.
Institutionalization of the “culture industries” concept
From the early 1970s two concepts were established at UNESCO that were to prove pivotal in guiding the debates, proposals, measures, and strategies that worked towards legitimizing the idea of public policy on communication and culture: the “right to communication” and the “culture industries.”
The idea of the “right to communication” was put forward publicly in 1969 by Jean d’Arcy, pioneer of French television and then director of the radio and visual services division at the UN Information Service in New York. At the time, the debate on civil rights in the information field was taking shape at UNESCO. In an article in the journal of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) he wrote: “The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than the right to information, first laid down twenty-one years ago in Article 19. This is the human right to communicate” (d’Arcy 1969, 14).
Throughout the next decade, in the numerous panel discussions and controversies, the idea of the validity of the vertical model with a one-way information flow simply spewing out content started to crack. A representation started to emerge of communication as a dialogical and reciprocal process, where access and participation became essential. Experts in one of the first panel discussions on communication policies and planning, organized in 1972 by UNESCO, asserted their refusal of the idea of communication from the elite to the masses, from the center to the periphery, or from the information-rich to the information-poor, for example. From these meetings between legal experts emerged the principle of difference, with no distinction on the grounds of nationality, race, language, religion, or gender.
The concept of “cultural industries,” introduced in the second half of the 1970s, was designed to change the prevailing perception of “culture.” An expert committee, convened by UNESCO in co-operation with the Canadian National Commission for UNESCO, met in Montreal in June 1980. The following are some excerpts from the founding texts.
The increasing place given to cultural industries in UNESCO’s programme is linked to a process of reappraisal that has been going on for a number of years in thinking about culture.
[…]
Thinking during the past decade has had the merit of seeking to implant the cultural debate in the material context of its subject, particularly when it has deliberately focused on the problems of cultural production (how cultural products are thought up, selected, designed, manufactured, distributed, promoted and consumed), even though some authorities still refuse to grant the due importance of the “industries of imagination.” (UNESCO 1980, 1, 6)
With this new perspective, “the trend towards the economic and financial concentration and internationalization of cultural industries” was seen as a fundamental issue from the outset.
Economic analyses should remain central to a programme of reflection which aims to be exhaustive. They should also study in greater detail the general problems and the sectoral aspects of the cultural industries. It is also quite clearly on the basis of such analyses that the public sectors will set up or develop national cultural industries. (UNESCO 1980, 14)
The outcome was a general philosophy on development, articulated in the conclusions of this meeting in Montreal:
In any case, what is at stake is the establishment or resumption of a dialogue between cultures, which would no longer take place only between producers and consumers but would foster conditions for collective and truly diversified creative effort in which the receiver would become a transmitter in his turn, while guaranteeing that the transmitter, even when institutionalized, would learn to become a receiver once again. What is at stake is harmonious development in diversity and mutual respect.(UNESCO 1982a, 236)
The themes “dialogue of cultures” and “harmonious development in diversity and mutual respect” were already prevalent. At the time, they inspired the work of the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, appointed by the then Director General of UNESCO, Senegalese Mohtar M’Bow, and presided over by Sean MacBride, Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Ireland. The MacBride Report, the first document on the inequality of cultural and information exchange to be issued by an international institution, endorsed by the UNESCO general conference in 1980 in Belgrade and published under the symbolic title Many Voices, One World, explained the urgency of considering the right to communication as an expression of new social rights: the right to know, the right to transmit, the right to discuss, the right to a private life. Most importantly, from the right to communication it inferred the necessity for a new world order and for public policy on culture and communication (MacBride and International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980).
