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436 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

On the one hand, the federal government interpretation in her section of this chapter.)
created the International Network on Cultural This subject is raised to protect against ‘glob-
Policy (INCP) in 1998 which, by 2003, alization’ and its anticipated effects of
brought together 68 ministers from around homogenization. Therefore, discourse on
the world, each with responsibility for diversity is constructed on feared power rela-
cultural policies. tionships, whose effects are worrisome, both
On the other hand, Québec was closely in terms of identity and in terms of economics.
associated with negotiations on the Interna- Throughout the corpus, the ‘United States’
tional Instrument on Cultural Diversity constitutes the spectre of globalization and is
6
(IICD) that resulted in the adoption of the seen as the home of the feared cultural homog-
Convention on the Protection and Promotion enization. Doubtless, the discourse about
of Diversity of Cultural Expressions on the recognition of global cultural diversity
October 20, 2005, during the 33rd session of would not be experiencing the same growth
the General Conference of UNESCO. were it not for this dread of a worldwide
My reflections are based on a comparative American cultural homogenization which is
analysis of three distinct corpuses of institu- promoted by commercial hegemony.
tional discourse about culture: (1) all of the The ‘fundamental issue of cultural diver-
seven official policies on culture produced in sity’ in the field of cultural policies is explic-
Québec from 1961 to 2000 (see Pietrantonio, itly presented as the protection of the identity
2002); (2) the weekly press releases of the of peoples from ‘commercialization’. 10
Bureau de la diversité culturelle (Office of Throughout this ‘dossier on cultural diver-
Cultural Diversity, BDC), which became, in sity’, it is a question of promoting nations’
mid-May 2004, the Secrétariat gouverne- distinctive characters. In the three corpuses
mental à la diversité culturelle (Government examined the unit of meaning of cultural
7
Secretariat for Cultural Diversity) (for 2000 diversity is, for the most part, based on the
and the period from 2003 to 2004) – this unit idea of a cultural homogeneity of nations
has, in fact, operated the Internet site for the which enable nations to differentiate them-
Ministère de la culture et de communications selves from one another. In other words,
du Québec (Québec Ministry of Culture diversity is mainly used in the sense of
and Communications) since January 2000; 8 promoting national cultures, which are, how-
and, finally, (3) the annual reports of the ever, assumed to be ethnically homogeneous.
International Network on Cultural Policy This entails a new register in the institutional
9
(INCP), a network in which Canada contin- usage of the concept of diversity. However, in
ues to play an important role, after having the case of the INCP, the discourse on the
initiated it. It has held an annual conference protection of national culture seems con-
since its inception in 1998 and is undergoing comitant with the need to take account of
some expansion since only 40 countries were intra-national cultural diversity, which
members in 2001. In each of these three cor- strongly distinguishes this corpus from the
puses, the discourse on culture is constructed other two. In Québec, such a new usage of
in relation to an international reference point. the notion of diversity in the wake of global-
Indeed, we could say that this has also been ization takes little account of intra-national
the case for cultural policies in Québec since ethnic diversity. Intra-group ethnic diversity,
they were first developed during the 1960s. in terms of categories based on social class,
Thus, we can argue that since 1998, in gender, age, etc., is, in fact, ignored in the
institutional milieus dealing with culture, it whole corpus, except for what constitutes
has been the question of regulating global Québec’s cultural policy of 1978. 11
commerce and trade that has permitted the It is worth mentioning that until very
international deployment of the discourse recently; i.e., less than 10 years ago, in both
on diversity. (Denis presents a similar Canada and Québec, the concept of diversity