ABSTRACT
Most commentary on cultural policy focuses on developments within nation states, analysing the genesis, career and impact of selected central and local government initiatives. Cultural artefacts are not only promotional vehicles for other goods or commodities to be traded in their own right. They also provide the major imaginative spaces in which individual nations and social groups explore and project their sense of themselves and affirm their way of life and core values. The initial US push to secure the free movement of cultural goods was pursued through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), one of a cluster of institutions designed to regulate global capitalism that the Allied powers put in place in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The early post-war years were defined politically by the ideological Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union and successive wars of decolonisation. Korea was caught in the crosshairs of both conflicts.