Rehabilitation of cultures
Entry into the postcolonial era overturned the north/south balance of power throughout the United Nations system. At the time, the challenge to the cultural and communication world order was in phase with the crisis of the diffusionist development/modernization paradigm, an offshoot of the ideology of linear and infinite progress. The way of seeing the world that had prevailed in UNESCO’s strategies since the 1950s and had consecrated the ideology of communication as a solution, backed by functionalist sociology, was being eroded. The counterpoint of this discontinuity was the recognition of the singularity of cultures as a source of identity, meaning, dignity, and social innovation. As the linear view of the transmission of values collapsed, diversity was established as a prerequisite in the quest for a way out of so-called underdevelopment. It was seen as an alternative to the therapies guided by the ideology of calculation (the GNP) and technical determinism. The rehabilitation of the creativity of cultures was combined with the emphasis on solidarity at local, national, and global level, the celebration of the “spirit of place,” the categorical imperative of citizen’s participation, and the concern for biodiversity. This new philosophy of growth made it possible to unearth a buried historical memory, kindled by the thinkers of the unity–diversity duo in the Third World, from Mahatma Gandhi to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. It was also a warning against misuse of the quest for cultural diversity: shirking shared global responsibility; chaotic fragmentation without due regard for the numerous inequities based on systems of privilege rooted in cast, race, class, gender, and nation (Galtung et al. 1980). The plea of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries for a new world order in the field of culture and communication paralleled the efforts deployed by the Group of 77 to change the terms of commercial trade through a “new economic world order.”
The challenging of the existing cultural and communicational order was also in phase with the change of paradigm in a sector of academic research. It was the period in which the project of a political economy of communication and culture – or, more broadly, as Raymond Williams put it, an approach inspired by “cultural materialism” – was being established, primarily in Europe and Latin America, always within specific contexts. The intellectual challenge was to avoid the two pitfalls of economic reductionism and idealist autonomization of culture, and to articulate its various levels and dimensions: imagination and infrastructure; international, national, and local; public policies and grass roots.
In 1982 the World Conference on Cultural Policies (Mondiacult) in Mexico City crowned a process initiated 12 years earlier at the Venice Conference on the same subject, punctuated by regional conferences on both cultural and communication policies (Mattelart et al. 1984). Mondiacult emphasized the link between economy and culture, economic development and cultural development. It outlined the principle of a cultural policy based on the recognition of diversity, aimed at enhancing individual and collective creativity way beyond the arts, in other forms of invention. The main contribution of this conference was above all the establishment of the anthropological definition of culture in institutional references: “The set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional features of society or a social group. In addition to art and literature, it encompasses lifestyles, basic human rights, value systems, traditions, and beliefs” (UNESCO 1982b). This broad and all-encompassing view of the role of culture articulated the universal idea of fundamental rights, to the particular features of lifestyle through which members of a group experienced their bond with others. Another contribution of Mondiacult was to build bridges between the concepts of cultural policy and communication policy, two themes that had developed on the different continents in the 1970s, sometimes in parallel, sometimes in synergy through numerous regional conferences. The rehabilitation of the anthropological definition of culture, which had been given a rough handling since UNESCO’s foundation, was a way of breaking free of the ascendancy of the instrumental conception of communication and information severed from peoples’ history and memory. This conception had governed the crafting of diffusionist development strategies by social planners throughout the 1960s. It was, however, the anthropological definition of culture that made the notions of cultural diversity, cultural identity, and intercultural relations meaningful.
For a number of reasons, the debate at UNESCO on questions of communication and culture, and particularly on a new world order, turned into a dialogue of the deaf: the intolerance of Reagan’s United States, clinging to its doctrine of free flow of information, which managed to narrow the focus down to freedom of journalism and journalists only, especially around issues of societies of professional journalists and the international code of ethics; the opportunism of the Soviet Union, taking advantage of the Third World’s demands to better justify the closure of its own communication system to “foreign intervention”; the contradictions in the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, in which certain governments grasped this international tribune as an opportunity to single out scapegoats and overlook their own violations of their journalists’ and creators’ freedom of expression (in addition to the extreme heterogeneity of the technological equipment of the nonaligned countries); finally, the incapacity to bridge the gap between the concerns of nonaligned countries and those of countries of the European Community, as the latter started to fear the threats to their public services and cultural democratization policies, spawned by the internationalization of the cultural industries.
As regards the nonstate protagonists in the debate on the new order, we could say that while, on the one hand, media and advertising trade associations rapidly became aware of the necessity for a united front to counter the demands of the Third World, there was, on the other hand, an absence of structured action by organized civil society. At the time, the prevailing approach to communication among the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), labor unions, and political parties was still strongly influenced by an instrumental view of communication devices. This was all the more paradoxical in that NGOs in many fields had invented the slogan “think global, act local.” They had mobilized via new forms of networked action around issues such as the environment, human rights, and the excesses of transnational companies (e.g., in the pharmaceuticals or agrifood sectors). It was only in 1983 that one of the first networks, the World Association of the Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), was structured, in Montreal. Unsurprisingly, the third general assembly of this network was held in Managua, five years later, in a revolutionary Nicaragua where communication and popular education experiences were flourishing, radio occupied a predominant place, and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspired adult literacy campaigns (Mattelart 1986).
