John Ralston Saul
Culture and Foreign Policy
Republished with permission

a) Observations on Canada's Image Abroad

From mid-July to mid-August, while considering this paper, I was moving about in France and Britain. My general impression of Canada - reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching television the way anyone might - was reasonably positive. On book-review days there would be Canadian books reviewed prominently in a number of papers; sometimes two on the same page, as in Le Monde, thus creating a large block and a theme. There was a Canadian film enjoying attention and success in Paris. The European gave a page to a Canadian film musical about AIDS.

On a single day in London I noticed a Canadian book prominently reviewed in most papers; a controversy throughout the media over a Canadian television series about World War II; BBC radio was featuring an interview with Leonard Cohen.

The bookstores I frequent in Paris and London were featuring several Canadian books on their front tables, among the most important publications of the local season.

And while an innovative Anglophone Canadian opera director was being lauded at the Aix Festival and throughout the press for his revolutionary interpretation of The Magic Flute, an astonishing Francophone Canadian Theatre creator was the star at the Edinburgh Festival where he was experimenting with a new play on the theme of Hiroshima. There were seven or eight other Canadian companies from across the country at the same festival.

And everywhere I went people were writing or talking about a film on Glenn Gould, the pianist whose cult status has grown every year since his death. In much of Europe he is considered to have been "the modern pianist." The film was created by a Francophone from Montreal. Gould was a Toronto Anglophone. The actor who played him, a Toronto Anglophone, was a product of immersion schooling and so also did the French-language version.

All that I have just mentioned was the result casual survey. No doubt I missed more.

In this same period I didn't come across other mention of Canada. None of our political figures was quoted. No trade victories or battles were discussed. None of our business leaders were profiled. When important international crises which we are very much involved were reported, our role was not mentioned. Not even the Quebec election drew any interest.

A bit later in the month there was talk of an unfriendly takeover bid for a big gold company and an assurance company's bankruptcy, eventually a few comments on the Quebec election. However these were not the product of interest in Canada but of "disaster" journalism.

The point of this anecdote is that Canada's profile abroad is, for the most part, its culture. It is our image. That is what Canada becomes in people's imaginations around the world. When time comes for non-Canadians to buy, to negotiate, or to travel, chances are, the attitude towards Canada will already have been determined to as surprising extent by the projection of our culture abroad.

I don't wish to exaggerate this point. There are, of course, exceptions. Our United Nation troops are occasionally mentioned in passing; far less than our role merits. Hockey and figure-skating draws attention during international championships. In June in Britain and France our central role on D-Day was given fair treatment. But everywhere else, that is, where people were dependent for coverage the U.S. channel, CNN - Canada disappeared. I was forced to follow coverage in this way from Rome and so discovered that my father had not, after all, landed on Juno Beach. Nor had any other Canadians. In fact, no one except the American forces seemed to have done much.

I make this point because not being a player in International communications today implies disappearing from the planet. It isn't simply a lost cultural and financial opportunity. It is a major problem for foreign policy. Countries dependent on American structures to present them will be visible only as much and in the way that that structure wishes.

A handful of slightly larger countries have images which go beyond their culture. But that is the result of aggressive military policies of the sort we avoid. Or of high profile involvement in regional crises.

Culture is therefore the face of Canada abroad. To the extent that foreign policy is dependent on foreign public recognition - an identifiable image and a sense at all levels of what we stand for, what kind of society we are, what we sell - that policy is dependent on our projection of our culture. What's more, we are more dependent on that cultural projection than the handful of larger countries who are our allies and our competitors and who have other ways of projecting their image.

b) Funding Disadvantage

Curiously enough we don't act as if this were the case. Our competitors, on the other hand, do. The Joint Committee has already heard the relative figures spent by countries to encourage the export of their culture:

1990 figures

France: $1,492 million or $26.58 per capita
Germany: $1,100 million or $18.50 per capita
U.K.: $ 933 million or $16.00 per capita
Canada $ 128 million or $ 4.09 per capita

In these tight financial times all our budgets are being cut. Foreign Affairs cultural budgets have dropped drastically since 1990. But even at its highest it was seven times less than the French; four time less than the British.

The question is not whether we can afford to spend to export culture. The question is whether we can afford not to.

c) The Role of Culture Identified by Other Developed Nations

The practical answer to that question lies examining why the others spend so much. And why does the United States go to the wall, for example, to protect its penetration of the world's film markets?

There are three central reasons:

1. Countries are in large part the image the project abroad. Their manoeuvrability and influence in the world community is affected by the image.
2. Cultural exports are extremely profitable. They constitute, for example, the United States' second most important export.
3. Trade penetration abroad depends to a great extent on that image. To put it crassly, American films sell America. They sell soft drinks, clothes cars, tourism. They sell the myth.

Nations which do not make every effort to expose their cultures are naive and self-destructive. They are attempting to function without a public image in an international climate where those images play an important role.

