The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated June 22, 2001


Cultural Policy and the Art of Commerce

By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

The first 100 days of the George W. Bush administration saw few cultural salvos. The nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general brought gasps. But, despite being outed as an apologist for the Confederacy, the former senator immediately declared a cultural détente, pledging not to be the second coming of Ed Meese. Counterparts of William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, the cultural pit bulls from the two previous Republican administrations, have been noticeably absent from this one.

Instead, this administration has been leading with its material-issue cards -- tax policy, energy policy, and free trade. But is that really a culture-free agenda? With the president mounting his offensive to get Congress to approve his free-trade policy, for example, we're hearing a lot about what he calls "the moral imperative" to break down tariffs and promote jobs and freedom around the world. Where does the promotion of American business stop and the promotion of American culture begin?

That question has gotten me thinking back to a lunch I had a while ago, at a conference on "Prospects for Culture in a World of Trade," at New York University. I was seated at a table with an official from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and, as conversations between Americans and Canadians inevitably do, we soon found ourselves discussing some of the differences between our two nations. The gentleman, a longtime trade-policy expert, tried in vain to explain to me the ways in which the Canadian government defines "Canadianness" in promoting and protecting indigenous music, film, and television.

Now, I grew up not a half-hour's drive from Canada. I have visited hundreds of times. I loved SCTV long before it appeared on NBC. I even learned to count to 10 in French through watching "Sesame Street" on a Toronto station. But after all these years, I still can't understand what is essentially Canadian about the work of Neil Young, William Shatner, or the Kids in the Hall. Canadians call shell-covered chocolates "Smarties," and we call them "M&M's." They spell labor with a "u" and pronounce it with much more feeling than we do. That's about as far as I get.

Thanks to my American thickness, my conversation with the Canadian official soon turned from cultural protectionism to trade protectionism -- or so I thought. See, I initially thought those were two distinct subjects. But, it finally became clear to me, my Canadian friend saw them as one and the same. Several times, he even employed the phrase "American cultural policy."

Wait. What's that? If such a thing as "cultural policy" existed, I should have heard of it. I have lived in the United States my whole life, engaging and embracing American culture with a passion that often frightens my immigrant father. Through years of graduate training and a doctorate in American studies, I have managed to turn my passions into something that resembles a career. So I'm supposed to be something of an expert on American culture. Yet, through all that television watching, NPR listening, air-guitar playing, history reading, Walt Whitman quoting, Elvis defending, and otherwise pompous conversing about the nature of American culture, until now, I have never encountered the phrase "American cultural policy."

Do we have a cultural policy?

At first, I followed my gut instinct and told the Canadian: No, the Unit ed States takes a laissez-faire approach when it comes to culture. But that's just what he expected an American to say. We love to believe that we have succeeded because of entrepreneurship, gumption, and loopy optimism. Rarely will we concede that the state has played a role in the construction of much of what we value, including "private" universities, the libertarian Internet, and other bits and pieces of our culture. The very idea that the state might help "pick winners" offends our libertarian and republican sensibilities. I've always been allergic to easy answers, however, so I've begun to question my initial assumption.

Maybe we do have a cultural policy. While we don't have a U.S. secretary of culture, we have a secretary of commerce. Cynics might argue that American culture is commerce, but, even without getting into that debate, we can at least ask whether the Commerce Department executes something that might be called a cultural policy. The Canadians sure think so. I'd be willing to bet the French, Iranians, Serbs, and Brazilians would agree. I hesitate to speak for them, like an agnostic trying to describe a religious belief, but I will do my best.

To non-Americans, it often seems that American cultural policy encompasses the various ways that the U.S. government bullies, wrenches, tricks, intimidates, and otherwise persuades other nations to let Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit open in Prague theaters and to let Celine Dion's voice -- no, wait, she's Canadian ... Shania Twain's ... uh, Britney Spears's -- fill African airwaves. What's good for the Mickey Mouse Club is good for the United States.

Certainly, the Clinton administration put great pressure on other nations to let American films debut on more than a small quota of foreign screens and to standardize copyright enforcement in all media in all nations. Furthermore, the pact negotiated in the final days of the administration -- to grant permanent normal trade status to China -- will expose more Chinese consumers than ever before to the likes of Viacom programming.

Clinton succeeded in some areas -- strengthening copyright globally, for example. But he failed to prevent "culture" from being treated distinctly in world-trade disputes. Cultural productions, for instance, still have some exemptions from the normal rules for trade in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now the Bush administration clearly wants to pursue policy goals similar to those of the Clinton administration as it tries to extend the model of NAFTA to the entire Western Hemisphere. But it, too, is likely to face obstacles. The vast Free Trade Area of the Americas discussed at the recent summit in Quebec could contain weak exemptions for cultural works, limiting the U.S. government's power to strike down cultural policies in other nations that it deems threatening to U.S. interests.

But what are U.S. cultural interests? During the cold war, the answer was easy. Through its various propaganda organs, the U.S. government paid to spread American culture around the globe; cultural policies were small, inexpensive elements of a grand, sweeping policy meant to contain and roll back communist expansion.