The cultural exception
From the second half of the 1980s, the commonly accepted belief of deregulation and privatization established itself as the guiding principle of globalization on an international scale. It contributed to freezing public policy debate on culture and communication within the UN system.
Only in debate on the role of the communication space in the construction of large trade zones was the principle that “products of the mind” were not merchandise like any other still questioned in the 1990s. This was the case of the European Union, the first experience of macroregional integration. The tug-of-war between the EU and the US in 1994 within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), during the so-called Uruguay Round – just before the GATT became the WTO – ended with recognition of the “cultural exception” clause that legitimized public policies on broadcasting and films at both national and regional level. The experience of debate on cultural exception in the European Union was a test case. On this occasion, the first mobilization of culture professionals around the citizen’s right to communication and against culture as a commodity appeared, notably through the organization in 1987, in France, of the “Etats généraux de la culture,” a grand Assembly which rallied people of culture and arts not only in France but throughout the EU (Ralite 1987).
The legitimization of the rule of exception represented the third failure of the US’s strategy to liberalize the sector. In 1989 it had suffered its first setback when it tried to suspend application of the EU directive “television without borders” on the policy of quotas for European programs on TV channels in the Union. During negotiations in the same year on the free trade agreement between the US and Canada, the latter had secured a “cultural exemption” clause that it was to renew five years later at the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This enabled it to continue or to adopt policies favorable to public television, tax credits for the development of television, a national fund for cable and satellite TV, and measures concerning publishing and cinema. In 1994 the Mexican government nevertheless refused to include in the NAFTA agreement a clause similar to the one secured by Canada.
Canada and France (supported by the Francophone countries) were the two states that had distinguished themselves in the construction of this philosophy, which reserved a special status for culture. It was therefore no coincidence that in 2001 they found themselves as leaders in the promotion of the project for an International Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. This was evidence that in the new configurations of institutional and citizen players, the idea of the necessity of cultural and communication policies designed at a global level was also the fruit of historical processes anchored in singular cultures. In these two countries, there was a close connection between the clause of contemporary cultural exception, the philosophy underlying the establishment of their public audiovisual services, and the cinematographic policies of quotas on Hollywood films from the 1920s and 1930s.
All these antecedents of culture and communication policies served as a background to debate, from 2001 to 2005, on the adoption of the convention on diversity.
Cultural diversity: a conflictual and contradictory paradigm
At the 33rd general conference of UNESCO in October 2005, the member states almost unanimously approved the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The United States and Israel were among the very few countries to abstain. The US’s hostility was proportional to the importance of the document. After the vote at least 30 countries had to have ratified the Convention for it to come into force, a condition that was not met until March 2007. Washington therefore took advantage of that interval to maintain its demands on bilateral trade partners to open their film and audiovisual markets in exchange for commercial compensation in other sectors. An emblematic case was South Korea, a country that had distinguished itself since 1985 for the independence of its film policy, which had enabled it to nurture a high-quality, internationally recognized film industry. Yet in bilateral trade negotiations, it bowed to pressure by agreeing to halve the quota of locally produced films shown in the country.
The Convention has unquestionably been a symbolic step. By making cultural diversity part of humanity’s common heritage, it opposes “inward-looking fundamentalism” and “humanized globalisation,” as the Director General of UNESCO put it (Koïchiro 2001, 3). Its key principle of diversity in dialogue is deliberately contrary to Samuel Huntington’s claim that a clash between cultures and civilizations is inevitable (Huntington 1996). Moreover, by recognizing the specific nature of cultural activities, goods, and services, the convention has laid the foundations of a supranational law that runs counter to the project of unbridled liberalization. It has established rules for the rights and obligations of states: “The parties reaffirm their sovereign right to formulate and implement their cultural policies and to adopt measures to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions and to strengthen international cooperation to achieve the purposes of this convention” (Article 5).1 Unlike the principles of cultural exception and exemption, its field of application stretches beyond the preserve of the audiovisual and cultural industries, spreading “to the manifold ways in which the cultures of groups and societies find expression. These expressions are passed on within and among groups and societies” (Article 4). The “manifold ways” include not only language policies but also the promotion of native peoples’ knowledge systems.
