Dr. Marilyn Waring:
Will the World Economy
Produce Only World Culture?

These "notes for a discussion" were presented on June 13, 2001, at ISPA's International Congress in Sydney, Australia.

[about the speaker]

Notes for a discussion at ISPA's Beyond Borders International Congress, Sydney Opera House, 13 June 2001

IS THERE A GLOBAL ECONOMY?
Globalisation is still superficial. The global economy is still limited. The real layer of globalisation is restricted to the capital markets. In most other areas institutions remain intensely local. Trade, for example, is still predominantly regional. Most companies are predominantly national. Consumer markets are national, but are segmenting even further within regions as consumer education improves and consumers are able to demand products that precisely meet their needs. We tend to think that, because a number of multi nationals command large market share, that the economy is more global than it is.

'Culture' has been part of the global economy for many centuries. Today's flow of culture and cultural products through the market is heavily weighted in one direction, from rich countries to poor. The rise of culture as an economic good has added to the identification of culture with commodities that can be sold and traded - crafts, tourism, music, books, and films. Although the spread of ideas and images enriches the world, in the currently predominant economic culture there is a risk of reducing cultural concerns to protecting what can be bought and sold, neglecting community, custom, and tradition.

Make comments here on how the world measures growth, why the market is so important, what is left in or out of economic measurement.

Many activities and goods that are critical to human development are provided outside the market - but these are being squeezed by the pressures of global competition. There is a fiscal squeeze on public goods, a time squeeze on care activity, and an incentive squeeze on the environment.

HOW HAS CULTURE BEEN TREATED IN TRADE AGREEMENTS?
Many countries have argued that cultural goods should be exempt from free trade agreements. The Uruguay Round acknowledged the special nature of cultural goods, granting some exemptions. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) required substantial negotiations before limited exemptions or exclusions of cultural industries were adopted. The issue was reopened in the negotiations for the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) which ultimately collapsed, in many ways because a global cultural advocacy network on the Internet organised such a sustained response from 'civil society'. But before the collapse we could see that the debate polarized countries that see cultural goods as an economic good or service like any other (Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States) and countries that see cultural goods as having intrinsic value to be protected for artistic diversity and national identity (Canada, France, and, I believe, Australia). We are poised for a new round of this debate in the WTO, and there are challenges here, especially in the area of intellectual property, and especially led by indigenous people.

IS A GLOBAL ECONOMY A NEW PHENOMENON?
I don't think so at all: I'm not a medieval historian, but, for example, tax free multinationals called the church, and most notably the abbeys, controlled the wool trade throughout Europe in that period. Trade was controlled in other regions by 'Empires', and we might think of the People's Republic of China as the modern equivalent.

These multinationals also controlled 'high' performance culture: it was their music, their ritualistic theatre, their passion plays, and their writers and directors, who travelled beyond borders. To a limited extent (growing subsequently through the following centuries), royal patrons (for which read governments) commissioned art, music, and performing art, but the predominant culture of one (religious) ideology prevailed at the level of the market.

There was also a rich multiple localised texture of dance, theatre, song, language, dress, and festivals in the unpaid economy of every community: and much of this has endured for centuries alongside the remnants of 'culture' that survived the burning and looting of the abbeys.

WHAT ABOUT A GLOBAL CULTURE? IS THERE ONE, AND IF SO WHAT ARE ITS CHARACTERISTICS?
The notion of a 'global culture' has parallels with my outline of a global economy. On the one hand we might characterise a global culture the way UNESCO has done, as reported in the World Development Report of 1999. The parallel is the money market. Their study showed that world trade in goods with cultural content - printed matter, literature, music, visual arts, cinema and photographic, radio and television equipment - almost tripled between 1980 and 1991, from $67 billion to $200 billion. It continues to grow. For the United States the largest single export industry is not aircraft, computers, or automobiles - it is entertainment. (Though if you accumulated the sector of arms exports it would of course exceed entertainment). Its films grossed more than $30 billion worldwide in 1997, and in 1998 a single movie, Titanic, grossed more than $1.8 billion.

