The French Way (48 page)

The Fifth Republic was willing to put the Uruguay Round at risk in the name of the cultural exception. French resistance, it seems, had less to do with the survival of a profitable economic sector—though that was how the Americans attributed motives—than it had with defending France and Europe from the Americanization of culture. In 1993 Prime Minister Balladur, continuing the tough stance of his socialist predecessors, instructed his negotiators to make no concessions. At home Balladur won wide political endorsement for facing down the United States, and he also gained the open backing of Spain and the tacit support of Germany. On the other side of the Atlantic, President Bill Clinton, who had close ties with Hollywood, took personal interest in the negotiations. Tough bargainers like Mickey Kantor, U.S. trade representative, and Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association ofAmerica, represented the United States at the GATT talks.

The controversy over the cultural exception raised tempers in both Paris and Washington. When President Clinton rejected the principle
of excluding culture, Jack Lang, who had been culture minister when the GATT talks began, warned that the time had come to declare “war” in order to safeguard the nation's traditions, art of living, and culture.
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French officials insisted the cultural exception defended not just their national audiovisual industry but that of all Europeans as well as the cause of global diversity.
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President Mitterrand, speaking in Poland, linked national identity to the freedom to create images and asserted that a nation that abandoned its means of representation to others was “a slave society.”
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There were echoes in this campaign of Jack Lang's Mexico City tirade in 1982 against American cultural imperialism (see chapter 2). European movie directors including celebrities like Pedro Almodovar and Bernardo Bertolucci as well as French professionals like actors Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve and directors Bertrand Tavernier and Alain Corneau demanded protection. Tavernier vented that “the Americans want to treat us the way they treated the Redskins,” and Corneau warned against an American monopoly: “Think of a world in which there is only one image.”
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The prospect of a “world culture” saturated by American movies, television, leisure parks, music, fashion, and food prompted Nicolas Seydoux, the head of Gaumont, the oldest French producer and distributor, to ask whether or not “our children will resemble us[.]”
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Hollywood celebrities like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, who supported a free market for entertainment, squared off against their French colleagues while the former chairman of Columbia Pictures complained, “This is simple protectionism, it's arrogant, as anti-American as you can get. What they don't like is that audiences find American entertainment desirable.”
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What particularly galled American negotiators was that revenue from the tax on box office receipts, over half of which was generated by American films, was diverted to the French cinema industry. Valenti groused about Europeans invoking national identity: “The negotiation has nothing to do with culture unless European soap operas and game shows are the equivalent of Moliere. This is all about the hard business of money.”
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He made the
case for open markets: “I think the people of Europe…should have the right to choose their own television. The audience is king. I want more competition in the market place, less man-made barriers. Let the market forces collide and something better will come out of it.”
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French opponents of the free-trade approach responded: because Hollywood now insisted on some measure of international income from all its productions, the inevitable outcome was formulaic movies depending on special effects and minimal dialogue that would sell in the global market. They thus complained not so much at the takeover of an “American cinema” as they did about the proliferation of a kind of global, standardized image—which they were quick to add was either vulgar or barbaric.
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The result would be that nations like France would be unable to “tell their own story.” The celebrated Greek moviemaker who worked in France, Costa-Gavras, warned that without the cultural exception big Hollywood studios would overrun small independent European producers who, in his eyes, were the most creative sector of the industry.
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Le Monde
added, “In the era of globalized exchange, images…export a style of life, a ‘model' of society. On the terrain of the imagination whoever captures minds also wins at commerce: ‘standard' images, ‘standard' aspirations.”
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Citing commercial gain was a vulgar appeal that the French tried to avoid. Jack Lang asserted, “Cinema is a national art by which one expresses the history and imagination of a country….Cinema is not merchandise.”
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Yet French negotiators like Toscan du Plantier, the head of Unifrance, the cinema's export marketing office, also stressed that tens of thousand of jobs and large revenues were at risk. And the inability of French films to penetrate the American market only fortified the determination of French officials to secure the exemption of the audiovisual sector from the GATT talks. They complained about the unwillingness of American distributors to exhibit French films—a kind of de facto Yankee protectionism. Explaining the apathy of American audiences, Toscan du Plantier grumbled, “Americans don't even
know what the world ‘cultural' means. Hardly ten percent of them are educated in the sense that we use the term in Europe. A film like
The Visitors
is just too complicated for them. It contains references to the Middle Ages that the average American would absolutely not understand: he doesn't imagine a past that existed before him….In fact their cinema has become a kind of giant video game where the family amuses itself.”
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Once again, as in the 1980s when the socialists campaigned against cultural imperialism, the American threat to cultural identity provoked open debate among intellectuals. And many of the earlier discussants stepped forward again, including such stars as Bernard-Henri Levy, Max Gallo, Regis Debray, Mario Vargas-Llosa, and Andre Glucksmann. What set up the debate was a warning by Levy, Glucksmann, and others against letting the GATT dispute revive the old nationalistic demons of anti-Americanism: the poor quality of French films was not the fault of the Americans.
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And the Peruvian-Spanish writer Vargas-Llosa triggered the reaction by charging that the dinosaurs of
Jurassic Park
“do not in any way threaten the cultural honor of the land that gave birth to Flaubert, the Lumiere brothers, Debussy and Cezanne, Rodin and Marcel Carne. They threaten only the band of little chauvinistic demagogues who talk about French culture as if it were a question of a mummy that any contact with the outside world would quickly reduce to ashes.” The denationalization of culture was irreversible, the Latin American author contended; even the French were trying to create films for the world market. Creativity would not be served by bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectuals who arrogated to themselves what was to be viewed or heard; such an approach only served “state parasites,” as one could see in the mountain of inferior movies sheltered as “national culture.”