The kingpin of the legal structure is the principle of sovereignty: a state can recover its right to make its own cultural policies, even if it previously relinquished that right in bilateral trade agreements. For the convention to be legally binding, the definition of its relationship with the other international instruments determining states’ rights and obligations is crucial. That is the importance of Article 20. It confirms that the convention’s relations with the other treaties have to be guided by the idea of “mutual supportiveness, complementarity and non-subordination.” “When interpreting and applying the other treaties to which they are parties or when entering into other international obligations, parties shall take into account the relevant provisions of this convention.”
In terms of Article 21, dialogue and coordination “with other international forums” (unspecified) is one of the premises of the application of Article 20. The “other forums” in question are those in which the fate of cultural diversity is also decided: the WTO, and especially the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), where audiovisual and cultural services are on the liberalization agenda, as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), attached to the UN system in 1974. The WIPO’s function, through its treaties, is to define the standards regulating the production, distribution, and use of knowledge and know-how. All these authorities participate in the definition of norms as the baseline of international trade and the driver of the so-called postindustrial technical system. In every field the advocates of a shared elaboration of international standards, based on the universal competence of the law as decreed by the state or interstate organizations, clash with those who support a globalization of sectoral and minimal norms, defined primarily by the only operators in the market.
It took three sessions of intergovernmental meetings to finalize the document submitted in October 2005 to the member states of the UNESCO general conference. As the host at UNESCO was its Division of Cultural Policies and Intercultural Dialogue, the authors tried to compromise between two positions: on the one hand, the majority, including the European Union, which defended the principle of international legislation ratifying special treatment for cultural goods and services as “vehicles of identity, values and meaning”; on the other, a minority led by governments such as the US, Australia, and Japan, inclined to see this document as yet another form of “protectionism” in a sector where, as in other services, free trade should prevail. Between the two lay a variety of standpoints, including those of states that expressed their fear of seeing their national cohesion undermined by contamination of the principle of diversity. From this point of view, the document was also an intercultural production.
The drafting of the convention was a tortuous process punctuated by battles over concepts, words, and tenses, and even over ideas that had long since been ratified by UNESCO. This was the case for instance with the furtively mentioned notion of “cultural industries.” The wording in the title of the convention was changed from “cultural diversity” to “the diversity of cultural content and artistic expressions” and finally to “the diversity of cultural expressions.” The word “protection” was objected to for its protectionist connotations. Its use was consequently justified by referring to its recurrent appearance in many international conventions ratified by the UN, on the protection of vulnerable categories or victims of discrimination. This was the case with children’s rights, for example. The anthropological definition of culture, despite being enshrined in the “Universal declaration on cultural diversity,” unanimously adopted in the wake of September 11, 2001, and present in the first round of intergovernmental negotiations, paid the price of many compromises. These impacted on the formulation of strategic articles, leaving them open to contradictory interpretations. For instance, whereas French diplomacy celebrated Article 20 as a victory over the mercantile view of culture, the British government failed to see it as signifying the possibility of extracting cultural goods and services from the WTO’s jurisdiction.
Culture and communication: the dissociation
The fuzziness of concepts was, however, far from being conjunctural. Nor was it the fruit of compromise between distinctly different positions. In 1998 Tony Bennett and Colin Mercer, two researchers from the Australian Key Center for Cultural and Media Policy participating at UNESCO’s intergovernmental conference on cultural policies for development, in Stockholm, deplored “the absence of conceptual clarity in the cultural policy field.” They ascribed this to a combination of factors including: the relative immaturity of cultural policies as an interdisciplinary field of study and research; the low priority granted to research funding by the institutions responsible for defining and implementing these policies; the private or privatized nature of many studies; the scarcity of relations between universities and cultural sectors; the lack of resources for systematic research funding by civil society institutions and organizations; the excessive focus on national research capacity and the inequality of its international distribution. Finally, the delegates pointed out the fact that: “The sensitivity of many questions of cultural policy – around questions of censorship, for example – means that key policy decisions are often made on political grounds in ways which minimise the value of research findings.” To illustrate this, these specialists in cultural and media policies noted that “crucial cultural policy issues – the distribution of media ownership, for example – are strongly affected by the lobbying power of influential constituencies” (Bennett and Mercer 1997, 4–5). Nearly 20 years after the introduction of the notion of “cultural industries” in the institution’s references, they urged UNESCO to engage in “knowledge of the cultural industries.”