The vehicles for this trade in cultural goods are the new technologies. Satellite communications technology from the mid-1980's gave rise to a powerful new medium with a global reach and to such global media networks as CNN. The number of television sets per 1,000 people worldwide almost doubled between 1980 and 1995, from 121 to 235. The 1990's have seen a boom in multimedia industries, with sales of the world's largest 50 multimedia companies reaching $110 billion in 1993, with a significant increase in the past seven years. The development of the Internet is also spreading culture around the world, over an expanded telecommunications infrastructure of fibre optics and parabolic antennas.

But the global market for cultural products is becoming concentrated. UNESCO suggests it is driving out small and local industries. At the core of the entertainment industry - film, music and television - there is a growing dominance of US products, and many countries are seeing their local industries wither. Although India makes the most films each year, Hollywood reaches every market, getting more than 50% of its revenues from overseas, up from just 30% in 1980. It claimed 70% of the film market in Europe in 1996, up from 56% in 1987 - and 83% in Latin America and 50% in Japan. By contrast, foreign films rarely make it big in the United States, taking less than 3% of the market there.

Once-thriving film industries around the world declined in the 1970's and 1980's, a result of the rise of television. Mexico once produced more than 100 films a year, but despite a resurgence of cinema attendance, local production had dropped to less than 40 films by 1995, and to less than 10 by 1998. Hollywood had captured the resurgence of attendance since the mid-1990's, leaving domestic industries to struggle.

SO IS GLOBAL CULTURE A NEW FORM OF COLONISATION?
Well yes and no. It's important not to overstate the case, just as the case is often overstated in describing the global economy, that can be the case here. But what of the following:

Culture does not always flow in one direction. Reggae and more recently, salsa music from the Caribbean are great illustrations. I just know in my bones that people will be listening to and talking about Bob Marley and the Wailers, and the Buena Vista Social Club, long after they ever watch the Titanic as an old classic: and it neatly makes the point. Is the influence of a particular cultural product only to be measured by the market exchange it generates?

Think about this myriad of other examples.

Aung San Su Kyi is under house arrest in Rangoon in Burma. She read good books from Off the Shelf from the BBC smuggled to her from friends. She is described by other friends as a pure oriental traditionalist. Her tastes in music are Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi, with some Vaughan Williams. Her favourite poet is T.S. Eliot. She reads the biographies of Mandela and Sakharov. On the walls of her home is a painting of her father by the Burmese artist Soe Moe. She describes it as being 'like an Andy Warhol done in the same style as his Marilyn Monroe'.

Now at the risk of seeming xenophobic - but largely because examples from home are the most easily available, what about the following:

Madam Jermaine Acogny is from Senegal. She trained in France and is recognised as among the world's finest African dancers. For 10 days she is in the dance studio of the Auckland College of Education with the insistent rhythms of African drums, and with rudimentary English she is training Maori students in contemporary dances.
The New Zealand Listener recently spoke of New Zealand poet Bill Manhire travelling to Las Vegas, where thanks to Glenn Schaffer, a Los Vegas hotel and casino owner, he was to sit on the board of the International Institute of Modern Letters. The Institute is also involved with an organisation called the International Parliament of Writers which arranges funding for an asylum programme that takes writers from countries where freedom of expression is shackled. So in Los Vegas at the moment there is a poet from Sierra Leone who is wandering the streets looking rather puzzled, and, said Manhire 'I suppose feeling safe in some ways and endangered in others'.

