John Ralston Saul
Culture and Foreign Policy
Republished with permission

a) Attitudes

It is important to avoid falling into what might be called the prevailing fashionable fatalism attached to public policy and in particular to foreign policy.

"Globalization" and "financial cut-backs" lead to an inevitable "lack of manoeuvrability." This phrase or phrases like it are on everyone's lips. But received wisdom is nothing more than a shield for those who wish to avoid the responsibility of thinking and acting.

This particular generation of received wisdom - the fatalistic generation - is the product of an over-reliance on a technocratic or expert approach in which there is an obsession with large abstract themes and methodology. All that then remains open for discussion for the citizenry and their politicians are the particularities of procedure.

The pessimism attached to this "big" approach incapacitates the policy leaders who should be concentrating on building long-term alliances, taking active leadership roles on the international front and applying themselves to the straightforward practicality of most of our needs and problems. Most of the solutions to our problems lie in the use of imagination, originality and an ability to get down to concrete hard work. Not in expert management.

Curiously enough the fatalistic moans, which come from many in the great pools of consultants, economists and political scientists, seem to betray a basic lack of sophistication when faced by the realities of international affairs. They talk about how globalization creates inevitability. Then talk about the disorder brought on by the end of the Cold War.

If you put these two contradictory tendencies together, what you have is an extremely fluid international situation. That fluidity means there is a great deal of ground to be gained by a medium-sized nation willing to use its imagination and to build new international alliances based on practical shared interests. To do this they need to be fast and aggressive, to identify and take leadership positions, to indicate direction when so many are milling about in confusion.

A large number of Canada's international interests, concerns and problems are shared by many other countries. In several areas, particularly that of culture, there are cultural alliances which could help us to accomplish what we need to accomplish.

As for the lack of funds, this often disguises a lack of either desire or will-power. Yes, funds are short, but, as the saying goes, you get nothing for nothing. And cultural policy is one of the cheapest areas in government. Considering the important role that it plays in national and international policy, it is also dramatically and even irresponsibly under funded. In spite of operating in conditions so unfavourable as to be unprecedented in the developed world, it already more than pays its way in direct and indirect terms.

What is more, there are dozens of things that can be done - some requiring funds, some merely a change in approach - which would normalize the conditions in which our culture operates at home and permit it to make its full contribution nationally and internationally. The sums involved, even at their maximum, are a minor event in budgetary history. What is needed above all is aggressive, practical and clever thinking, along with tough application of policy. And above all what is needed is neither fatalism nor false optimism, but a calm understanding that a great deal can and must be done.

b) FTA- NAFTA

Received wisdom has it that culture was excluded from these agreements:

"1. Cultural industries . . . are exempt from the provisions of this Agreement."

However, the following paragraph appears to reverse this exemption:

"2.... a Party may take measures of equivalent commercial effect in response to actions that would have been inconsistent with this Agreement but for paragraph 1."

In other words, we have formalized a mechanism for our own punishment should we take active cultural measures to solidify or strengthen the position of our industries. These are the measures which are necessary to give them the financial strength to export effectively.

It may be that paragraph 2 does not mean what it says. If so, what does it mean? It seems to create a mechanism by which action in the cultural sector will lead to retaliation in, for example, the steel sector. This situation needs to be clarified. Certainly, since the signing of the FTA there have been no significant cultural initiatives.

If this section is the trap which it appears to be, then the government must begin formulating a policy to deal with it. Otherwise it puts a severe limit on both national and foreign cultural policy.

c) National Policy

There is a general tendency to think of "foreign policy and culture" as a matter of what can be done abroad - sales, distribution, image, influence, export earnings, etc. But of course other countries also have foreign policies and what they do abroad as the other half of the foreign policy-culture question. Their sales here; their distribution, image, influence here; and their draining of earnings out of Canada.

