Ref. :  000028675
Date :  2008-01-21
langue :  Anglais
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Cultural Diversity – A Learning Journey: Pre-View 2010

Source :  Christine Merkel


When the 2005 UNESCO Cultural Diversity Convention entered into force on March 18, 2007, I was lucky enough to share this moment in Montreal together with some seventy colleagues of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity from the four directions of this world (1). It was a moment of great relief, a moment of cheerfulness and – tears. Tears, running down cheeks of civil society activists and government representatives alike, tears on cheeks of diverse skin colours and ages. This was quite unexpected to me. Throughout my professional and public life, I have been involved repeatedly in the work of word-wide civil society organisations and political campaigning, both in Europe, in South Asia and in the Arab World. But never before had I experienced such a moment of tense happiness and happy exhaustion, of champagne mixed with salty tears, like the first great relief after a heavy delivery.

Delivery of what? Which name to choose for the baby? The baby? It felt like having witnessed birth of at least twins, if not a triple or quadruplet birth, judging from the profound feelings of the newly-made parents and godfathers/godmothers of this Convention now in force.

Delivery of a new continent, in the first place: In his very moving speech on this occasion, Rasmané Ouedraogo of the African Coalitions for Cultural Diversity spoke about a “Sixth Continent” which had come into being with the prospects of this Convention, a continent of cultural diversities, making us all citizens of a Common-Wealth-To-Be, while still holding passports of the Nation States we were born into by our mothers, Nation States, which had embarked on ratifying this Convention with light speed, thus making its entry into force an unprecedented success in the international community.

Delivery of a new architecture of intergovernmental co-operation in the field of culture and development in the second place, an architecture of global governancewith clear objectives and a legal space to assure public cultural policy, public responsibility for cultural diversity in the short, medium and long term. Delivery of the task to bring this Convention to life, with the help of, and also despite of, the often slow and tedious procedures of multilateral consensus building and negotiating.

And, thirdly, delivery of new necessities, for Civil Society, to get its act together and create an International Federation in order to engage in structured partnership with the future Intergovernmental Governing Bodies of the Convention, for State Parties, to create appropriate task forces to take stock of measures needed to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions within their territory and at the international level, and to designate a point of contact responsible for information sharing in relation to this Convention, for the European Commission, to comply with the obligations of being Party to a UNESCO Convention for the first time in its history.

Taking for a moment the courage to look ahead into the future, I dare to come up with some educated guesses how the emerging landscape of cultural diversity might look like in the year 2010.

What will have happened to the continental shelf of Rasmané’s Sixth Continent of Cultural Diversity by 2010? It will probably not exist as yet, and this might even be for good reasons. If tectonic shelves move too abruptly or too fast, they might cause Tsunamis. But, there are many energetic and tangible moves on all open oceans, and a number of small and medium sized islands start emerging, like Light Houses of Excellence in Cultural Diversity. Archipelagos are very interesting geological formations, exciting to explore.

A guided tour on the archipelago of cultural diversity in the year 2010 might take you to a number of fascinating sites, as for example (2) :

Urban Public Spaces
- Harnessing the fruits of cultural diversity in municipalities: networks of major European Cities as well as Global City networks are very active in developing further their local policies for Cultural Diversity, i.e. through five major North-South-South projects;
- Essen/Ruhr.2010, together with the cities of Pècs and Istanbul as Cultural Capital(s) of Europe for the year 2010, pledges to engage in a ten-year-programme for building cultural capacities and for developing cultural industries;
- A highly interesting network of intercultural cities of the Council of Europe is taking shape, which began its work in 2008.

Second life, screen life
- Young kids and teenagers now enjoy much more interesting and culturally divers content in radio and TV, in the fifty odd languages of the old continent, while getting new ideas about the lives of kids in Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Americas and the Arab world;
- A changed culture of television programming in (Europe’s) Public Service broadcasters, re-organised around principles of cultural diversity.

Life long learning, public awareness, participation
- All major cultural festivals like Berlinale, the Venice film festival, Locarno, the Medellin festival of literature, FESPACO (Ouagadougou), the Cannes festival, the Salzburg festival, the Shanghai Biennale, Pop.komm and many others have made it a habit to give a bibliophile edition of the text of the 2005 Convention as a welcome present to all artists invited, in one of the six UN languages; by 2010, a total of 10.000 thousand artists from 150 different countries have received these booklets;
- 21 May, World Day of Cultural Diversity, has become a popular day for schools, youth centres, bookshops, libraries, cinemas and discotheques, churches and mosques, to organise celebrations of cultural diversity, story telling festivals, song contests etc;
- The international network of UNESCO Chairs for Culture and Development, with University Chairs in disciplines as divers as International Law, Cultural Management, Political Sciences, Anthropology, Arts and Culture, Design, Master of Business Administration, Music, History of Natural Sciences, Philosophy, History, Psychology and others, will be convening a first International Summer School on Cultural Diversity Studies (July/August 2010);
- In the run up to the Second World Conference of Arts Education which will be hosted by the Republic of Korea, the North-Rhine-Westphalia Arts Education programme of giving one instrument to each and every kid has inspired many more States and countries to start similar programmes;
- To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Convention in 2012, the worldwide network of the 6000 UNESCO-Associated Schools (ASP) will be preparing a joint project week on cultural diversity in their school community.