At the beginning of the year 2001 the New Zealand Herald asked some of those who ran Auckland's major cultural and performing art organisations about the highlights of the past year. Lloyd Williams, General Manager of the Auckland Philharmonia, said the highlight was Mahler's Song of the Earth with music director Miguel Hath Bedoya and soloist Helen Medlyn. Jonathan Elva, Creative Director of NBR New Zealand Opera said that the most exciting highlight was the production of Aida. Chris Sannes, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery 1 said the unveiling of Picasso in April was the most important. Simon Prast, of the Auckland Theatre Company named the only indigenous and totally New Zealand production of all those nominated, Serial Killers by James Griffin. But the selections, whatever their period or artistic form, reflect on a western culture which has been the traditional 'regional' trading pattern.

Exports reflect that same pattern. At this time there is a special Maori film section at the Festival of Cinema in Douamenez in France, and the Festival of New Zealand film in Zagreb. Crooked Earth, Rain, Stick Men, Snake Skin, and Lord of the Rings were the New Zealand films at Cannes. Dame Malvina Major was performing with three young New Zealanders at the Hague, and Deborah Wai Kapohe was making her London debut at the Royal Albert Hall in the proms. The New Zealand String Quartet were in Edinburgh. New Zealand Theatre was being represented with a tour in the U.K. of Bare with Madeleine Sami and Ian Hughes. There was to be a major Colin McCahon show in Amsterdam at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art and David Low cartoons at the House of Commons Gallery in London.

IS THERE A GROWING CULTURAL HOMOGENEITY?
The debate among anthropologists on whether there is cultural homogenisation remains open. There are no surveys showing that people are becoming alike. And while some argue that globalisation is an ideological process imposing a global culture, others argue that while cultural products flow around the world, people receive and use them differently.

It does not make sense to speak of a world of six billion people becoming a mono culture. The spread of globalisation does not mean the abolition of traditional values, indeed new global media such as the Internet have proven a powerful means of projecting traditional culture and the culture of radical opponents of globalisation.

I'm quite interested in the observations of Professor Peter Berger, Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, at Boston University. His is obviously a male western North American perspective. He writes that the issue of global culture and the globalisation of culture is a very significant one involving both fears and hopes, and that is obviously reflected in the attention of this Congress to this question. There is the notion the world is becoming increasingly unified. If a global culture is in the making, perhaps a global civil society might come into being. This might help create a more peaceful world. This is the optimistic point of view.

A different view is that conflicts in the world are going to be less and less ideological. People will fight over religion, values, and culture. Samuel Huntington has discussed this in his book Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996).

The likely scenario is somewhere in the middle. There is a global culture that is primarily Western American and is spreading by a number of channels. This does not mean it is going to have an absolute hegemony.

Berger isolates at least four distinct processes of cultural globalisation that are going on simultaneously. The first he calls the Davos culture. This culture is globalised as a direct accompaniment of global economic processes. Its carrier is international business. Most of the interactions are in English. (I want to come back to this question of the dominant language at a later point). The culture carries over into lifestyles - notions of costs, benefits, and maximisation spill over from work into private life. It is a culture of the elite.

Then there is the 'faculty club' culture. Essentially this is the globalisation of the western intelligensia. It's about feminism or environmentalism. It is not carried by international business, but by international academic networks, non governmental organisations, and international foundations. It is also an elite culture, though there are those who aspire to it from the lower echelon of cultural enterprises.

The other two areas are somewhat different cultures, being less organised. One of course is popular culture. This is a case of cultural hegemony demonstrated not just in outward behaviour - clothes that are worn, films that are seen, music that is listened to - it carries a significant freight of beliefs and values. He suggest the attraction of rock music is not just about a particular preference for loud music and athletic dancing. Rock music also symbolises a whole cluster of cultural values concerning self expression, spontaneity, released sexuality, and defiance of the alleged stodginess of tradition. The irony is the people in charge of the globalisation of popular culture are members or aspiring members of the Davos elite, but the consumers of these cultural exports are a vastly broader population.

