International Cultural Policy

The internationalisation of the world economy provides a fundamental context for the production, consumption and distribution of cultural products and, thanks to the growth of digital technology, more and more of them find audiences far from home. World trade in cultural goods and services more than doubled between 2002 and 2011, reaching US$ 624bn in 2011 (UNESCO 2013). Yet policy to some degree lags behind this development. As we have discussed in previous chapters, despite its alleged decline in importance, the nation-state remains the prime mover in cultural regulation and indeed support, while the city is increasingly the site of policy innovation. Global trade is often where the tension between economics and culture becomes most apparent, yet disputes at this level are still primarily between nation-states. These include questions such as what, if anything, is to be done about the US dominance of international cultural trade? How to preserve the French language or the Korean film industry? Nonetheless, the twentieth century has seen the rise of both

regional policy institutions with a cultural remit, such as

MERCOSUR1 or the European Union, and global ones, such as the United Nations (UN) and its agencies, for example the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). These organisations have shaped cultural policy and may do even more in future, though the development of effective international policy organisations is uneven, as it is in many other policy spheres. Yet despite the number of media and communications scholars who have written on aspects of globalisation and on topics such as trade wars and cultural imperialism (Herman and McChesney 1997; Miller et al. 2004; Tunstall 1994), as Paschalidis (2009) has argued, cultural policy research has tended to avoid the topic of international cultural policy (ICP), preferring to leave it to scholars of diplomacy or foreign relations. David Throsby has usefully summarised areas where culture

engages with the economy internationally:

international trade in tangible cultural products such as artworks, books, CDs, etc.;

international trade in intellectual property rights relating to intangible cultural commodities such as television programmes, movies, digitised music, etc.;

international labour movements affecting the cultural industries such as the mobility of artists;

international cultural exchanges such as touring by performing companies, the circulation of artworks and artefacts on loan between museums and galleries, etc.;

international cultural diplomacy and the exercise of ‘soft power’; international cultural tourism.