Nation & World: Monday, October 20, 2003
Treaty targets Hollywood's homogenization of culture
By Peter Ford
The Christian Science Monitor
PARIS — If you were watching television last night in Sydney, Australia, you had a choice between the American sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond" and a couple of U.S. movies: "Meet the Parents" and "Coyote Ugly."
In fact, despite government quotas requiring Australian-made programming, 76 percent of all new shows launched on Australian TV in the eight months before April 2003 were foreign productions, mostly American. That largely made-in-the-U.S. television diet is part of the background to a new round in the global culture war.
Talks are starting on a United Nations treaty designed to help countries protect their native cultures in the face of what many characterize as the homogenizing effect of Hollywood. It's the kind of pact the United States sees as likely to hamper free trade and free expression — as well as hurt profits.
The U.N. convention on cultural diversity, championed by Canada and France, would take cultural goods such as films, plays and music out of the realm of trade negotiations. It would exempt them from free-trade rules, allow governments to protect and support their cultural industries, and enshrine the "cultural exception" that European nations have defended in international law.
If such a treaty were passed, "peoples and states concerned for their identities will open up to the world with greater confidence," suggested French President Jacques Chirac in an address to last week's U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization general conference.
On the contrary, argued Terry Miller, who headed the U.S. delegation to the meeting. "A convention to control the flow of cultural ideas, products, or services," he said, "is a perfect example (of) an easy answer to globalization ... to try to shut out the rest of the world."
The United States, he said, also feared that a convention recognizing governments' rights to apply cultural policies could be a tool that abusive governments might use against minorities.
"It is up to the individual to decide what he should see," Miller said later. "Why should a government impose its choice on a citizen?"
That, say proponents of such a treaty, is the view from the cab of the cultural steamroller that is the American entertainment industry. Far from limiting choice, they say, government intervention is the only way to guarantee it in many countries.
"The market today has failed to deliver a level of choice, including a minimum of Australian content, and we can assume the market won't deliver on the Internet, either," said Kim Dalton, head of the Australian Film Commission. "It will deliver American products."
Though Australian TV programs are popular, Dalton said, they cost about $200,000 an hour to make, while U.S. producers, having already made a profit in the United States, can sell a similar series to Australia for just $33,000 an hour.
"The economic reality is that Australian broadcasters meet their quotas but rarely exceed them because they are commercial organizations, forever looking at input costs," Dalton said. Without government rules, he said, "Australian culture is going to become roadkill" under the U.S. juggernaut.
In the United States, foreign shows made up just 4 percent of new programs from September 2002 through April 2003, according to figures from media analysts Mediametrie.
"The free market is basically homogenous," Dalton argued. "American audiences have far less choice than French or Australian audiences."
In the two years that UNESCO officials expect negotiations over a treaty to take, debate is likely to focus on how to define culture, and whether its expressions are different from other tradable goods.
U.S. delegate Miller takes the view that "culture" means language, history and religion, but not their expression in works of art. "It's not fair to give the same status to a DVD or a cassette as you would to them," he said. "I don't see much difference between a copper ingot, textiles or a film."
For Sheila Copps, Canada's heritage minister, "A book is clearly quite different from a ball of wool" and should not be subject to the same trade rules.
"If you demand the right to see your own language reflected in a book, is that anti-competitive?" she asked.
Canada's strong cultural policy, she said, "ensures free movement of ideas, but it saves shelf space for our own faces and voices. If you don't see yourself reflected in books, movies, TV and music, there is a part of civilization that's missing."
To leave cultural trade issues to the World Trade Organization, she said, "would reduce the world to a giant shopping center."
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company
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