Cultural Development and the Open Economy: A Democratic Issue and a Challenge to Public Policy
Abstract: The context of economic globalization poses an unprecedented challenge to public policy in the area of culture, as the fragile balance between economics and culture, formerly ensured by the state, is called into question. Far from indicating that the state no longer has a role to play, the imperatives of cultural development demand a dynamic approach to public policy. The democratic stake of cultural development is to re-establish the citizen's right to contribute to public life and, in this respect, to promote access to and participation in the cultural sphere which, the authors maintain, is increasingly centered in the mass media.
Résumé: Le contexte de la mondialisation économique pose un défi inouï aux politiques publiques dans le domaine de la culture, dans la mesure où l'équilibre fragile entre économie et culture, jadis assurée par l'État, est remise en question. Loin d'indiquer que l'État n'a plus un rôle à jouer dans ce contexte, les impératifs du développement culturel exigent une approche dynamique aux politiques publiques. L'enjeu démocratique du développement culturel est de rétablir le droit des citoyens à contribuer à la vie publique et, dans ce sens, de promouvoir l'accès et la participation à la sphère culturelle qui, selon les auteurs, est de plus en plus centrée dans les médias.
In the fall of 1993, the issue of cultural development in an open economy came into general public view as the world's news media focused on the final stages of negotiations in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The efforts of several European countries, led by France, to exclude culture from the GATT talks, clashed with the U.S. rejection of all forms of national protection of cultural industries.
The issue is a familiar one to Canadians, who felt a sense of déja vu with regard to our own "free trade" negotiations with the U.S. of a few years earlier. But the playing out of the GATT controversy under the klieg lights of the world stage underscored one of the most salient aspects of the issue: the increasing centrality of cultural matters as points of friction in the developing global economy.
This essential characteristic of late twentieth-century "globalization" was recognized by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the federal Department of Communications in their 1991 call for research on cultural development and the open economy. Our group received a mandate to explore a new conceptual approach to this question. After examining the basis for the terms "open economy" and "cultural development," as well as related concepts such as "cultural industry" and "the public sphere," we concluded that the key to dealing with the challenges of cultural development in the new global context lay in rethinking the role of the state and public policy.
Economic globalization has called into question the traditional basis for state intervention in the cultural sphere. Yet, so long as cultural development continues to be a fundamental aspect of democratic public life, state intervention in culture is not only legitimate but necessary. In this context, the question of cultural development demands a new approach to public policy, grounded in a refined appreciation of the capacity and responsibility of national states, economic realities, and the social demand expressed by various publics.
The issue of cultural development in the context of an open economy is thus a question of democracy, insofar as cultural development can be defined as the process by which human beings acquire the individual and collective resources necessary to participate in public life. By adopting such a definition, one recognizes the social and political character of cultural development. The issue is complicated by the global spread of the industrial mode of production, distribution, and reception of symbolic goods--the cultural, artistic, and intellectual artifacts that are the raw material of cultural development. In the context of an open economy, the tendency to place priority on the development of cultural enterprise, coupled with the generally diminishing role of the state, further highlights the character of this issue as a question of democracy. The fact, for example, that public cultural institutions are in crisis in every sector and in all parts of the world does not inexorably justify a liberal economist's approach to culture. To the contrary, it demonstrates the need for a new approach to public policy.
Public policy on cultural development needs to address three areas: culture, education, and media (see Rigaud, 1990, 1992). Traditional cultural practices, mass-mediated communication, and public education have become intertwined, through networks of communication and information resources which are also fundamental to the conduct of global commerce (Melody, 1990, 1992). Media institutions have become major cultural industries while serving (through advertising, promotion, and example) as the locomotive for all other cultural activities, as well as for mass consumption in general. The omnipresence of mass media and their capacity for instantaneity confers on them a special status with regard to the exercise of citizenship and democratic public life. At the same time, educators recognize that media hold the key to many of the dilemmas that they are grappling with (Sizer, 1992). The approach that we are suggesting highlights these connections while clearly distinguishing between cultural and industrial development.
In keeping with our mandate, we have dealt mainly with conceptual questions rather than specific policy issues. Our view of the notion of cultural development is clearly a positioned one: we are fully aware that, for some, cultural development refers to the development of cultural industries, while our own concern is for the social aspects of culture. In a similar vein, the notion of an open economy has little meaning to some analysts, insofar as participation in the new emerging world economy is effectively limited to a restricted number of players. Yet, this term designates a certain reality that one must learn to deal with.
To speak of the role of the state today also demands taking positions, especially when trying to situate the state with respect to the market (see Berger, 1990). Are state and market objectives antagonists or allies of convenience? Should one stay with a conventional notion of "national" state, or extend the idea to include other levels of local, regional, and transnational government? How one conceptualizes democracy also inevitably orients the debate. The temptation to look at the market from a perspective of democratization, for example, is fraught with pitfalls laid by the logic of liberal economics.
Because it is of concern for democracy, cultural development must be oriented towards the public interest despite economic and political constraints. While the present context is marked by important changes, past gains should not be wiped off the board. An historic tension between economy and culture has marked the evolution of modern industrialized societies, and if the industrialization of culture is not a recent phenomenon, the present extent of its global penetration presents a real danger to the expression of local and national differences. The accent placed on commercial aspects circumvents social considerations a bit too simply and undermines the already fragile balance between sociocultural and economic objectives of government policies in culture and communications. This is why a new approach to public policy is needed.
