Just days before the General Conference of UNESCO adopted the Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, the 49-member Philippine presidential consultative commission on constitutional amendments unanimously resolved to propose the removal of a provision in the Philippine Constitution that prohibits foreigners from owning and controlling media firms in the country. In a newspaper report, Biliran Mayor Gerry Espina said, “you cannot regulate technology. We really want to open access to information which should not be controlled by locals alone.” Commission member Alexander Magno added that deleting the provision “will make business more efficient and this will regulate the content. In a multimedia world, you can’t tie up content with ownership. This would ensure that media as a business is contestable in the market, so that monopoly would be eliminated.” He called the specific general provision of the Philippine Constitution a “stupid provision” wherein the country “lost investments in the past because of this constitutional inhibition.”
Apparently, these gentlemen were well-meaning, so well-meaning in fact, that their remarks vividly demonstrate the gravity by which human intelligence has become so undermined by the rhetorics of pure market ideology such that basic definitions of concepts as “media”, “technology”, “information”, “ownership” and “content” are confused and muddled with corrupted notions of “multimedia”, “market” and “monopoly.”
Inspired by current altruisms of “international cooperation” and a “multimedia world”, the mendicant and obsequious thinking that accounts for much of social and economic problems - whether in the Philippines or the global South - may also be attributed to the long historical process of colonialism and imperialism. American media, way back in 1898, published an article called “The Philippines and trade”, clearly describing how through “inter-oceanic processes” the machinery of neocolonialism became embedded into civic consciousness:
“Our (the U.S.) commercial development, following the course of our territorial expansion, logically and inevitably, has expanded the vigor of our growth function internally, between the two oceans rather than externally upon either; but this inter-oceanic process having completed the subjugation of the obstacles to it, the energies of national growth became freed to operate upon new fields of activity… The extremities of the hardships to be endured, or the terrors or dangers to be confronted, do not enter into the national question of expansion at all [but rather] the outflow of national energy obeyed the laws implanted in the national organization as blindly and instinctively as do the swallows the laws of their migration.” (Quoting from the article “The Philippines and Trade” published in The Freedom, 5 November 1898, in Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History, by William Henry Scott. (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1982), pp. 289-290.)
Often, culture and ecology are seen as obstacles to commercial development, and their subjugation throughout colonial history - from military force and financial power, to the image and symbolic industries - has consistently been comprised of the alienation of the mental from the physical, of content from carriage, of theory from practice. Thus, it is not surprising that in recent events, the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO, had to remind everyone that the UNESCO was intended to be the intellectual balance to the Marshall Plan, a massive Post-War economic aid given by the U.S. to favored countries in Western Europe, in particular as reward to those embracing capitalism and rejecting communism. The Marshall Plan was selective aid, U.S. financial power, determined to complete U.S. economic and cultural imperialism after the War. As “intellectual balance” to financial and political dominance, the diversity of cultural expressions is being destroyed in order to stimulate demand for their re-creation as merchandise.
The adoption of the UNESCO Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions is considered by many a moral victory. But it is only one step towards the resurgence of a dialectic that has been subjugated by globalisation’s obsession with a U.S.-style mono-culture that sees everything in terms of business markets. The result of two years intense debates and negotiations, the Convention now places upon audiovisual services and information services the status of heritage and contemporary activity, or what the UNESCO calls “two pillars of culture.” This means that media and information are specific cultural expressions to which countries have the sovereign right to nurture and protect beyond the demands of trade. However, it is also often the sovereign right of states that reinforce the trafficking of culture as commodity in compliance with “free trade” agreements. Thus, states may have the potential to exclude cultural policy from “free trade” agreements, just as they can invoke “media diversity” in support of foreign ownership and control of media.
The relationship between people and state constitutes a social contract, a covenant whereby people have surrendered some of their rights to the institutions of government. It is a contract of such pernicious consequence that it must bear an organic nature, always subject to a vigilant people’s conceptualisations of development. If the UNESCO Convention seeks to reaffirm links between culture, development and dialog, and such links are potentially left to the sovereign right of states to elaborate, then the spirit of the state’s covenant with its people must demand that its cultural policies be articulated in view of indigenous/populist rather than primarily national or international welfare: Welfare within a culturally specific context, through genuine and open dialog, and in terms of an indigenous development paradigm that is outside imperialistic models usually defined within the narrow realms of global consumerist culture.
Fatima Lasay / Quezon City, Philippines, November 2005
