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This one-day symposium will be
devoted to the notion of ‘cultural diversity’ now salient
in international cultural politics. Does the recent
adoption by UNESCO of a Convention on the Protection
and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions
signify that the ideas underpinning this international
normative instrument have become leading principles of
cultural governance, at both the global and the national
levels?
The day will be divided into three
sessions.
The morning session will discuss the
implications of the treaty directly for the flow of
cultural goods and services such as television programs
and films and as regards the issue of global governance.
The early afternoon session will be
devoted to cultural diversity in an area that the treaty
does not directly deal with: the management of cultural
difference inside different contemporary societies. While
this Convention was being adopted several countries were
exploding with riots, so often portrayed as being
triggered by cultural or religious factors. This session
will also discuss issues of global cultural diversity and
the increasingly difficult management of cultural
difference in an interdependent world.
The late afternoon session will deal
with the question of mediation and how various media
inflect the issue of cultural diversity both from
mainstream media and in terms of the self-representation
of minorities.
Morning
Session: The UNESCO Convention and its Consequences
The new ‘cultural diversity’
Convention has captured the popular imagination much more
strongly than previous UNESCO standard-setting in the
cultural arena, for it resonated with widely shared
anxieties about the loss of cultural distinctiveness in
the face of globalization. Furthermore, because the US
government vehemently opposed its elaboration, the
three-year drafting period was marked by ideological
confrontation. This has given it much higher media
visibility than its predecessors. In point of fact,
however, the present Convention has a number of
precursors: the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection
of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict; the
1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing
the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of
Cultural Property and the 1972 Convention Concerning the
Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.
Each of these texts has contributed to an edifice of
globally propagated and shared values. Furthermore, beyond
efforts undertaken at UNESCO, other kinds of cultural
values have been made into global principles by the
environmental movement, human rights activists, etc. So
does the successful passage of the ‘cultural diversity’
Convention really signal a quantum leap forward towards
world governance in cultural matters? How might the
Convention alter the way states make and administer laws
and regulations in the arena of culture? In what ways is
culture governable? Is there now a corpus of principles
that might form the basis for world governance in cultural
matters?
The morning session will explore
these questions in depth, by bringing together a range of
scholars as well as officials involved in the genesis of
the Convention. Papers will review and assess the
Convention on its own terms and in the context of other
international agreements that pertain to the governance of
culture and media (e.g. GATT, GATS, WIPO, UNIDROIT
Convention, etc.), with a focus on questions of governance
and policy.
Afternoon
session: Cultural Diversity as Cultural Difference
‘Cultural diversity’ as a policy
issue has been more commonly understood to refer to
ethnically marked difference, and its negotiation and
management, particularly in the public sphere, in and by
societies that are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in
their cultural composition. Indeed this understanding is
implicit in the language of the Convention and the text
has been welcomed by those whose concerns are closer to
‘identity politics’ than to cultural goods and services.
Issues such as ‘identity, diversity and pluralism’ or
‘cultural diversity and human rights’ were explicitly
covered in an earlier Universal Declaration on Cultural
Diversity adopted by UNESCO in 2001. These very issues are
central to questions of citizenship and
self-identification in many countries and have recently
hit a raw nerve in many societies, witness the recent
young people’s riots in France and Australia or the furor
over Danish cartoon representations of the prophet
Mohammed.
This session will therefore explore
the current challenges in this area as well as the
possible relations they may have with an avowed commitment
to cultural diversity by bodies of global governance.
Late Afternoon
Session: Mediation, and Culture Diversity
This session will concentrate on the
role different media play in representing cultural
diversity in different contexts. Mainstream media
portrayal of cultural difference are significant but the
session will concentrate on how minorities represent
themselves in France, Palestine and the U.S. |