The open economy
The notion of an "open economy," when used to describe the economy of a country, indicates that that country does not place obstacles in the way of incoming foreign products and investment, and suggests a certain dependency on external markets. Used in the broader context of international trade, the term is synonymous with "internationalization" and refers essentially to a system of exchange in which products, services, and capital circulate relatively freely, without being restrained by the intervention of states. Finally, with respect to state intervention in a particular sector, an open economy presupposes a necessary adjustment of that sector to the international context. To speak of cultural development in the context of an open economy, then, is to suggest that, faced with the general move towards internationalization, the traditional support of the state for cultural activity, justified on political, economic, and social grounds, must be re-evaluated in light of increased openness to competition.
The present international trade regime is, in effect, grounded in the principles of liberal economic theory. Be it within the framework of the GATT, which is the normative expression of this theory in international trade, the International Monetary Fund, which plays an identical role in the financial sphere, or various organs of regional economic integration such as the European Community or the North American Free Trade Agreement, relations are organized around the basic ground rules governing the free play of supply and demand. In a system thus oriented towards increasingly open markets, the stated objective (according to the economists) is to give the final word to the consumer, and any intervention by the state that seeks to influence the consumer's choice is viewed as an obstacle towards trade and to be avoided if at all possible.
But is it necessary to accept this deterministic view of a situation of increasing restriction of government intervention? Between the theory and the reality of the open economy lies a certain distance. Although it is common to speak these days about economic internationalization, the globalization of markets, and a worldwide scale of production, the international economy is not in fact a totally open one. The globalization of markets has been accomplished in the financial sphere, where capital circulates with relative ease and can respond almost instantaneously to signals emanating from the economic and political environment. This is not quite the case, however, with the exchange of goods, where serious problems still remain in several sectors such as agriculture or textiles, for example, let alone in the area of services, where liberalization has barely begun. Even governments which proclaim themselves in favour of a complete opening of markets do not hesitate to intervene when they perceive a threat to a given sector of their economy. In a similar vein, the private sector seeks to restrict competition and stakes out monopoly positions. Transnational corporations, through a process of constant acquisitions, mergers, and investment, have achieved a remarkable, and disturbing, degree of concentration on a global scale. In the case of the communication and cultural industries, it is now possible to speak of an oligopoly ("World's Top," 1992; Melody, 1992). This being so, the final outcome of the internationalization of the world economy is far from evident (see Mucchielli, 1987).
With the liberalization of international trade and the growth in all sorts of commercial exchange, one therefore finds a displacement in the traditional logic of state intervention in the economy, based on the supply of goods and services in response to social and political considerations, towards a new logic based instead on the satisfaction of consumers' demands. Such a displacement has the effect of exacerbating the traditional tension between economy and culture.
This has been particularly evident in the case of the GATT. As early as 1947, one finds, in the original text of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a provision for domestic film quotas (Article IV), which shows that the authors were aware of the threat posed to national cultures by indiscriminate application of the principle of free circulation of goods (Jackson, 1969). In Article IV, the GATT attempted to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable objectives: the facilitation of trade by the general elimination of discrimination between foreign and domestic films, and the protection of a viable degree of national production.
The question led to a confrontation as early as 1961, when the United States raised the issue of restrictions placed on U.S. television programs by several signatories to the GATT. Through subsequent rounds of negotiations, it became increasingly difficult to exclude the various areas of cultural production from the market logic that characterizes the GATT. Of particular note is the failure of various attempts to reconcile the U.S. position rejecting any exception to the free circulation of goods and services with the European Community's view that no state be required to make concessions that might threaten its national cultural identity (Peterson, 1989).
A similar opposition is found in bilateral situations, such as the debate leading up to the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. The centrality of the issues of national identity and cultural sovereignty in this debate--on the Canadian side, at least--highlighted the extent to which this question is intertwined with that of the role of the state (Bernier, 1987). The cultural industries were ultimately exempted from the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, with the caveat that either party may take measures of equivalent effect in response to any intervention which would otherwise be incompatible with the terms of the Agreement (Article 2005). The NAFTA reconfirms this exemption, but restricts it to relations between Canada and the United States, without extending it to include Mexico (Appendix 2106) (see Johnson, 1988; Patrick, 1989; Carr, 1991; Northcote, 1991).
In general, economic arguments for government intervention with regard to culture have viewed cultural products as goods and services deserving encouragement and support because of their intrinsic value to society, without regard for market considerations (Cwi, 1980). Furthermore, the deficiencies of the market in the cultural sphere have justified state intervention, insofar as the benefits to society that are provided by the producers of cultural goods far outweigh the rewards that the market alone can provide (Rotstein, 1988). In the general context of economic liberalization, however, these arguments have come under severe attack, primarily from economists themselves (see, for example, Globerman, 1987).