Cultural policy making can hardly be considered without taking into account the question of communication policies. Yet the Convention and even, more fundamentally, the philosophy guiding UNESCO’s action in matters of cultural diversity, tend not only to dissociate the two issues but even to disregard the second one. The Convention contains two references to “diversity of media.” One is in Point 12 of the preamble which stipulates that “freedom of thought, expression and information, as well as the diversity of media, enable cultural expressions to flourish within societies.” The second, Article 6, includes at the bottom of the list of recommended measures (point h): “measures aimed at enhancing diversity of the media including public service broadcasting among forms of intervention.” What exactly such “diversity of media” might be is not clarified. The word “concentration,” for example, is absent; the concept is too disturbing. Proposals from organized civil society to include a reference to this subject were all refused.2 The two world summits on the information society, organized by the ITU – in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005 – likewise overlooked the general phenomenon of concentration hindering citizens’ appropriation of the communication space and widening the gap between those who broadcast and those who receive, those who know and those who supposedly do not.
Was this for fear of scaring off the United States, which contributed more than 20 percent of UNESCO’s budget and had finally returned to the fold in 2003, after walking out in 1984 to mark its refusal of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries’ demands for more balanced information flows through a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO)? Certainly. Was it a compartmentalization of tasks between the divisions of a big international bureaucratic machine like UNESCO? Yes again. But there was more to it. This international institution created its own dark legend about the 1970s, when the cultural policies debate was conceived of only in relation to the debate on communication policies, and vice versa. This taboo precluded the possibility, within the institution, of critically assessing the past and its contradictions. The cultural focus became increasingly autonomous as, outside the institution, strategic reflection of political science, the political economy of communication and culture, and cultural studies, in their critical form, turned toward communication policies defined as: a set of principles, constitutional measures, laws, rules, and state, public and private institutions comprising the normative framework of television, cinema, radio, Internet, advertising, editorial production, the record industry, the arts and show business. During the period of stalemate in the debate, between 1985 and the turn of the century, the series of questions on cultural diversity raised within UNESCO was dealt with – one could say exclusively, with time – on the one hand, by the anthropological approach and, on the other, by the discourse on the alliance between biodiversity and cultural diversity. Even though we can but celebrate this reconciliation with the anthropological approach, since the early twentieth-century controversies between anthropologist Marcel Mauss and some of his colleagues, we have been aware that there is a risk in the autonomization of the cultural field: it could make ethnographic study on the social uses of cultural goods and products say what it would otherwise be unable to express from a macrosociological point of view. As for the discursive reunion between biodiversity and cultural diversity, we know how much, in the history of communicational thinking, biomorphic metaphorization has proved to be a source of numerous misunderstandings and oversights. The analogy is in any case made at the expense of a sociopolitical approach to the mechanisms of production, circulation, and consumption of communication and culture. The actual effect of these two biases means that the issue of concentration, in the context of internationalization that reigned when the “cultural industries” issue was on the agenda in the 1970s, has become a blind spot in the discourse on cultural policies at UNESCO. Actually, the communicational approach has been dismissed by a perspective that Michel de Certeau would probably have branded as “culturalist.”