The remarkable thing is that Canadian culture - in spite of being excluded from large parts of it home market by structural deformations which actually favour foreign imports - has succeeded in establishing a presence abroad.

This is been due, in part, to small programs and imaginative support from elements in Foreign Affairs. But above all it reflects the energy and quality of Canadian culture. In spite of working at a severe per capita funding disadvantage, and from an unfavourable home structure, it has been successful far beyond our population size.

The central question is how much more could be accomplished and earned if it were operating from fairly organized home market and with competitive levels of foreign funding?

d) False Objections

Dealing with the role of culture abroad in a sensible and professional manner has been, repeatedly blocked by a series of overwrought and ill-informed objections:

Culture is felt to be an intangible by many trade specialists and politicians who favour the concrete sound of wheat and wood. They miss the point that culture employs over half-a-million Canadians and, even, disadvantaged as it is, exports a half billion dollars worth of culture a year. Often those unable to focus on culture are the same people who preach about the importance of the "service industries." But culture is the content of the service industry.

There are others who worry about departmental jurisdiction or federal-provincial jurisdiction or waste from overlap. They miss the point that the provinces spend so little on culture that such a debate makes no sense. Even Quebec, with all its declared concerns over culture - even under a PQ government - invested on average only half of one per cent of its total budget on culture in general between 1961 and 1986/7. The cultural community does the best it can by cobbling together insufficient funds from whatever levels they are available. The problem is not jurisdictional or overlap. It is lack of commitment, strategy and budget at any level.

Many public figures feel that culture is a difficult area because its content can't be defined the way others can. They are caught up in pointless anxiety over what Canadian culture is and precisely how will that content fits into policy.

They are missing the point. Culture is not about propaganda. It is neither definable nor controllable. it comes out in thousands of forms. The resulting overall impression is the image or culture of a country. The culture of a people defines itself through its expression. The government's job is simply to ensure that culture is accessible to Canadians and abroad.

More specifically, there are those who see culture as an adjunct of politics or business: as a sort of decoration or a diversionary entertainment. This is wrong. Culture is a value in itself. It is the real expression of the country, as well as being a money-making business.

It is not something which arrives as an aftermath to be wrapped elegantly around trade deals. It is trade in its own right. It is not a prestigious tool in the classic sense of nights in the theatre for deputy Ministers and corporate presidents. Culture is relevant when it has a real public. The government's job is to ensure that public's access.

In fact, trade is in many ways an adjunct of culture. It is the widespread, varied and accessible presence of Canadian culture in a foreign country that creates many of the conditions which industry can then take advantage of.

e) The Practicalities of Culture

• Culture passes through four stages:
• Creation
• Production (such as publishing or film production)
• Distribution
• Consumption

There is no lack of the first and no potential lack of the fourth. However these two stages can be affected only marginally by public policy. The intermediate stages - Production and Distribution - are the structural layers where public policy can make all the difference at home and abroad.

In discussing foreign policy it is impossible to ignore the state of the home market. Much of foreign policy is national policy.

If you have a culture - however vibrant - which cannot easily be produced and distributed at home in a regular, mainstream way, then selling that culture abroad becomes artificial; almost like running away from reality.

Governments have become used to constant complaints, from those who create and those who sell creativity, about the state of the internal market-place. In the past there has been a tendency to interpret this as a sign of professional weakness or inferior quality. Over the last decade in
particular, people who know nothing about how the cultural process works have taken to insisting that it is all a matter of the market-place. And may the best production win. This sort of abstract ideological nonsense is of no help to Canadian culture, Canadian exports or foreign policy.

 The reality is that the last half century has seen a remarkable explosion in Canadian creativity. A great deal of this creativity has made its way through to a national public and, in many cases, an international public. This has been done with co-operative private and public efforts. However our production and distribution structures have simply not managed to keep up with the quantity and quality of Canadian creativity.

Some of this can be blamed on our cultural industries, much of it on inadequate regulations. But the heart of the problem is that from the very beginnings of our cultural efforts we have had to deal within our borders with much larger industry structures controlled from the two largest English-speaking countries and the largest French-speaking country. As our culture has flowered, so their industrial structures have grown. We have never come to terms with that contradiction.

The reality is that the well-known cultural statistics - such as only 4% of films shown are Canadian or 17% of books and publications - do not reflect accurately either the quality or the quantity of Canadian creativity. What they do reflect is a structural deformation.

The relationship of this to pure foreign policy is simple. A film industry which tries to finance itself on 4% of the home market is in no position to be active abroad. Equally, a publishing industry dependent on 17% of the market cannot hope to finance international distribution networks.

It would therefore be naive to imagine that we can truly export our culture to the natural level of its quality unless we change the structure of the internal market.

f) The Pursuit of Balance

The essence of foreign policy is the pursuit of balance. This creates situations of maximum manoeuvrability. Canada is caught in a situation of severe imbalance which explains much of the pessimism in our elites. Their tendency, in a final fling of fatalism, is to push further into the dead-end of that imbalance.