Thus, increasingly, the argument in support of state intervention is put not in economic terms, but in terms of cultural sovereignty and the need to create a market favourable to national cultural products. The idea that a national culture is made up of the sum of the products created by residents or citizens of a given territory has a certain resonance for creators as well as indigenous entrepreneurs, all of whom form the "clientele" of government policy in the cultural sphere. For them, the open economy poses dramatic problems. Seen from the main producing and exporting countries, especially the U.S., meanwhile, national cultural policies have nothing to do with national culture, merely with protecting national industries. The least one can say is that the nationalist argument needs some correction if it is to continue to serve as a serious basis for state intervention in this area.
But it is possible to take another approach, in which state intervention is justified not on the basis of promotion of national culture, but by virtue of its importance for cultural development, as we have defined it earlier. In this view, cultural development provides the resources that enable an individual or a community to intervene socially, economically, and politically. The importance of public service broadcasting, for example, lies as much (if not more) in its capacity to provide a forum for public debate than in serving as a window for national culture. For adherents to this approach, there is no question that the open economy presents a challenge, insofar as social and political, as well as economic, activity is destined to shift to the transnational level. The important thing, in this approach, is not so much to protect markets as to invent new mechanisms for the empowerment of social actors--who, for better or for worse, are still politically constituted primarily within national boundaries.
In this respect, the issue of cultural development is related to questions of citizenship and democracy, particularly in the context of an open economy.
Cultural development
The preceding section provided some indication of the historic tension between economics and culture, as manifested in government policies with respect to international trade. A keen awareness of this tension must be fundamental to any discussion, however general, of cultural development.
There are few terms as polysemic as "culture," which can be defined so broadly that it encompasses every aspect of social, political, and economic life, or so narrowly as to refer strictly to artistic activity.
According to Raymond Williams, one can use the word culture to mean "(1) ... a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, ... (2) a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general, ... (3) the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity" (Williams, 1976, p. 80). Economist Michael Walker, on the other hand, provides a different definition: "What we refer to as culture is simply the society-wide summation of the individual choices people make" (Walker, 1992, p. 1). Opposing these two definitions enables us to make the distinction between a sociological and an economic approach to culture: in Williams' definition, culture comprises a vast body of information and knowledge through which people adapt to and participate in their milieu; in Walker's view, it is an expression of market relations.
This opposition provides some further important insight into the tension between economics and culture. In most of western Europe, as well as in countries like Canada and Australia, the state has traditionally recognized that culture cannot be reduced to a question of supply and demand. In recent decades, however, the move to limit the financial and social responsibilities of the state has heightened this tension while undermining the basis of legitimation for state intervention.
Interestingly, the very term cultural development can be seen to have emerged in anticipation of this type of legitimation problem. According to Lange (1992), the term first appeared in the mid-1960s, in the discourse of French diplomacy, from where it was propagated through international organizations such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe. Lange cites UNESCO director-general René Maheu, who declared, at an academic conference in France in 1964: "It is wise to avoid the trap of a single, commonly accepted, definition of culture.... But cultural development is a dynamic operational notion, as rich as those of economic and social development" (Lange, 1992, p. 4).
As a political issue, the question of cultural development has been most consistently sustained, over a period of 30 years, in the agenda of UNESCO. One finds it, implicitly, in the debate on the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that culminated in publication, in 1980, of the MacBride Report on international communication problems (UNESCO, 1980). More recently, the United Nations declared the years 1988-97 to be the "decade of cultural development" and mandated UNESCO to organize a series of activities around the question. As part of this process, an international blue-ribbon commission on cultural development chaired by former United Nations secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar is currently sitting. UNESCO has put forward the idea that all human development contains an essential cultural dimension, and it has called for restoring cultural values to the process of economic and technological development in whatever guise those may occur (UNESCO, 1987).
It is also in the framework of a UNESCO activity that one finds one of the earliest explicit links between the notions of cultural development, cultural industry, and the role of the state. At a 1980 UNESCO conference in Montreal called to study "the place and role of cultural industries in the cultural development of societies" (UNESCO, 1982), Augustin Girard wondered whether "under certain conditions, cultural industries may provide a new opportunity for cultural development and cultural democracy" (Girard, 1982a, p. 23). Girard--a former senior official in the French Ministry of Culture and author of an earlier UNESCO publication entitled Développement culturel (Girard, 1972)--sketched out a plan for public policy with respect to cultural industries which, he argued, should aim to meet the following objectives: (1) broadening access to culture; (2) improving quality in the mass media and developing community and independent media; (3) fostering creative work; (4) modernizing traditional cultural institutions; (5) strengthening national cultural production; (6) ensuring the country's cultural influence abroad (Girard, 1982b, p. 231).
This proposal is pertinent to recall today, particularly if one looks at the list as an order of priorities and considers that most governments--if they have dealt with cultural policy at all--have tended to emphasize these objectives in reverse.
In sum, the question of cultural development takes on a new problematic character in the contemporary context. For some, the emphasis is placed on the economic development of the cultural sector, and cultural development implies the development of cultural industries. For others, cultural development would consist of the promotion of classical, as opposed to popular, culture. Cultural development is also seen, by some, as the instilling of national cultural identity. Finally, cultural development can be conceived of in sociocultural terms, in conjunction with social development.
