Producing Cultural Diversity - Hegemonic Knowledge in Global Governance Projects

Chapter 1
Introduction: Culture and Governance
You can expect unexpected links between people, practices, and concepts from a policy project that has the Syndicat national autonome des comé­diens du Burkina (Autonomous National Union of Comedians of Burkina), the Swiss NIKE Nationale Informationsstelle für Kulturgüter-Erhaltung (National Information Center for the Preservation of Cultural Goods), and the Association of Canadian Publishers rooting for it. At the heart of this project and thus at the heart of the present study is an international treaty that not many people have a clear impression of but that has been celebrated by those involved as an exceptional diplomatic success story: the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions? concluded at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (U­NESCO) in 2005.
This 'convention' in the international legal sense, that is, this treaty, is interesting as a 'convention' in a semiotic sense, too, as a case that illustrates the shaping of the relationship between a linguistic sign and its designatum, or, in other words, signifier and signified (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 91-94). Looking at how the Convention came to be does not only tell us something about how public international law is made, that is, how negotiators establish a convention about what to understand by 'cultural diversity' and related concepts in strictly circumscribed legal terms. It simultaneously offers insights about how the sign 'cultural diversity', originally chosen by its supporters, if not arbitrarily, then at least by a very conscious and openly strategic move as opposed to a more 'organic' development, came to impregnate the semantic content of the associated political campaign in a way that at one point the relationship between the sign and its designatum was stripped of all arbitrariness and became naturalized. The meaning of 'cultural diversity' had at this point irrevocably become what those who coined the term had intended to convey, with deviating interpretations failing to assert themselves. The relationship between the signifier 'cultural diversity' and its signified(s) had been shaped by a strong linguistic convention that became almost impossible to break.
The various efforts to write, lobby for, and put into practice the Convention on Cultural Diversity that constitute the core of the present study are fascinating in their form as well as in their contents. One reason for this is the stark contrast between what the treaty initially appears to be to the untrained eye and what it slowly unfolds to be when looked at through the eyes of its most passionate supporters and its most bitter opponents; another reason is the degree of skill with which its supporters shaped their political campaign both inside and outside the conference halls. Many (non-scientific) publications that deal with the Convention or the campaign leading up to it as well as many meetings, conferences, round tables and other events on this treaty frame the Convention using very strong visual stimuli on brochures, banners and the like-stimuli that encourage a primarily aesthetic and innocent reading of the project:

Fig. 1: Images illustrating the Convention on Cultural Diversity?
Broad ranges of vivid colors, smiling faces, beautiful people, objects and places with (viewed from a Western perspective) exotic allure; all these images could be used just as well on brochures for the discerning tourist as on the covers of publications elucidating an instrument of international public law. The innocent reading of the Convention prompted by such images would perceive it as a descriptive statement of celebratory nature praising the intrinsic beauty of the manifold varieties of artistic achievement sprung from human creativity around the globe-a 'carnival of cultures' stimulating the senses of those beholding this beauty in awe.
Those able to complement such an innocent reading with more detailed knowledge of UNESCO as the Convention's sponsoring organization might confuse or equate the Convention with another recent UNESCO convention on culture: the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 (UNESCO CICH), particularly since cultural heri­tage has attracted more attention from anthropology, sociology, and related fields than cultural diversity. The Convention on Intangible Cultural Heri­tage expands the aims of what is one of UNESCO's most widely known lawmaking efforts from many decades ago: the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage of 1972, which is the legal foundation of UNESCO's program of awarding monuments and landscapes around the world the title of cultural and/or natural 'World Heritage'. The Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage expands the notion of 'cultural heritage' from bricks and rocks, so to speak, to include 'living expressions and traditions' such as, for example, 'oral traditions and expressions including language', 'performing arts (such as traditional music, dance and the­atre)', 'social practices, rituals and festive events', 'knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe', and 'traditional craftsmanship' (UNESCO CICH, Art. 2, Para. 2). While this treaty is also embedded in certain concepts of culture (and of heritage) that do not go uncriticized, the Convention that the present study is primarily concerned with, the Convention on Cultural Diversity, is a project that is specifically concerned with the economic aspects of culture, and more precisely with the international trade in cultural goods and services.
In a nutshell, the gist of the Convention is that it guarantees its parties, that is, the states which have ratified it, the right to adopt sovereign cultural policies allowing them to protect-mainly their own national-cultural goods and services (music recordings, film productions, education programs, etc.) from being included in an international process of trade liberalization, as agreed mainly in the frame of the World Trade Organization (WTO) treaties, notably the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), but also in a host of bilateral treaties. This is in line with the conviction 'that cultural activities, goods and services have both an economic and a cultural nature, because they convey identities, values and meanings, and must therefore not be treated as solely having commercial value' (UNESCO CCD, Preamble, Para. 19) and that submitting cultural goods and services to liberalized international trade would decrease the-national, ethnic, regional-diversity of expressions of culture. This constitutes a thoroughly 'hard' issue not transported by the 'soft' visualization with colorful dots and swirls, intricate patterns, and elaborate costume. The Convention is indeed intended by its supporters to be anything but innocent: to many of those involved in shaping the treaty it is expressly designed to combat what they see as dangerous global economic developments, notably the ever more complete submission of economic processes to the logic of free trade, and more particularly the pressures on state governments to commit to this logic as built up by the negotiations in the framework of the GATS.