In the case of Canada the pear is not cut in half. Our remarkable cultural successes abroad do not reflect a majority position for our own culture in our own country/market. And the greater the success of other people's cultural foreign policy inside Canada, the weaker our own industries. If, this is the case, much of this inequality is not a matter of competition and quality, but of a dysfunctional internal Canadian structure, then we are at a permanent disadvantage. Quite simply, our industries are denied the financial reserves necessary to export vigorously. And our population
does not receive a reflection of itself from the culture available to it. This is, to put it mildly, confusing.

It weakens Canadian efforts in a whole series of areas. It makes it difficult for the citizen to understand what its own interests are, because other people's interests are constantly presented to them as if they were our own.

Therefore, to attempt to build a new, vigorous foreign cultural policy without addressing the situation inside Canada would be naive. For example, to expect the film industry to be active and aggressive abroad, when industry structures leave them 4% to 6% of the national market, would resemble a child running away from home, not a national policy.

In other words, the cultural foreign policy of Canada must begin with a widespread beefing-up of and sometimes revolution in national policy.

d) International Cultural Alliances

The received wisdom which seems to have developed in Ottawa, in particular over the last decade, is that the general international movement towards freer markets of all sorts means that we must be extremely careful, even discrete, in our attempts in cultural national policy to use "affirmative action." Our approach seems to be that we are the odd man out.

This is an inaccurate picture of the world. It results in part from a self-hypnotizing obsession with what happens south of the border. Our discretion has become psychologically clinical since the signing of the two hemispheric trade agreements. This may be either because our officials know what the cultural exemption means or because they are frightened to find out (see 2b).

The reality is that many other countries are to a greater or lesser degree concerned about a form of cultural free trade which translates into the domination of three or four players. This is true in many parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. We have a great deal to gain by forging aggressive and vocal alliances with them.

For example, when the French led European dissent over film policy at the conclusion of the GATT negotiations, we were not publicly part of the argument. We may or may not have been hard at
work behind the scene. But we were not seen to be there when our natural cultural allies were fighting a very tough battle in an area where our own battle lies ahead.

The Americans will not thank us for our silence when - and if we decide to do something about our own film policy. Nor will the Europeans feel any obligation to support us.

In other words, we must begin building international alliances for more serious cultural actions.

e) Relative Markets

There is a chronic tendency both in the cultural community and in government to consider the U.S. market as the most important to penetrate, and often as almost the only market worth penetrating. This is true of English Canadians, but Francophones sometimes seem even more mesmerized.

Proximity, population size, language and the American cultural penetration of Canada are the four primary explanations. Interestingly enough, despite the "cultural exemption," the two trade deals have accentuated this obsession.

The reality is that in most cultural sectors the American market holds no more financial promise than many European markets. The reasons are simple.

Per capita, the consumption of culture in the United States is far, far below that of most European countries. In very general terms, it is often 5 times lower in the United States. In many areas the German, French, Spanish, italian and English markets are of more or less equal value.

One example. A mid-list best seller on the New York Times Bestseller list is often about 40,000
hard-back books. Very few books reach that level - a handful in a population creeping towards 300 million. In Germany or France or Italy or Spain, 40,000 is a relatively common level for a mid-level best seller.

Part of the explanation for this differential is that the United States has a small middle/upper class
and serious problems in its public education system, while much of Europe has become essentially middle-class and has relatively healthy public-education systems.

The United States is big enough and divided into enough competing regions that culturally, it operates as a continent which has little need for, or interest in outside influence

The United States is deeply nationalistic and simply has little interest in other cultures. And this nationalism creates a natural and invisible trade barrier which legislation can't touch. The European nations named above have had a growing interest over the last half century in what happens elsewhere. They have large translation programs, many festivals with international orientations and welcoming approach to other cultures.

The point is that we have a far better chance exporting much of our creativity to these countries than to the United States. That doesn't mean we should ignore the American market. But it does mean that we should not become obsessed by and should put much of our efforts in other directions.

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.