In this latter view, the key to democratic cultural development lies in making available and accessible the full range of resources that the individual must mobilize in order to enjoy the opportunity to participate fully and equally in the public life of his or her community, and that communities may enjoy in a world in which communities are increasingly interdependent upon one another. As Garnham has put it,
The only definition of cultural development ... would be the one that stressed the resources needed for cultural participation--access to the means of cultural production, distribution and consumption--and thus measured cultural development in terms of both increasing absolutely those resources available to a given population and spreading them more widely among that population. (1992, pp. 2-3)
Such a view of cultural development is clearly at odds with one based strictly on the participation of consumers in a marketplace. In the context of an open economy, the contradiction turns around the role of cultural industries and the progressive involvement or disinvolvement of the state.
The cultural industries
While the term "cultural industry" came into vogue in the policy discourse of various national governments as well as international organizations like UNESCO only relatively recently, the industrialization and commercialization of culture has been the object of an abundant literature somewhat longer.
The concept of cultural industry goes back, of course, to the German philosophers Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno (1972), who, nearly half a century ago, denounced the process by which culture passed from a state of artisanal to that of industrial production. It is worth recalling that their Frankfurt School colleague, Walter Benjamin (1969), in a famous essay some 15 years earlier, published one of the first texts to evoke the ambivalence of the "mechanical reproduction" of art--what Enzensberger (1974) would later refer to as the "emancipatory" and "repressive" capacities of media (see also Jay, 1973). Today, one still finds this ambivalence implicit in much of the current work focusing on cultural industries (for example, Miège, Pajon, & Salaün, 1986; Lacroix, 1986; Tremblay, 1990; Flichy, 1991). It is also worth noting, as Lange (1992) has done, that a major difference between the Horkheimer-Adorno critique of the cultural industries and more contemporary versions is that the former paid no concern at all to nationalist considerations.
As early as the late 1960s, authors such as Herbert I. Schiller (1969) and Armand Mattelart (1976) pointed to the importance of emerging transnational culture in the restructuring of the global interests of world capitalism that began in earnest following the Second World War. This process--and the accompanying critique--took a new, more radical turn with the rise of mainstream neoliberal ideology during the 1980s (Mattelart, Delcourt, & Mattelart, 1984; Schiller, 1989, 1992). In this view, cultural production first underwent a process of industrialization and mediatization in the most industrialized countries, and this process was then extended on a global scale. By the 1980s, the process was consolidated to the advantage of an ever-shrinking number of giant transnational corporations, while national states everywhere saw their room to manoeuvre severely limited. Today, critical perspectives on the industrialization of culture and its negative impact on democratic development can be found in certain institutional, as well as academic, settings (see, for example, O Siochru, 1992).
At the same time, however, it is possible to take a more sanguine view of the cultural industries without renouncing the critical edge. The Australian researcher John Sinclair has characterized their importance as follows:
The cultural industries then, are those which produce goods or services which are either somehow expressive of the ways of life of a society, such as film or television, or which occupy a special position within its system of social communication, such as advertising or the press. They are the industries which give form to social life on sound and image, words, and pictures. They offer the terms and symbols with which we think and communicate about patterns of social difference, the aspiration of groups for recognition and identity, the affirmation and challenging of social values and ideals, and the experience of social change. (1992, pp. 3-4)
Seen in this light, cultural industries would seem to be an important setting for the democratization of cultural life. They could certainly play an important role in cultural development as we have defined it. Like formal education, access to culture can further the emancipation of the individual and enable the citizen within each of us to adapt to and participate in the life of the collectivities in which we function. But then, the economic approach to the cultural industries, which states that they are no different from other industries and should be left to evolve in the marketplace according to the play of supply and demand, is so overwhelming today that its critics suggest it would be best to withdraw the cultural sphere altogether from economic considerations. According to this view, merely to speak of cultural industries is already to accept a commodity logic that has nothing to do with democracy (Rotstein, 1988; Petrella, 1992b). On the other hand, to pursue this latter view is to accept that cultural industries have nothing to do with cultural development, or even that there is nothing cultural about them at all.
The notion of cultural industry, with all its contradictions, well describes the situation that the state, in particular, must deal with in seeking to elaborate public policies for cultural development. But once the state subscribes to this notion, the type of policies it tends to put in place engender new contradictions. Looking at public policy with respect to cultural industries, then, requires us to look at the relationship between the state and these industries.
The state and the cultural industries
Clearly, despite all of the foregoing, and particularly the financial clawbacks of recent years, the state maintains an important presence in the cultural sphere. In Canada, as in other Western countries, national cultural production continues to benefit from significant public funding support. Traditional institutions, from public broadcasting to libraries and museums, survive and in some cases continue to flourish. But this recognition should not be allowed to obscure the fact that a critical shift has occurred.
Almost everywhere, the role of the state in culture has gradually been displaced from an emphasis on cultural development towards economic development of cultural industries (see Caune, 1992; Lange, 1992). Evidence of this displacement tends to appear first in the official policy discourse, and soon thereafter in actual policy measures. In general, the 1980s were marked by a conceptual clouding of the ultimate goal of public policy in the cultural sphere: was it to promote the economic well-being of private cultural enterprise (the industrial logic), or to support public participation in cultural life (the democratic logic)? While many official policy documents, and even some legislation, continue to emphasize the sociocultural nature of state intervention in culture, the dominant thrust is clearly towards promotion of cultural industries, justified in terms of support for national culture (the nationalist logic).