The official documents that UNESCO chose in 2005 to illustrate the unfolding of the cultural diversity issue in its strategies, from its inception in 1946, contain no traces of any intellectual accumulation by the institution on the cultural industries, nor on communication policies and measures (Stenou 2003). The same tendency is found again with regard to the MacBride Report in 2005, 25 years after its approval by the General Conference of Belgrade. This institutional silence contrasts with the many initiatives taken that year throughout the world by researchers who studied the document, reassessed it, and compared it to the new questions raised by the challenges of the construction of a knowledge society for all (Institut de la comunicacio 2005). It likewise contrasts sharply with the equally recurrent abundance of references to the figures of a hegemonic stream of thought in the Anglo-Saxon countries, spawned by anthropology and Cultural Studies in documents that have marked out the debate on culture since the late 1990s. Examples include Anthony Giddens’s contribution on “globalization, culture and inequalities,” along with that of Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, in collaboration with Katerina Stenou, head of the Division of Cultural Policy and Intercultural Dialogue on “Sustainable Development and the Future of Belonging,” in the World Culture Report, 2000, subtitled “Cultural diversity, conflict and pluralism” (UNESCO 2000). Paradoxically, UNESCO’s engagement in reflection on the role of states in the promotion and protection of cultural diversity is based on the “postnational” concept. This is a rather fuzzy notion that excludes all reflection on the changes and redefinitions of the forms taken on by the state and nation state confronted with the global space. Its theoreticians even announce their disappearance, leaving the newly sovereign community of consumers face to face with transnational flows. In the conclusion to an archaeology of theories put into circulation by these theoreticians of cultural globalization, Mattelart and Neveu wrote:
Faced with a world whose complexity is not simply a convenient slogan, they have taken up the challenge by an excessive use of meta-discourse, instead of endeavouring to theorize this complexity. Following Norbert Elias, we wish to point out that the label theory is warranted only by conceptual constructions that make it possible to solve problems, to renew the intelligibility of objects. From now on conceptual sophistication conceals a thinking steeped in conformisms, ill at ease with the complexity of new inter-cultural balances of power in the context of generalization of technical and productive systems. (Mattelart and Neveu 1996, 42)
The bursting of the financial bubble in October 2008 belied the myth of the senescence of nation-states, repeatedly used to legitimize processes of unbridled deregulation of all systems of social solidarity.
The New Sociopolitical Actors’ Philosophy of Life and Action
Can we expect more today from the leading international organizations, to advance the debate? Probably not. Moreover, that is not where the problem lies. It resides in the way in which the various public and private sector agents appropriate the regulatory principles forged in protracted intergovernmental negotiations, not only to implement them but also to push back their limits. Article 11 of the Agreement invites them to do so: “Parties acknowledge the fundamental role of civil society in protecting and promoting the diversity of cultural expressions. Parties shall encourage the active participation of civil society in their efforts to achieve the objectives of this Convention.” Actually, during the process of drafting the Convention, and before that, in the process of approval of the very idea of a legal tool, in many places throughout the world these actors’ awareness often preceded that of the public authorities, whom they urged to take a stand. Major lessons in the intense mobilization at national and international level consist in the fact that the debates on cultural diversity at UNESCO, and on networking, held at the information society summits, have included the social movement and the national collectives of professional cultural organizations.
What is the philosophy behind the interventions of the new sociopolitical players in this changing topography of places where the private appropriation of culture, the media, information, and knowledge is negotiated? It can be defined as two principles.
The first pertains to the exercise of “communication rights” as new social rights. Although the intuition that fueled the initial phase of the debate on “the right to communication” in the 1970s was endorsed, its range was widened. Reference to the right to plurality signifies the desire to concretize existing communication rights, to put them into practice and not to wait for a new legal instrument guaranteed by international law. As noted in the Assessing Communication Rights Handbook designed by the CRIS network: “ ‘Communication rights’ is a useful term that relates immediately to a set of existing human rights denied to many people, and whose full meaning can only be realised when they are considered together, as an inter-related group. The whole is greater than the parts” (World Association for Christian Communication 2005, 20).
These “existing rights” are defined in the three main human rights documents: the Universal Declaration of 1948, the Pact on Civil and Political Rights, and the Pact on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights (1966). Communication rights encompass not only communication in the public sphere (freedom of expression and the press, access to public and governmental information, diversity and plurality of the media and their content); they also cover the production and sharing of knowledge, civil rights such as privacy, and cultural rights such as linguistic diversity. In contrast to the restrictive conception, which reduces diversity to the offer that is supposedly self-regulated by the market, diversity in its full sense is assumed to be impossible without diversity of the protagonists, of the sources of creation and the content of knowledge, and of cultural and media expression.
This human rights philosophy formalized by a new generation of public law specialists entails a critique of the essentialist view of human rights. The right to communication is indissoluble from civil and social rights. It is possible only if there is a guarantee of the political and economic, social and cultural conditions enabling human beings to exercise what Spinoza called the conatus, the power of transformation and change that enable them to pursue their struggle for recognition of the human dignity of each individual. The idea is to create the conditions for the deployment of human potential. The recognition of these rights, including the right to communication, means recognition of the right of all to participate in the transformation of society (Herrera Flores 2005). This reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is particularly relevant in today’s global geopolitical context, where countries tend to have double standards when it comes to human rights. Transformed into a catechism, the Universal Declaration serves both to denounce human rights abuses in foreign lands, and to hide countries’ own violations of those same rights.