Common sense says we should be doing the opposite. Not out of dislike for others or from false nationalism. But to seek balance through counterbalance. The greater our influence outside of the dominant spheres, the greater our influence on the dominant players. This is the strategy of indirection, first laid out by Sun Tzu 2,500 years ago. Since then, in every field, those who succeed in spite of not being in a position of natural dominance, do so through indirection. Only the fools, carried by false pride, insist on a direct approach and end badly.

Culture is one of the elements which can help governments to begin calmly working towards a healthier balance.

The three markets on which we concentrate our efforts - the United States, Britain and France - are in many ways our least natural markets. Their attitudes on culture are essentially "one way" because they have imperial visions. Their own culture is the advance flag of their vision.

What's more we must be careful when dealing with these three countries not to fall into their visions of a unilingual / mono cultural world. Canada is an experiment and an experience in its own right. Language is of course important and our dual approach gives us a powerful tool. But it is not in itself a purpose.

Our culture is merely described through our languages. But what it describes is a nation which has opted for co-operation between two major forces. Our options, our ethical assumptions, our relationship to the physical, are not the same as these other mono cultural powers. No matter how successful we are, they will always see us, through their imperial vision, in a subsidiary, ax-centric role.

One of the things we must concentrate on is developing our image outside of this triangle. Another is to push Francophone culture in the Anglophone world and vice versa. We must not allow ourselves to be defined by other people's criteria. In this context the translation programs of the Canada Council are particularly important and should be expanded.

Above all we must concentrate on creating poles of attraction inside Canada which reflect our reality. That means we must put special emphasis on bringing cultural leaders from abroad to Canada so that they witness what we are instead of hearing about it.

g) Portraying the Centre

The great Canadian thinker, Harold Innis, once quoted Napoleon as saying: "Complaints are made that we have no literature; this is the fault of the Minister of the Interior." In other words, in a healthy, free society culture is not created by government. In that same essay on cultural strategies, Innis said, "We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points." That is what government can do.

But as the Canadian playwright, Rene-Daniel Dubois has put it: "Survivre, ce n'est pas un objectif." Or, as Shiva Naipul put it, "A people without a vision must perish."

We have that vision. Our culture expresses it. It is the vision of a Northern people who, with great and ongoing difficulties, have found ways of living together while other nations warred within an imposed single-note, centralized mythologies of themselves.

There are, to put it simply, two sorts of national visions. There is the religious / imperial sort which carries within it the assumption, sometimes, spoken, sometimes not, that its vision is better than anyone else's. The other is less imposing. It does not think less of itself. Nor does it think less of others. This requires profound self-confidence and does not require the dominance of others. But because it is based on a comfort with ourselves - such that we can live without conquering, culturally or otherwise - this is an important vision. A vision from a new sort of centre; one that is remarkably attractive to many countries.

Our need is to learn how to project ourselves from that centre. It is a point of view which must be
understood by some in public service who are lost in pessimistic helplessness before what they call globalization. What we all need to understand is that globalization, what ever it may turn out to be,
consists of competing visions of the world, of how societies can work, of how people are to live together.

Our experience of the last two centuries is the experience of people who are constantly learning how to cooperate. This lies at the heart of what makes our culture appealing to others.

h) A Northern Country

Finally, it cannot be repeated enough, we are a country of the north. Yet much of our foreign-policy stance is an assumption of the opposite. We falsify our image of ourselves and our culture by speaking like a nation which begins at the latitude of our major cities and spreads south. The vast majority of our population may live in these cities. But our country lies to the north of them. And it is that north - its riches - which finance the country and provide much of its mythology.

To portray ourselves as the product of riches without including the country which produces them is a profound form of alienation.

We do take initiatives in the north; but they are all too often hesitant and uncoordinated.

For some time we have been hesitating over the creation of an Arctic Council. Why? Because the United States hesitates. But we are the Northern nation. Instead of holding back until we can redefine our agenda enough to satisfy the American agenda, we ought to press ahead with the other six countries and forge the Council in the image of ourselves and of other nations who share our values in the north.

We must bring as many foreigners to the north as we can in our exchange programs. We must develop international air links across the north. We must press our natural advantages in northern Russia. We must educate the world about northern pollution. (Much of it comes from those who complain about our trapping.) We must take the lead in Northern scientific research and in cold-climate technology. We should be developing language-training centres for circumpolar languages in our Northern cities. These and other actions are the basis for viable life in the north - for Inuits, Dene and those who have come from the south.

In other words we must demonstrate that this north - most of our country - is Canada and that we can project our vision of it.

In what way is this a cultural question? Culture is a form of accurate living memory. We are the great Northern nation. We must act like it.

John Ralston Saul is an essayist and novelist. He is the author of many books, including The Doubter's Companion - A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Voltaire's Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West, and Paradise Eater, which won the Premio Letterario Internazionale in 1990. Mr. Saul has a Ph.D. from King's College, London.