Historically, the liberal democratic states have sought to reconcile the contradictions between industrial and democratic imperatives. With a relative degree of success, the state has tried to ensure that the industrialization of culture did not simply serve the interests of economically interested actors, but the public interest as well. Even in the United States, where commercialized culture serves as a model in many sectors, the democratic logic has brought forth protective measures such as the "fairness doctrine" in broadcasting. In the same way that most democratic societies have progressively moved towards universal accessibility in education, the process of democratization has implied ever greater accessibility to cultural products.
But the evolution of the system of international trade, the explosion of mass cultural consumption, and the growing economic importance of cultural industries have placed a priority on national concerns. State support for cultural industries has been primarily legitimated by arguing the need to promote national identity. Having learned to present their own interests as being those of society at large, the entrepreneurs of national cultural industries have successfully lobbied for various protectionist measures and less constraining regulatory requirements, in the name of enhancing their competitivity in the international market. The basic operating principle of today's cultural industries is to cloak themselves in nationalism.
Yet, the difficulty of harmonizing industrial and nationalist imperatives in the context of the open economy encourages the state to tend towards reduced intervention in the cultural sphere, and most nation states find themselves in a double bind with regard to their traditional role in this area. The emergence of transnational free trade zones gives the state much less room to manoeuvre and, at the same time, the undermining of its capacity to promote national cultural industries (coupled with the dislocating impact of new communication technologies) contributes to delegitimating the possibilities for intervention that remain.
Thus, whereas state intervention in culture used to maintain an ever precarious balance between the need to democratize cultural life and the need to develop economically viable cultural industries to this end, the present context of the open economy has upset the balance. For example, measures to control the concentration of ownership, originally justified by the need to maintain a certain pluralism and access to the means of cultural expression, have in many cases fallen by the wayside in the name of the need to lift barriers to the development of strong, internationally competitive, national cultural industries. This is what we mean by the coming together of industrial and nationalist concerns, to the detriment of democratic ones.
But the demands of democratic cultural development are such that societies have expectations with regard to cultural industries that go beyond questions of national identity--and, in fact, the presence of national industries in a given sector does not, in itself, guarantee access even to the national market. Thus, the industrial logic that fuels these "national champions" drives them to operate in precisely the same way as the transnational corporations--concentrating production, seeking economies of scale, centralizing activities in metropolitan areas, and above all keeping a close eye on the bottom line, all of which deprive citizens on the social and geographic periphery of the resources essential for democratic cultural development.
As Garnham (1992) has stated, the concentration of the means of cultural production and distribution on a global scale means that activities of "meaning creation" are increasingly distant from the sites of reception. This removes an important lever of influence that consumers can have on producers and reduces the relationship between creators and their publics to its basic market expression. "Increasingly, a global cultural industry makes it impossible for the creator of a cultural artifact and its consumer to share any material, social or political context" (Garnham, 1992, p. 3).
In short, the commodification of culture excludes and marginalizes all cultural practices that cannot be materialized in a market relationship, with the result that, for most people, cultural activity becomes a socially neutered act of consumerism--one among many. Furthermore, placing a priority on industrial concerns means that cultural participation is increasingly a function of one's capacity to pay, thus extending existing social inequalities to the cultural sphere (Murdock, 1992).
Democratic cultural development, to the contrary, depends on maximizing the possibility for participation in cultural life. But in the context of an open economy, the fragile balance between citizenship and consumerism with respect to culture has been upset. The possibility that every individual being harbours both a citizen and a consumer is undermined in sole favour of the consumer. This is an aberration of liberalism insofar as its economic expression through the market seems to demand rejection of its political ideal, the equality of citizens and their right to participate on an equal basis in public life.
The role of the state in this context is to redress the balance and see that democratic imperatives are not subordinated to industrial ones.
Culture, media, and the public sphere
To a great extent, the question of cultural development is articulated in the social interstices of communication which, as Carey (1989, p. 23) reminds us, is "a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed." In modern societies, this process takes place in the public sphere (Habermas, 1989) and, increasingly, in the mass media. While a good case can be made for the argument that the democratic mission of cultural development has been undermined by the mediatization of culture (for example, Caune, 1992), there is no longer any doubt that the implantation and extension of media forms constitute clear signals of passage from one era to another in the evolution of societies, and that the presence of so-called mass media is one of the markers of modernity (Innis, 1972; Williams, 1973; Eisenstein, 1979).
As media institutions are among the constituting elements of our age, mediatization--that is to say, the range of production and reception practices that media foster, as well as the particular way in which they transform reality while producing it--lies at the heart of social, collective, intercultural, and international relations. At every level, from the local to the global, contemporary culture is increasingly subject to mediatization.
While an important critical tradition has characterized the extension of mass media, particularly television, as either antidemocratic (Mills, 1956), antisocial (Mander, 1978; Postman, 1985; Guattari, 1992), or at best anti-informational (McKibben, 1992), it is useful to take a more nuanced view in which media are inscribed in a general, dialectical process that Carey (1989, p. 87) has described as "conflict over the real."
The very notion of conflict presupposes issues over which different social actors diverge, and which they seek to resolve either through negotiation or by force. Mediated communication plays an unpredictable role in this. It can contribute to levelling the playing field, or it can bias the game. Recognizing this, media can have a bearing on democratic cultural development to the extent that they are open to forms of communication that are not otherwise generally accessible in the global cultural marketplace (Raboy & Bruck, 1989).