The fourth culture Berger calls evangelical Protestantism, especially its Pentecostal version. (You can get there from fear because it provides hope). It brings about radical changes in the relations between men and women and the upbringing and education of children, and in attitudes towards traditional hierarchies. These new Protestants begin to act like sober, responsible, 18th century English Methodists. It is notable that most of the persecution of Christians recently publicised by human rights organisations in China and the Islamic world, and sometimes in Latin America, has been directed against evangelical Protestants. There's nothing new about religious persecution because of its conflicts with indigenous or imposed culture, and martyrs always assist its cause.

A NOTE ON ENGLISH?
It occurs to me that in most of these Berger cultures we have a world made in English. English has become a medium of communication, and one does not use a language innocently. Every language carries a weight of values, of sensibilities, of approaches to reality - all of which insinuate themselves into the consciousness of those who speak it.

And it may occasionally give rise to some very clever humour. I remember being in the Office of the Principal Officer of the United Nations Mid Decade Conference for Women in Copenhagen in 1980, when the telegram was received from the Saudi Arabian delegation to say that no one would be attending to represent Saudi Arabia. The telegram was addressed to the Conference for Decadent Women.

Globalisation with human rights is a fundamental part of the cultural planetary movement of ideas that can generate new cultural hybrids and new global cultural networks. Its not all bad. The gay community, for example, has its own internationally recognised signs, the ubiquitous rainbow flag, or the pink triangle. The word 'gay', an English word, is used in almost every country to label the identity. It is borrowed because most languages do not have positive acceptable words for describing a western kind of gay identity.

IS THERE A GROWING ECONOMIC HOMOGENEITY?
It can be said that large economic and political institutional cultures are becoming more homogeneous. There aren't as many alternatives and regime types given the nature of the global economy. AND ALSO GIVEN THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY! There are only so many ways that a political system can be organised to make it democratic, or an economic system can be organised to make it viable and competitive. On a cultural level its clear that there is real resistance to economic homogenisation.

However, there is not only one way to run an economy. Every country has its own deeply held and specific cultures. Economics likes to overlook this because it claims to provide a 'scientific' theory of economic behaviours that is culture independent. It always helps to remember that economics is a social science, just as politics is. In Seattle, in Prague, in Davos, antiglobalisation forces have been making their presence felt at the same time we have seen actions by the G7 and the United States that demonstrate that intervention and protectionism are no longer dirty words. They have propped up the Euro; there have been efforts to push down the oil price and to control currency imbalances, they have protected primary produce. The importance of these actions is that they legitimise intervention in other spheres. There is a far greater willingness for action, both individually and collectively, to tackle market imperfections and market failures.

By now everyone knows there is a problem with globalisation. Things aren't working out the way they were supposed to when the grand design was outlined. There is a bit more humility and a greater willingness to accept that those who have been warning about the nasty side effects of one size fits all might have a point.

The renaissance of politics is perhaps the most important recent development. Civil society and good old fashioned democracy and participation are making it clear to governments that nation states and the planet's future can not be entrusted to the market or left in the hands of corporations. Choices are to be made and they are political choices. It's still a problem that governments tend to listen to the voices of business, but nearly all of humankind's great leaps forward have been as a result of pressure from civil society.

Local cultures have also taken on renewed vigour and significance as political movements promote local culture and local identity. It's not all peace and light: in the post-cold war world local culture has often replaced ideology in politics, as the rise of fundamentalist movements reflects. In politics one of the things that we are seeing is the increased intensity of cross cultural interactions, a chaotic pattern of hybrid formations that certainly are not universal and transcend any suggestion of homogeneity.

IS THERE A SPECIAL TENSION BETWEEN CULTURE AND ECONOMICS?
There a tremendous tension between culture and the market. We can not quantify culture. There have certainly been efforts to quantify the market value of culture: the Creative Industries exercise undertaken by the first Blair government is a case in point. In attempts to quantify culture, the costing exercise becomes a collecting together of what is known, identifying gaps in the data and the accuracy of what is there, but so much is always left out of the equation. Cultural institutions have other social objectives, and key elements of economic performance needed in terms of growth statistics are not good indicators of our social objectives. Institutions of Performing Arts can be squeezed between the two aims. I have followed with some interest the Guardian Weekly's commentary in respect of the Royal National Theatre, with its recent headline: Market Place Rhetoric has Eclipsed Idealism at the Royal National Theatre.