The second principle that makes a desacralized approach to human rights meaningful is found in the philosophy of common public goods – admittedly still in its infancy – opposed to the privatization or “patenting” of the world and human beings. The category “common public goods” encompasses all the areas that ought to be exceptions to the law of free trade, because they are a common heritage that should be shared in conditions of equity and liberty. This principle motivates citizen mobilization around not only communication and knowledge but also health, life forms, the environment, water, software, and the radio spectrum. All these domains should be governed by the rules of public service.
Very recently, under the effect of the crisis triggered by the subprimes and excessive financial speculation, critical economists put forward the idea that financial networks and channels should also be considered as “common public goods” and governed by an international law guaranteed by multiple authorities. A handful of traders would thus be unable to play with the circulation of financial flows, to the detriment of entire societies. Such a radical about turn, away from the logic of neoliberal globalization, implies the need to put the primacy of politics, the sovereignty of the people, and the meaning of public intervention and of the state’s economic role back onto the agenda. It also implies a qualitative leap forward in citizens’ participation in knowledge and in the management of the main issues preoccupying society today.
From alternative communication to public service: widening the horizon of democratization
These two principles – communication rights and philosophy of common public goods – inspire various modes of intervention and speech. I will illustrate this in two significant fields of action.
The first pertains to the broadening of reflection and action concerning the democratization of communication. The new sociopolitical players have amplified their strategic perspectives. Not only do they struggle for the legalization and sustainability of citizen media (community, associative, free, and independent); they have also become a force to be reckoned with as they strive to structurally change the organization of the entire media system and to legitimize the notion of regulation by rehabilitating the public concept. The aim is: (1) to perpetuate a third sector of communication; (2) to reform, consolidate, or create, when it does not exist, a public service that is not simply a mouthpiece for the state; and (3) to demand that the private-commercial sector be consistent with the authorization granted to it to use a public good: the range of frequencies. Evidence of this process of “citizenization” at work in the communication field is the proliferation of debates and mobilizations in favor of the change of broadcasting laws in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, all of which have media monopolies or duopolies. Echoing this position of critique in action are the continental campaigns, again in Latin America, for communication rights and against concentration, on the initiative of popular communication networks and the alterglobalist movement. Their agenda for action, research, and work gives some idea of the maturity of their collective pleas for a change of the communication system. The topics of debate proposed are: legislation and regulation of communication; digital technology and social change; media concentration; and public broadcasting and community communication. Strategies include: construction of public control of the means of communication; enabling society and citizens to gain knowledge and the capacity to act in the communications field; and developing a national culture policy.
Through ebbs and flows, steps forward and steps backwards, all these actions and the debates animating them attest to the slow and arduous social appropriation of this field of questioning on the public sphere, in its relationship with media. As noted above, the public authorities are loath to acknowledge the existence of these new citizen actors in the field of information and communication technologies, whether they are old or new; just as they are reluctant to recognize the role of public mediators, “intermediate corps” between the state and the market, that they are destined to fulfill in reality. One of the essential contributions of these new collective sociopolitical subjects lies in their capacity to shift the horizon of the political stakes of democratization of the communication space, and their ability to seek and to build new strategic alliances.
The diversity of subjects composing the social movement is a guarantee of its richness. Possible limits are those stemming from the very nature of polyphony: the spaces and processes in which organizations and networks with multiple objectives are involved. Conceptualizing life in a democracy from diverse standpoints supposes agreement that even though democracy and truth are mutually dependent, they are also mutually threatening. This is a paradox that Foucault summed up neatly in a lecture on the “government of self and others”: “There is no true discourse without democracy. But true discourse introduces differences into democracy. There is no democracy without true discourse. But democracy threatens the existence of true discourse” (Foucault 2008, 168).
Towards a new social contract around the question of knowledge/power
The second illustration of the reshaping of thinking and critical action concerns the changes that have occurred in the forms of collective organization of reflection and intervention on hegemonic media.