As we have already stated, the challenge of democratic cultural development is to restore the citizen's capacity to participate in public life by promoting access and participation in culture. To the extent that culture is increasingly mediated, this indicates a need for public policy with respect to media. The only justifiable basis for media policy is the public interest (McQuail, 1992), and the key to the notion of public interest is the conception one has of "the public" (see, for example, Peters, 1989).
The idea of the public as a social entity, constituted through public communication and expressing itself in forums of public discussion, is central to the contemporary conception of the public interest. And the constitution of a public sphere, free, transparent, and accessible to all, where citizens can discuss and be informed about the social and political issues that concern them, is the fundamental element. Today, the most pressing question in this respect is whether media activity in fact promotes or restricts the functioning of a democratic public sphere.
The historic evolution of the public sphere, alongside the evolution of the means of public communication, has of course been extremely detailed in the work of Habermas (1989). During the past decade, and especially since the first full English translation of the German philosopher's study appeared in 1989, the idea of the public sphere has been vigorously examined in an impressive international body of literature, much of which seeks to situate Habermas's approach in the contemporary geopolitical context (for example, Garnham, 1990a; Skogerbo, 1990; Aufderheide, 1991; Dahlgren, 1991; Keane, 1991; Curran, 1991, 1992). The idea of the public sphere is thus not simply of theoretical and academic interest but has practical political implications as well.
While Habermas's historical account of the public sphere is strongly criticized for idealistically postulating that a genuine democratic public sphere actually existed somewhere in the distant past, and for seeming to neglect the potential existence of dominant, alternative, and oppositional public spheres (Dahlgren, 1991; Keane, 1991), the concept is particularly useful in considering the possibility of a space insulated from the domination of both market and state. It is on this that several authors (for example, Garnham, 1990a) have based their arguments for regenerating the notion of public service media.
In this respect, it is important to insist on the fact that the idea of a democratic public sphere does not only regard the news media, nor is it limited to public debate and discussion in a narrowly political sense. The public sphere can be seen as extending to all types of information, communication, and symbolic exchange--in sum, to the entire sphere of culture.
In bygone days when culture was restricted to social elites and contemporary mass media did not exist, the idea of public space was a basically physical notion, referring to the places where people assembled to take part in public activities. With the invention of the printing press, public space took on a symbolic character as well, insofar as public debate could now take place without necessarily bringing participants together physically. As the technical complexity and socioeconomic vocation of media evolved and intensified (from press to broadcasting; from information to entertainment and advertising), so did the problematic nature of the public sphere. Today, it is in the area of television that we see the extent to which this constitutes a democratic issue.
The evolution of national broadcasting systems, and public service broadcasting in particular, has been well-documented in an important international body of literature in the past decade or so (in addition to dozens of individual national studies, see McQuail & Siune, 1986; Rowland & Tracey, 1990; Blumler, 1992; Caron & Juneau, 1992; Siune & Truetzschler, 1992; Avery, 1993). The situation of national broadcasting systems in this period has been marked by reductions in financial and political support for public broadcasting services, the softening of regulatory requirements favourable to domestic national broadcasters, the licensing of new competitors to existing services, and in at least one important case, the privatization of a public network (France's TF1). In general, these developments are characteristic of the context of the open economy.
However, the opposition between public service and market forces in broadcasting also has a clearly ideological basis. As Rowland & Tracey put it:
From the 1970s to the 1990s, broadcasting has become a potent symbol of a collision of ideas over how Western society should be organized, not just economically, but also culturally, creatively, morally.... At root, the struggle is over two opposed models of social and political order involving different conceptions of democratic rights and freedoms, different ideas of the relationship between culture and economics. (1990, pp. 9, 13)
In the evolution of television content, a new contradiction with similar implications occurs. In television, the mixing together of genres has blurred the line between factual and fictional programming, for example. The new genres (baptized "infotainment," "faction," "docudrama," etc.; see Bondebjerg, 1990) are increasingly present in the programming grids of the general service channels. At the same time, serious information has been commodified to make it into an attractive product in the commercial sphere, where it competes for the audience with music videos, professional sports, cinema, and so on. Some would see in this development further evidence of the "disappearance" of the public sphere in the age of television; to the contrary, it allows us to see precisely just how far the public sphere now extends beyond a narrow domain of "information" to encompass all cultural activity, of which television now represents the most widespread and virtually universal form.
If television constitutes a public sphere, it is a paradoxical one in the sense that participation takes place in a highly privatized way, usually through the consumption of cultural products in the intimacy of one's home. But cultural participation implies a much wider range of activities, including some that correspond to a more traditional conception of public space (museum and theatre attendance, use of libraries), as well as others that involve the use of older communication technologies (reading, listening to recorded music). Cultural participation is also tied to education in the broadest sense and depends on a range of linked practices, from the provision of arts and cultural appreciation and production training as part of the school curricula, to the use of broadcast media for educational purposes, as well as access to lifelong education programs and education in the responsible use of mainstream media.