The piece spoke of the dilemma facing many directors of artistic institutions struggling to survive in a low and under funded culture. It said that "too often Britain's big institutions the National and the Royal Shakespeare company speak of 'production' and 'strategies' rather than the burning importance of the works themselves". The story was about Sir Trevor Nunn's alleged earnings from My Fair Lady and other productions which were destined for Drury Lane along with seeing South Pacific and Oklahoma on Broadway and Glenn Close in A Streetcar Named Desire. All of these were seen inside the National as potentially huge earners for both the institutions and for Nunn. The commentator, Michael Billington asked, "isn't the need to embrace world drama just as sacred a duty as that of balancing the books, and is a Broadway transfer the ultimate theoretical goal".

What happens in the tension is an attempt to be seen as credible in the market. Cultural institutions choose to, or are co-opted to, or feel they have to, play the market game. I'll give you a couple of examples of how that is played.

Julie Brans Peeler is the Director of the National Arts Marketing Project of the Arts Marketing Centre in Chicago. She reports: "Unlike industries dominated by major players, arts organisations are small and fragmented. Without a single dominant voice they get lost, but they serve their communities and in total are a surprisingly big part of local economies. The arts in Illinios are larger than farming and trucking, but until you start evaluating and measuring you can't say that. Well, some people thought that art subsidies were a waste of money, people did not contest subsidies for trucking or agriculture because they were not so visible. (Of course under the WTO such subsidies shouldn't be available for trucking or agriculture). No one argues about paying farmers about not to milk their cows and its to do with visibility in a budget. The Arts Organisations to do impact studies and they get good at finding money from small business administration or doing cultural tourism initiatives". I'm sure many of you are familiar with this approach.

Suzie Hargraves is Director of West Yorkshire Arts Marketing, part of a national network in the UK. She reports that arts organisations are learning to speak the language of educators or politicians. "Unlike Europe, where the arts were heavily subsidised, in many English speaking countries the arts appeared to be less highly valued or supported by governments." The press runs campaigns about subsidies being a waste of money, but employment within the arts, and surveys of who attends, show one of the biggest industries in the U.K. The U.K. music industry alone is worth more than steel or pharmaceuticals put together".

SO WHAT'S THE FUTURE FOR CULTURE IN A MORE GLOBAL MARKET?
For many, the exposure to new cultures is exciting, even empowering. For others, it is disquieting, as they try to cope with a rapidly changing world.

Dr. Francis Fukuyama speaking on economic globalisation and culture, noted that "homogenisation, and an affirmation of distinctive cultural identities will occur simultaneously. Many people think that because we have an advanced communications technologies, that will lead to homogenisation on a deeper cultural level. I think that in a way its done just the opposite. Communications technology has allowed both Asians and Americans to see each other more clearly and it turns out they have very different value systems. When people examine a culture, they pay too much attention to aspects like the kinds of consumer goods that people buy, that's the most superficial aspect of culture.

In a celebrated 1948 essay "Notes towards the definition of culture" T.S. Eliot predicted that in the future humanity would experience a renaissance of local and regional cultures. At the time his prophecy seemed quite daring. However we have seen in the Balkans, we see in China, we watch in Africa, and in our own countries of Australia and New Zealand: it is not easy to completely erase cultures, however much assimilation is tried, however many children are taken from their homes, however small they may finally be in numbers. Behind them is a rich tradition, and people who practice them - their language, dance, songs, traditional theatrical rituals, art, craft - even in secret.

