Page 204 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media convergence, communications regulation 183

These disputes have been characterised by tensions between the values of
trade versus culture (Harvey 2002). An example is the bilateral free trade
agreement reached between the United States and South Korea in 2007. South
Korea has actively supported its film industry including through screen quotas in
force since 1967. The quotas contributed to the rapid increase in the film market
which created conditions for successful regional exports, part of the so-called
Korean wave. Under pressure from the US government, lobbied by the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Hollywood, South Korea reduced the
screen quota by half, from 146 days to 73 days in 2006 in the lead-up to signing the
free trade agreement in 2007. Korean films regularly outsell Hollywood movies
but cultural protectionism was a casualty of broader trade negotiations. Taiwan
dropped its film import restrictions in 2001 when it joined the WTO, and a decade
on foreign movies took 97 per cent of box office revenues ( Jaffe 2011). China has
faced increasing pressure via the WTO to end its twenty-foreign-films-a-year
quota, and open its cinemas to foreign films. The twenty foreign titles previously
allowed each year would compete with more than five hundred domestic movies.
Even so, they accounted for around 45 per cent of Chinese box office revenues.
In 2010, Avatar grossed £125 million, totally dwarfing the £65 million made by
China’s highest-grossing domestic film ever, Let the Bullets Fly (Jaffe 2011). In
February 2012 China announced it would permit fourteen premium format
films (IMAX, 3D) to be exempt from the twenty-film import quota.
One of the most significant challenges to the powerful, trade-based approach
of the WTO has been the effort to support cultural diversity through UNESCO,
a strategy pursued by countries such as Canada and France, recognising that this
offered potentially more durable protection than that provided by ‘cultural
exception’ exemptions within the WTO. The UNESCO Convention on the
Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO
2005) states that ‘cultural activities, goods and services have both an economic
and a cultural nature, because they convey identities, values and meanings, and
must therefore not be treated as solely having commercial value’. By July 2013
when El Salvador ratified, there were 130 state parties to the Convention, as
well as the European Union, but it lacked the influence of such agreements as
the Kyoto Protocol, which 150 countries ratified. The United States voted against
the Convention, together with Israel, when 148 countries originally supported it;
Australia, Honduras, Liberia and Nicaragua abstained. The Convention does
not formally impinge on states’ agreements under other treaties, including WTO
agreements, so its impact on trade rules remains unclear, but it marked an
important symbolic victory for an updated model of l’exception culturelle, the concept
France introduced into GATT negotiations in 1993. 3

Nation-states and policy

The reconfigurations of state power have been more varied and complex than is
captured by the language of erosion of state power, or transfer of power from states