We must recall our definition of cultural development here in order to justify the claim that this constitutes a democratic issue. It is not merely by mastering bits of information at the height of an international crisis, such as the Persian Gulf War, that populations can influence the course of history and public life. It is rather through the sum of social values that lead a society to organize itself in certain ways and lead it to create certain mechanisms rather than others to carry out its political will (Raboy & Dagenais, 1992). In this sense, cultural development is a critical democratic question, precisely in that the values it generates constitute the best insurance that basic democratic rights will be exercised intelligently, and that democratic behaviour spreads throughout the society.
The role of the state in democratic cultural development
The central argument of this article has been that democratic cultural development requires active state intervention through public policy. This view begs the question: What types of policy are indicated? In a more theoretical sense, the question becomes: What is the role of the state?
An open economy, as we have seen, militates against most traditional forms of policy intervention that aim to interfere with supply and demand. In the cultural sphere, it does not, however, ensure access to the market for all those with something to say, nor the eventual meeting of potential consumer and producer.
Policies emphasizing the principle of accessibility are neither incompatible with the context of an open economy nor prescriptive of aesthetic taste, while making it possible for any product enjoying a minimal level of public acceptance to find its market. Shifting the policy emphasis from cultural production to networks of distribution and points of consumption would arguably foster a more active relationship between creators and users of cultural products. The implications of such a shift has generated a good deal of debate, especially in the U.K. (see Mulgan & Worpole, 1986; Garnham, 1990b; Mulgan, 1989; Peacock, 1991). Suffice it to say that a world of difference depends on whether the finality of policy in this area is seen to be consumer sovereignty or cultural development.
A perspective of cultural development requires a broadening of the range of cultural institutions that enjoy public support. While national public service broadcasting is essential for cultural development, for example, this should not monopolize resources at the expense of other types of media which can claim public service status to the extent that their main purpose is non-commercial (Salter, 1988). In the present context, it is equally urgent to support the mainstream public broadcasting institutions and to draw smaller public service media out of their condition of marginality. The development of community media, closer to the communities they serve and more sensitive to their needs, is thus fully coherent with our definition of cultural development (see, for example, Wiesner, 1992). Not only do community media facilitate participation in public life, but also they provide an alternative basis for linking communities in addition to what is possible through traditional public service institutions.
One can also imagine a different approach to uses for new communication technologies. Technological development tends to be driven by commercial enterprises taking the lead before social uses are found for new technologies. The question of cable distribution of television services, for example, takes on a whole new light when approached in a perspective of public service rather than on a commercial basis. Instead of developing "pay per view" services or expensive interactive gadgetry which will widen the gap between the culturally service-rich and service-poor, why not look towards developing public video libraries and audiovisual archives, where producers would be invited to deposit their work which would then be made accessible to the public? As Raymond Williams has written, "The moment of any new technology is a moment of choice.... Nothing, either way, is determined by the technology, but it is an important feature of the new systems that they offer opportunities for new cultural relationships, which the older systems could not" (Williams, 1983, pp. 146-147).
Public policy for democratic cultural development also requires a new look at the question of media regulation. Regulation can serve various ends, but its most common goal is to harness competition with a view towards realizing "non-market public policy objectives" (Cave & Melody, 1989; Dyson & Humphreys, 1990; Entman & Wildman, 1992). Much of the experience with broadcast regulation has demonstrated, as Melody has concluded, "that a cultural policy built on restrictive regulation can at best serve short-term objectives, and will ultimately fail in the long term" (Melody, 1992, p. 2). But, the same author continues, "this is not an argument not to use such policies, but rather that they cannot be the main plank in the policy." Adapted to the needs of cultural development, regulation still has a role to play in ensuring equitable access to distribution markets for producers and consumers, and in ensuring that media, particularly commercial media, continue to meet public service objectives.
Regulatory frameworks may vary considerably from country to country, but they are always part of a public policy process. Opening up the process of cultural policy-making and policy evaluation to broader public participation is thus an important aspect of cultural democratization (see Raboy, 1994). In addition to ensuring the greatest possible transparency to the process, and democratic input through public consultations, one can imagine mechanisms for "levelling the playing field" in this area, for example, by providing resources to non-profit, public interest organizations and constraining the lobbying activities of industrial groups.
Policy-making could be linked to attempts to increase the public accountability of cultural, especially media, institutions. In this respect, the role of the state should be limited to the setting up and support of autonomous agencies, whose means of operation guarantee that they do not become new centres of power. Accountability must go further than the periodic filing of reports or appearances before administrative boards. It implies a process of interaction and feedback tying cultural institutions to their publics (see Blumler & Hoffmann-Riem, 1992; Raboy, 1994).
On the whole, such measures would contribute to the democratization of cultural development, and clearly, for this to occur, state intervention appears to be a sine qua non.
However, while insisting on an active role for the state in cultural development we nonetheless share the scepticism of those who deplore, and of some who denounce, the uncommendable history of efforts to bend culture towards political ends, or to direct public cultural practices towards the tastes of bureaucrats and politicians.
In this respect, one can draw on the efforts of authors such as John Keane (1988, 1991) to rehabilitate the notion of civil society, which Keane defines as encompassing the full range of actors who seek to participate in public life otherwise than through the state or the market. Thus, we can reformulate the project of cultural development as involving the redefinition of what is essentially a triangular relationship between the political and administrative authorities who exercise power in the name of the state, the economic interests that dominate the market, and the publics that intervene through the institutions of civil society.