These days, American cultural policies are still parts of a global vision. But culture is no longer peripheral. Commerce in cultural products accounted for more than 7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 1999. In 1999, copyright-intensive industries like film, television, and music exported goods worth $79.65-billion, more than any other sector of the economy, more than even the chemicals industry or the aircraft industry or agriculture. In this post-cold-war world, the enemy is no longer communism or socialism; it is the stubborn persistence of a cultural sovereignty around the world that stands in the way of American corporate expansion.

Still, the flavor or timbre of the culture being sold does not seem to matter as much to the U.S. government as the fact that it is being sold -- not lent, borrowed, copied, or shared. Striking down cultural protectionism could help chauvinistic films like Pearl Harbor; but free-trade efforts might also allow greater sales of CD's by Ali Farka Toure, of Mali, and Cornershop, of the United Kingdom, to be sold in developing nations. Of course, an American company, AOL Time Warner, distributes some CD's for both of those global artists, but AOL Time Warner does not seem to care, either, what language, instruments, and ideas are encoded on its CD's, as long as whatever is encoded moves the CD's from store shelves. That's why any U.S. policy that helps ease worldwide restrictions on trade and benefits American business also benefits business from other nations, Americans tell their critics.

Even more important, in today's global marketplace, the national identities of corporations mean less and less. Last year, the Canadian Seagram's Spirits & Wine was taken over by a French telecommunications company, in a three-way merger that created Vivendi Universal, which now owns Seagram's music and film archives (Vivendi has also just announced that it will acquire the American Houghton Mifflin Company for some $1.7-billion in cash). Then, too, any policies that promote American-made cultural products probably help the Japanese Sony more than anyone else: After all, Sony produces many of the devices one needs to use our products. And Sony now produces films and music by American artists as well.

In other words, what seems like a nationalistic cultural policy from the outside looks like a content-neutral global economic policy from the inside.

Sorting out what is a cultural policy and what is an economic policy can get complicated even when a country has overt rules for protecting or spreading its culture. Look at the complicated relations between Canada and the United States. Like some other nations, Canada has an explicit cultural policy, enforced by a cultural minister. For decades, the Canadian government invoked various tariff and postage policies to support indigenous magazines and deter American periodicals from flooding Canadian newsstands. American publishers exported to Canada the issues they were selling in the United States -- issues that, because they weren't focused on Canadian concerns, didn't directly compete with Canadian publications for advertising money. In the mid-1990's, however, when Time Warner issued a magazine called Sports Illustrated Canada (mostly a copy of the version sold in the United States, with a few added articles on Canadian sports, but lots of ads from Canadian companies), the Canadian government fought back: It placed an 80 percent excise tax on any ad revenues such "split-run" magazines might earn in Canada. Then, in 1997, the World Trade Organization ruled on an American complaint, finding that Canadian policy violated the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

That shocked many Canadians, who had been led into the trade-liberalization game with assurances that culture would never make it to the table. To Canadians, the issue was one of keeping the public sphere at least somewhat Canadian. It was about the editorial content of periodicals. But, to the United States, it was about ad revenue and moving copies of a generic product. At bottom, the two issues of money and culture were intertwined.

It may be that a nation adopts protectionist cultural policies when it fears for the future of its culture. If that's the case, then Canadian (and, similarly, French) cultural policies make sense. Multinational and American media companies have powerful megaphones and seductive products. So it's understandable that some nations predict that unrestrained commerce could drown out local expressions. And that the United States doesn't need an explicitly formulated cultural policy.

But consider things from a different angle. Paradoxically, the kind of fear that is at the root of French and Canadian policies is also behind one high-profile example of an American cultural policy: an instance in which the U.S. government has pledged resources to defend American culture from -- of all things -- American culture.

Under the leadership of the outgoing chairman, William Ferris, the National Endowment for the Humanities has been busy establishing 10 Regional Humanities Centers to catalogue, preserve, and celebrate the local cultural heritage of American regions. For years before coming to the humanities endowment, Ferris ran the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, at the University of Mississippi, which was pretty successful at defining the Southern in Southern culture, even as the Hard Rock Cafe was metastasizing in Atlanta and the French Quarter of New Orleans. The center serves as a model or inspiration for the proposed Regional Humanities Centers. The new chairman, Bruce Cole, seems committed to similar goals for the centers.

As the N.E.H. Web site explains, "While we often talk about 'one nation,' the United States actually consists of many regions. These regions -- with their accents, history, culture, and folkways -- help shape who we are. ... When we identify with a region, we draw upon what Eudora Welty calls 'a sense of place' -- cultural, historical, and social roots that shape our identities and imaginations. In a nation and world continually drawn together by travel, telecommunications, and the global economy, it is easy to overlook the importance of local experiences to our heritage and daily lives." The minister of Canadian heritage couldn't have said it better. In many ways, the chairmen of the N.E.H. and the National Endowment for the Arts are the closest things we have to secretaries of culture.

Certainly, both endowments are instruments of American cultural policy. They have protectionist goals. They finance and support American forms of expression that the market and the media often marginalize. Many, perhaps most, of their projects reflect something of an American state of mind, even if that state is in the distinct minority of American minds. The endowments may be woefully small, and they may have only nominal influence on the loud yawp of American culture. Like the Endangered Species Act, they may generate sensational headlines when they cross the wrong folks. Yet many of us would not want to live in a country without them.