As we know, the 1980s witnessed the rediscovery of the activity of receivers, the nonpassivity of audiences. It was a rediscovery that nevertheless suffered from ambiguities, for all too often it was made at the expense of critical questions on the radical transformation of media and cultural industries in the context of increasing deregulation and privatization. The excesses and neopopulist aspects of the belief in audiences’ free will, enabling them to “resist” by “resemantizing” media discourses, are ample evidence of that shortcoming.
The contribution of the citizen movement since the beginning of the new millennium contradicts that ironic view of the active status of audiences. It is based on the assumption that media users’ freedom is constructed through citizen counterbalances and therefore cannot be taken for granted. The recent phenomenon of proliferating critical monitoring and research organizations known as “observatories”– observers of information, communication, and culture – bear witness to that. In Latin America, for example, there were about 55 such organizations of culture, cultural policies, and the media in 2007, and the number of new ones is constantly growing (Albornoz and Herschmann 2007). This new form of organization of critique and intervention in the cultural and communication sphere attests to a state of social consciousness of the necessity and urgency for citizens to participate in setting public agendas and, more generally, in promoting the democratization of those spaces. Of course, we know how difficult it is to bridge the divide between awareness of a phenomenon and the sustained engagement that “observation of the media” implies. The short experience of these citizen observatories has shown that their modes of organization and functioning depend heavily on local conditions, even if they necessarily have a common philosophy. They are created and develop in widely diverse situations of social and financial sustainability: diversity of approaches, themes, funding mechanisms, working methodologies, thrusts of action and modes of integration with other components of the citizen movement. It is only by looking at these specific characteristics that we can compare them, identify what they have in common, and draw conclusions on their different experiences. Each one of them endeavors to invent a new ecology of communication, grouping together diverse actors.
The media observatory approach, that I have personally been involved in at national and international level, was inaugurated by the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre in 2003 with the launching of the Global Media Watch (Mattelart 2007). This type of observatory groups together three categories: journalists, academic researchers, and media users. Being an observer means deciphering the information content and analyzing the structural causes of silences, censorship, and distortions. It means investigating, alerting, proposing, and studying the modes of production of information that impact on journalists’ rights and duties. It means solidarity with those who are exposed to pressure by their private or public sector employers, and those who work in firms that refuse independent information. It means supporting media projects based on the diversity of content and voices. Finally, it means being attentive to the type of training dispensed for communication professions in higher education institutions. The advantage of this tripartite mode of organization is that it promotes contact, exchanges, and debate between people and organizations usually kept apart by their respective professional experiences. Interaction between journalists and researchers, for example, implies the necessity to transcend corporatist isolation. It questions the practices on both sides, and this leads – or should lead – to questions posed together, in co-operation with civil society, on the way in which their analyses are conducted and transmitted in accordance with society’s noncommercial needs.
To investigate the relationship that producers of information and knowledge have with society, we have to put the upsurge of new approaches to the communication–democracy nexus back into the context of challenges created in democracies by a real sharing of knowledge. It is in this sense that struggles for the collective appropriation of the “media question” have indeed become ideal observation posts. They make it possible to measure the road that is still left before a knowledge society different to the one promised us over the past two decades by the technodeterminist mirage of general-interest connection can effectively be achieved. What the struggles for the democratization of communication teach us is that there cannot be diversified knowledge societies without calling into question relations between knowledge and power, and therefore the status in that system of all producers of knowledge. The main challenge is to conceive of new alliances, a new social contract between these categories of intellectuals and the new sociopolitical subjects. Only the sciences that defy elitism and the academic ivory towers, while at the same time avoiding the game of populism, can serve as a counterbalance to the myth of a global information society conveyed by the cognitive monopolies and their short-term logic. This myth simply recycles the old diffusionist paradigm of information and knowledge delivery from those who know to those who are supposed not to know.
In my opinion, this radical approach is necessary if the right to communication is to be fully deployed in the invention of new democratic uses of both old and new information and communication technologies. That is the only condition on which the new utopia of knowledge sharing can help us to construct democracies conceived of not only in terms of multiple identities but also in light of the categorical imperative of equality and social justice.
Notes
1 For the text of the Convention, see http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001429/142919e.pdf
2 See, for example, the proposals of the world network CRIS (Communication Rights in the Information Society), http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/incom-l/2005-October/000908.html and www.crisinfo.org, November 11, 2004.
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