At the same time, new cultures emerge. For this Congress I have been interested in some of the writing of Fazal Rizvi in Australia, and especially his paper on 'Culture Globalisation and the Possibilities of Multi Culturalism in the Arts'. He writes "recent theories of cultural globalisation suggest that while earlier forms of migration involved the movement of people on a permanent basis, in the era of globalisation, many people are constantly on the move, while others join communities that have already become linguistically and culturally heterogeneous. Contemporary diasporas are less likely to have stable points of origin, clear and final destinations, and coherent group identities. Such a dynamic cultural context has given rise to the so called 'third cultures' in which the stories of movement are best told under the signs of hybridity and cultural melange rather than cultural adaptation. The cultural politics of hybridisation does not have a centre, it is both fluid and contingent. In contemporary nation states, through successive waves of migration, diasporas no longer constitute minority groups within an alien culture, but are increasingly posited as groups with experience in global cultural production well placed to take advantage of the new era. They have skills in the culture realm of ideas. Diasporas score by being able to interrogate the universal with the particular and by being able to use their cosmopolitanism to press the limits of the local. These are not stranded minorities, but people who are able to interrogate the global through the local. Artists have, of course, always been at the vanguard of such an interrogation of new cultural formations; people do belong simultaneously to more than one place or at least imagine multiple vantage points".

And as if to respond to this position as a case study, I came upon an interview with Peter Robinson one of the two New Zealand artists to be represented for the first time at the Venice Biennale. Robinson (and Jacqueline Fraser, the other artist) is a maori of Ngai Tahu tribal descent. Robinson now lives in Germany and has previously represented New Zealand shows at prestigious Biennale in Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, and Lyons. When Robinson first moved to Berlin in 1995 he was asked what sort of reaction his work received. He replied: "It was shattering in a way. I realised when I took my old work over there that it was either being completely misread because it is so specific to New Zealand culture, or read as some form of exoticism. It was branded somehow as outside the global art culture". He said: There have been many shows in Europe that have been about that kind of issue - about post colonial issues, about migration, it's been really great for my profile - but at the same time it's a double edged sword because you get put in a context which is hard to get out of. My interest in exoticism was in thinking about how, while the South Pacific might be exotic to Europe, when you look towards Europe or America from a South Pacific perspective it can be seen the other way. In the past I have looked at how a motive or symbol can be mis-read or be used to manipulate a market. Work can be seen to be about negotiating between a national and global culture as an individual. It's personal because you always consider the market place in terms of the way your work is received and read, and on the other hand the work takes its own course. Now the work I am doing has moved away from issues to do with Maori identity and exoticism. It's not that those issues aren't important, but what I can say about them has taken its course. When I left those subjects I was left with nothing, an abyss, so I decided I'd make this abyss - the theme of everything and nothing - the subject of my work, which leads me towards the writings of Steven Hawking and some existentialist philosophy. The interesting thing, however, is that while I now have a universal subject I find that whether you can help it or not its always going to have a New Zealand accent to it. I think that no matter how hard I try there is always going to be a New Zealand subtext.

FINALLY
As Mahatma Gandhi expressed so eloquently early last century, "I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any".

BIOGRAPHY
In 1975 Dr. Marilyn Waring became the youngest member in the Aotearoa/New Zealand Parliament. At the age of 24 she became Chairperson of the Public Expenditures Committee. She travelled to over 35 countries in this capacity and discovered that the rules that governed the finances of her own country were operating worldwide.

Marilyn also discovered that our international accounting systems do not count many things - notably the work of women and the cost of environmental damage.

A feminist economist with a Ph.D. in Political Economy, a development consultant who has worked in more than a dozen countries, a farmer, and an activist for "female human rights", Marilyn is currently Associate Professor in Social Policy and Social Work at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand.

An often cited author, her first book, If Women Counted: The New Feminist Economics, was the basis of a Canadian National Film Board production entitled Who's Counting? Her latest book is The Three Masquerades: Equality, Work and Human Rights.

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