But there seems to be an air of resignation about the fight to preserve regional heritage. Is Southern culture or, for that matter, Great Lakes culture so static, so dead, so unappealing that we require state intervention to preserve it? Will it become a stuffed head in a museum, if preservation efforts prevent it from evolving, recharging, and recapturing the public imagination? Above all, have we asked ourselves those questions about what is, in effect, a cultural policy?

There are other examples of federal cultural policy as well. They include the work of the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. Each of those agencies makes specific choices about what to protect and what to discard.

Perhaps the most powerful agent of American cultural policy is copyright law. The terms of its copyright system affect the form and function of all aspects of a country's expressive culture. When copyright laws are too weak, they make it almost impossible to reap a profit from marketing cultural expression; when they are too strong, as I believe they are now, they choke off creativity and scholarship. The copyright system involves not just federal policy and common law. New restrictive contracts and electronic encryption "locks" on digitized video and music also restrict access to, and therefore regulate use of, copyrighted materials. Today, we're in the midst of debates over how to interpret and reform copyright law, particularly in light of changes in electronic technology. My purpose isn't to get into a long discussion of that issue, but simply to point out how it is germane to considering whether the United States has a coherent cultural policy.

At times, the Clinton administration worked on behalf of big media companies to expand copyright law far beyond its original intent. From the late 18th century through the beginning of the Clinton years, copyright provided for a very limited monopoly over expression: It was aimed at taxing readers just enough to provide a financial incentive to creators. Instead, Clinton's copyright policies, carried out through powerful international treaties, stacked the power of the federal government firmly behind large, established producers at the expense of users, emerging artists, and independent production companies. The best -- or worst -- example is the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, legislation passed to put into effect two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization. The act radically expanded restrictions on fair use in the digital environment, much to the benefit of large media companies. On the other hand, at the same time the Clinton administration was busy bolstering some copyright monopolies, it was simultaneously attacking Microsoft for unfair-trade policies and carefully scrutinizing the merger that created AOL Time Warner.

When the federal government decides to scrutinize one media merger and to benefit another large media company, it is promoting winners and losers. Once again, it is executing often unarticulated and undebated cultural policy.

So while we may not have an official or overt American cultural policy, we certainly have American cultural policies.

Is that a bad thing? American cultural policies are ad hoc, disjointed, uncoordinated, and contradictory. In many ways, that's for the best. If the federal government is going to mess with culture, by all means, let it work at cross-purposes with itself. If American cultural policy were coherent, I fear, it would cohere to Disney's agenda, not an agenda that many Americans would support.

Nevertheless, the fact that the United States does have what can be called cultural policies means that American officials and the general public need to be more aware of just what they are, and how they affect us. That's where a growing area of study can help.

A large number of scholars today are interested in issues of cultural policy. They include Russell Cargo, founder and director of the Nonprofit Management Program, at George Mason University; Margaret Wyszomirski, director of the Arts Policy and Administration Program, at Ohio State University; and George Yudice, director of the Privatization of Culture Project, at New York University. Further, communications scholars also do interesting work in this area (although they rarely employ the phrase "cultural policy" to describe what they do). At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Robert McChesney has written about the ways certain broadcasting companies rigged the federal regulating game in the 1930's and retarded the growth of other companies. At N.Y.U., Mark Crispin Miller has run the Project on Media Ownership (PROMO), which analyzes the ways that media mergers have corrupted the public sphere. The list could go on.

To date, however, this work hasn't often been integrated into schools of policy studies. Neither the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, nor the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas at Austin, has anyone on the permanent faculty, as far as I know, devoted to anything like "cultural policy." A welcome exception is at the University of Chicago, where the Harris School of Public Policy Studies has teamed up with the humanities division to establish a Cultural Policy Program, directed by Lawrence Rothfield, an associate professor of English and comparative literature. Another notable center of study is at Princeton University, where Stanley N. Katz, former president of the American Council of Learned Societies, is a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.

Some of the most detailed work on cultural policy is going on in the world of private philanthropy. In 1998, a consortium of foundations set up the Center for Arts and Culture in Washington, which bills itself as "the first independent think tank for arts and cultural issues." The center has established a Cultural Policy Network to link hundreds of scholars in disparate academic enclaves. With the support of such institutions, we can be optimistic that, while cultural policy remains justifiably ad hoc, the study of it will not.

One point should be clear: Few policy topics can be labeled purely "cultural." Many of our policies to support the arts and humanities embody economic concerns, while a huge range of policies have cultural impacts. Defining cultural policy is as slippery as defining culture. During the flurry of debate that met President Bush's energy-policy proposals, Ari Fleischer, the administration's press secretary, was asked whether Americans might consider changing their fossil-fuel-addicted lifestyles. He responded: "The president believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one." If that's not a cultural-policy pronouncement, I don't know what is.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a faculty fellow in the department of culture and communication at New York University. In the fall, he will become an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, will be published in August by New York University Press.

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