Civil Society in Action
- The EU Years on Intercultural Dialogue (2008) and on Creativity (2009) will have strengthened the networks of cultural organisations and civil society throughout Europe;
- The International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity will count sixty-six Coalitions by 2010, including a group of six coalitions from the Arab World. As a consequence, the second congress of the IFCCD will decide to add Arabic to its hitherto three working languages, being English, French, Spanish;
- The initiative for a U.S. Coalition for Cultural Diversity will be convening its Kick-Off meeting on 18 March 2010 in Los Angeles;
- The decision of the European Alliance of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity, taken in September 2007 in Seville, to associate on an ongoing basis with associations of Diaspora producers and organisations from the Global South who are based in Europe, has led to fruitful cooperation and innovative project with i.e. African filmmakers and Brazilian music producers.

World.Wide
- “Fair culture” is on its way of becoming a trade mark in North-South and North-South-South exchange and co-production schemes, replicating the success story of Fair trade of the beginning of this century;
- Big music stores and shopping malls for electronic equipment take their pride in offering a gourmet corner with “slow food” cultural products and services from the Global South;
- The “Creative Africa” Initiative of UNCTAD 2008 has strengthened the infrastructure for cultural capacity building in several regions of Africa;
- World unions and associations of artists have started health-insurance and social security schemes of, with and for artists from the Global South;
- The 2008 “Festival des Arts Nègres”, a Senegalese initiative inviting Black art from all artistic disciplines and all countries around the globe, has been a great success. This has led to preparations of a second edition of the “Black Art Festival” in 2011, to be convened in Latin America;
- Major book fairs (Frankfurt, Cairo, Madrid, Johannesburg, Harare) have teamed up with the World Association of Book Publishers to support local publishing initiatives for children’s books and audio books, modelled on Public Broadcasting Service experiences.


Money Matters
- The Convention’s International Fund for Cultural Diversity has been established successfully and is functioning as a seed-money-‘bank’ for major initiatives on Cultural Diversity;
- Bertelsmann, FNAC, George Soros, Buffett Warren, the Majors and other partners have agreed to allocate substantial sums for an international venture capital fund for independent small and medium producers in the creative industries. Learning from the experiences of Grameen bank and Mama Cash, the fund will be administered as a decentralised network of min-vestment-banks (mini-investment);
- An international consortium of Foundations has started a cluster “Intelligent grant making for the promotion of cultural diversity” in the framework of the European Foundation Centre, Brussels.

Cultural liberty for human development
- The human rights record continues to be mixed: Cultural liberty has been suppressed through history and continues to be so. According to estimates of 2003, approximately 900 million people – one in seven people in the world – belonged to groups that faced some form of suppression of language, religion, or discrimination based on their ethnicity or religion in employment, schooling, and in political life. UN human rights bodies and research institutes are currently preparing a second World Report on Cultural liberty, to be released in 2013, aiming to reassess these figures;
- Following the example of UNESCO’s cooperation with IFEX (International Freedom of Expression eXchange), a global network of 71 organisations working to defend and promote the right to free expression, a likeminded group of international Human Rights and Development Organisations is exploring the possibility to set up a similar alert system for violations of cultural liberty.

Expert knowledge in action
- Following a UNESCO expert meeting with civil society organisations, NGOs, Coalitions for Cultural Diversity, international federation and unions of artists and others convened by the UNESCO secretariat in 2008, a strategy for a joined-up multi-stakeholder approach in implementing the Convention is becoming visible, including the renewed Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity;
- Following a UNESCO expert meeting with national, international and local cultural policy / creative industry observatories convened by the UNESCO secretariat in 2008, an dedicated trans-national Observatory consortium has been built as part of the implementation structure of the 2005 Convention;
- The Intergovernmental Committee has made it a tradition to convene a regular Paris Consultation under the Chatham House Rule, prior to its official working sessions, to allow for free and active exchange of views between experts in cultural policy, politicians and permanent representatives, and to share a maximum of information.

Free trade and cultural liberty
- For those State Parties to the Convention who had already signed bilateral Free Trade Agreements including AV- and Cultural sectors, some interesting law suits have clarified the scope of action concerning assertive cultural policy measures in favour of increasing the diversity of cultural expressions vis-à-vis trade law.

After the Second Conference of State Parties (June 2009, Paris)
- In the five months prior to the Second Conference of Parties (June 2009), UNESCO convened an international U40 Forum as a capacity building project for young and mid-career professionals, in cooperation with some National Commissions for UNESCO and with partners from universities and foundations;
- As this initiative turned out to be a great success, the U40 Forum will become a periodical activity. Every fourth year, in conjunction with every other Conference of Parties, a U40/U30 programme will be prepared in cooperation with the international network of UNESCO Chairs, a team of National Commissions for UNESCO and the International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity;
- The governments of Australia, the United States and Israel have engaged in intensive dialogue with the Intergovernmental Committee of the 2005 Convention and are exploring ways and means of ratifying the Convention before the third and forth Conference of Parties in 2011 and 2013 respectively;
- The 2011 Conference of State Parties will be attended by one hundred countries as a minimum.


Wise people always resist the temptation to predict the future. However, a flock of flamingos, flying over the extended archipelago of Cultural Diversity, might discover these and more Light Houses of Excellence. From their bird eye’s view, the jigsaw puzzle of cultural policy and creative economy technicalities might already reveal the emerging image of the new Sixth-Continent-To-Be.




Notes:

(1) All assessments and predictions in this text are the sole responsibility of the author.
(2) Important: some of the projects and plans are already under way, others are the author’s proposals, intended to inspire stakeholders who might be in a position to act on it.



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