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Regis Debray, vexed by being labeled a chauvinistic demagogue, answered that there would soon be one vision of the world in circulation, that of the Americans. “The guarantor of pluralism is Europe,” because,
he deemed, the Americans force their vision on the world while they effectively close their movie screens and their broadcasting companies to outsiders: “What's good for Columbia and Warner Brothers is good for the United States, so the question now is whether it's good for humanity.” Debray argued that the application of free trade to the audiovisual hurt weaker producers, citing the Italian movie industry, which produced less than twenty films a year. The stakes were high because “the image governs our dreams and dreams our actions.” He warned that “the monoculture that colorizes imaginations into monochrome” would ignite a global cultural rebellion: “Do you want to convert the planet into a supermarket leaving people the choice between the local ayatollah and Coca-Cola?” Watch out, he warned, because cultural minorities who cannot express themselves will regress into the worst forms of essentialist identities and xenophobia. Debray advised saying no to America since its empire would fade like all the others: “[L]et's at least make sure that it does not leave behind irreparable damage to our reservoirs of creativity.”
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Max Gallo, historian and former socialist deputy, joined Debray, insisting that defending national culture was not tantamount to acting as a chauvinistic demagogue or subscribing to anti-Americanism; it represented a rejection of the United States as the global cultural model. Gallo argued singular national cultures composed European culture, unlike the United States, where culture was supposedly divorced from history, locale, and memory—thus
Jurassic Park
was a world film whereas
Germinal
belonged to a nation. The cultural exception would save culture from being treated as merchandise for a global supermarket. “Is this anti-Americanism,” he asked, “or defense of pluralism?”
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“Dear Regis,” Vargas-Llosa replied in turn, adding that it was Debray's fantasy that a conspiracy of Hollywood multinationals could corrupt French tastes when in fact television audiences everywhere preferred soap operas and reality shows to high culture. Market capitalism had integrated the world, not socialism, and this process could
not be reversed by a return to the “tribal era.” As a former backer of Fidel Castro turned liberal, Vargas-Llosa warned the strategy of the cultural exception led straight to state control. “Dear Mario,” Debray responded, dismissing the accusation of anti-Americanism as the latest way to excommunicate an opponent. “I refuse America as a model and I feed off its culture. Euro Disney bores me and California enchants me.” Of course, conspiracy was not responsible for America's cultural imperium, he held; it followed the natural momentum of empire. The market was no solution because competition between Hollywood and, say, the African cinema would asphyxiate the latter. The one-time adviser to Francois Mitterrand concluded that nations are not prehistoric tribes but contemporary collectives of memory and belonging that the market would like to eradicate. If we didn't build a dike against American culture we would all end up with the same perspective, heading down “the same asphalt road toward the future.”
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While the likes of Vargas-Llosa and Debray debated the merits of the cultural exception, French negotiators nearly blocked the Uruguay Round as it neared completion in late 1993. It was a game of high-stakes poker that pitted the United States against France over a hugely profitable entertainment business. The American negotiator, Mickey Kantor, was unable to persuade the Europeans that they should ease their quotas on American movies and television programs or to lift levies on movie tickets and videocassettes. What strengthened the hand of the French negotiators was a domestic political consensus. From socialists like President Mitterrand to Gaullists like Prime Minister Balladur and, on the far right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the political community united behind the cultural exception. On this aspect of cultural policy the Left and the Right stood together. Or as Jacques Toubon boasted, “Culture transcends political divisions here. It is part of the national consensus of our country.”
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The European Community, at least tacitly, backed France against the United States. At times the Germans became impatient with French stubbornness, but they nonetheless sided
with their friends. In the end the French had their way and the audiovisual sector was excluded from the final agreement. The issue was thus not settled; it was put off to the future. President Clinton expressed his disappointment over what was an agreement to disagree, while Valenti complained that the Europeans had turned their back on the future and Kantor declared that the United States would continue the fight. Lang lauded the exclusion of the audiovisual sector as “a victory for art and artists over the commercialization of culture.”
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Audiovisual issues remained a standoff for the rest of the 1990s. French officials sought stricter enforcement of quotas and removal of the “where practicable” clause, a strategy that garnered support from some other European countries like Belgium, Spain, and Portugal. But in 1995, when the EU reviewed the Television without Frontiers directive, France could not overcome the opposition of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and others to strengthening restrictions. Lang, who had orchestrated the 1989 directive, complained that this setback showed that “the majority of Europeans will lie down as soon as the United States gives the order.”
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Meanwhile, the United States was confident that new technologies like satellite broadcasting, video-on-demand, digitized compression, Internet streaming, and other new forms of information communication would eventually render whatever quotas imposed by the cultural exception obsolete.
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They would simply bypass such barriers. Valenti admitted after the GATT talks that the real issue had not been film subsidies but the free entry of new technologies like pay-per-view and revenue sharing from levies on sales of blank videocassettes.
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The two sides continued to agree to disagree.

The issue resurfaced at the end of the decade during negotiations of an international agreement designed to end discrimination against foreign investment, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Once again France led the Europeans against the accord, fearing weaker rules would limit the state's ability to protect areas like the environment and culture.
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And once again there was a mobilization
of the interested parties, like celebrities from the arts including movie directors as well as various nongovernmental organizations concerned with antiglobalization. There were representations to the government, and in 1998 the Jospin administration withdrew from the talks in order to defend the cultural exception and the system of domestic subsidies. Philip Gordon and Sophie Meunier concluded, “The catalytic role played by protestors in the failure of the MAI was perceived as the first major success for France's anti-globalization movement.”
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It was not until the Inter-Governmental Conference at Nice in 2000, however, that the principle of the cultural exception was officially recognized by the EU.
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The French paid a heavy political price for this victory, but they had finally secured its triumph.