For this to be meaningful, in the context of an open economy, such a redefinition would have to take place not only at local, regional, and national levels, but on an international scale as well--establishing what Riccardo Petrella (1992a) has called "a new world contract." For the time being, the key remains the mode of intervention of the national state, and the principles on which such intervention is based:
The state must become the institution, the mechanism, the body of norms, of cultural values ... the instrument for defining and putting into place a new social contract. Instead of leaving it to private actors, to the global networks of transnational companies, to determine and define the public interest on a world scale, strictly according to economic criteria, the forces represented by the state should see to it that, through the state, they are the ones who define and try to put in place criteria for the common public interest on a world scale. (Petrella, 1992a, pp. 24-25. Our translation)
More specifically, with respect to cultural development, this would mean, for example, attacking monopolistic tendencies that could limit diversity in the production and distribution of cultural products; ensuring access to broadcasting and telecommunications networks on the basis of equality for all receivers, and of "common carriage" for all those with cultural goods to offer; promoting consumers', as well as producers', subsidies; and supporting the channels of public communication: schools, public broadcasting, a pluralist press, an adequate level of national cultural production (Garnham, 1992). In short, the state has the responsibility to see to the creation and maintaining of an enlightened public, by means of a generally accessible cultural infrastructure supported by public funds.
Such a program has nothing to do with restricting market access to products of national origin. To the contrary, we would suggest that it is the formal opening of markets, and the consequent tendency to favour large, corporate institutions of production and distribution, that restricts market access for certain types of national products. Seen in this light, the democratization of markets, under the leadership of national states, would be based on a strategy as well as mechanisms to facilitate access to the means of production, distribution, and reception of cultural products.
This view of cultural development implies an active, dynamic conception of democracy, of the type indicated by Alain Touraine when he states that "The aim of a democratic society is to produce and to respect the greatest possible amount of diversity, with the participation of the greatest possible number in the institutions and products of the community" (Touraine, 1992, p. 12).
To be sure, the context of the open economy imposes certain constraints that must be taken into account in rendering such a model operational. The world situation and, especially, the collapse of social systems based on planned economies, poses another type of challenge. State intervention in general and cultural policy in particular have been deligitimated in the eyes of many in those countries (see Manaev & Priliuk, 1993). But it is precisely the difficulty of this double-edged context that makes the challenge so important. The problems facing the new societies emerging from communism, the reaction of Europeans to the Maastricht treaty, the impossibility Canadians face in rewriting their constitution, are all signs of a "democratic deficit" that the promise of more to consume does not seem to resolve.
At the same time, the present context presents certain favourable aspects. A certain global culture may be in place, but it has not brought about the disappearance of countless local, regional, and national cultures, not to mention those cultures which cannot be labelled in territorial terms (Musso, 1991; Smith, 1992). The flourishing of independent groups of creators and communicators of all sorts around the world is the counterpoint to commercial, industrial culture (Thede & Ambrosi, 1991; Girard, 1992). The new communication technologies provide unsuspected opportunities to those who would dare try to harness them rather than submit to the constraints that they impose (Ellis, 1992).
The approach to cultural development that we are suggesting constitutes a paradigmatic shift in this respect. As we have seen, the principal justification for state intervention through cultural policy has, in most cases, focused on the need to promote national culture and national identity. Public policy should rather, in our view, seek to promote cultural development because it is essential to democratic public life.
Notes
- 1
- In addition to ourselves, the following participated in the project as consultants: Nicholas Garnham, head of the Centre for Communication and Information Studies, University of Westminster, London; André Lange, responsible for broadcasting and cultural industries research at the Institut de l'audiovisuel et des télécommunications en Europe (IDATE), Montpellier; William H. Melody, director of the Centre for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies, Melbourne; Riccardo Petrella, head of the Forecasting and Assessment in Science and Technology (FAST) program at the European Communities Commission, Brussels; and Guy Rocher, sociologist at the Centre de recherche en droit public, University of Montreal. Our complete report, in French, along with extracts from the consultants' contributions, has been published by the Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture (Raboy, Bernier, Sauvageau, & Atkinson, 1994).
- 2
- In Canada, for example, the term "cultural industries" first appeared in government statements in 1980, just as the focus of cultural and communications policy prepared to shift from a concern for the potential contribution of cultural institutions to national unity towards an attempt to develop national cultural industries. Appearing before a parliamentary committee, the Minister of Communications, Francis Fox, declared that the diffusion of culture was increasingly dependent on a strong industrial base, and consequently, his ministry would concentrate on helping the cultural industries to flourish. Supported analytically by the report of an important cultural policy review committee, Fox would author a series of policy statements in the early 1980s setting the tone for subsequent Canadian initiatives (see Raboy, 1990).
- 3
- The late Dallas Smythe recounted with irony how he was obliged to seek a foreign publisher for his masterpiece Dependency Road--dealing with the economic dependency of Canadian culture vis-à-vis the U.S.--when his intended Canadian publisher abandoned the project following an unfavourable market study (Smythe, 1981, p. vii). Stories like this are legion.
- 4
- Habermas himself continues to grapple with these and similar ideas in a spirit of social and political intellectual engagement (see, for example, Habermas, 1991, 1992).
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