The Story of French (54 page)

In the coded world of trade diplomacy, cultural diversity does not refer to multiculturalism or freedom of religion. It relates to the right of nations to support their own culture industry with quotas, subsidies and special laws. The logic of this stance is as follows: Films, books and music cannot be regarded as mere merchandise because their cultural content and symbolic values are central to the identity of nations. So societies must have a right to create regulations that guarantee a place for national production in their home markets. This issue has come up because of the particular economics of culture: Once the production costs of a TV show, a film or a book have been recovered, it can easily be exported at near dumping prices, making sales very profitable. Sounds only fair, but in fact this practice skews the market in favour of countries with the biggest domestic markets, and those whose cultural production is in a major international language. So American TV programs and French books may be sold in Quebec at a fraction of what it costs to produce a local TV program or book.

In 1997 Canada’s minister of heritage, Sheila Copps, united a group of culture ministers from sixty different countries who were in favour of cultural diversity. In 2000, Canadian creative artists’ associations established the Canadian Coalition for Cultural Diversity, which became the main lobby group on the issue. “We knew we could not just be on the defensive and try to justify our policies every time they were challenged at the World Trade Organization,” says Robert Pilon, the executive director. “What we needed was an international accord that took the necessity for cultural policy as a given, not as something for which we should say, ‘Sorry, but….’ The accord had to be on an equal footing with the WTO, and not subject to its rulings.”

Through patient and methodical work, Canada, France and other allies, including Belgium and Senegal, lobbied UNESCO to act on this issue. In 2002 UNESCO decided to create an international Convention on Cultural Diversity that would be binding for signing members—a sort of Kyoto Accord, but for culture rather than the environment. UNESCO got very strong support from the Francophonie, since the concept of cultural diversity was a natural fit with its doctrine of plurilingualism (discussed in chapter 16).

The Convention produced one of the most resounding battles in trade diplomacy in the first decade of this century. The American government, which had quit UNESCO in 1984, rejoined the organization in 2003 to try to water down the accord. But in the end, France and Canada, with the help of Quebec and the Francophonie, managed to convince 148 of the 150 voting countries to sign the Convention—the only opposition came from the United States and Israel. The battle is not over, though. The Convention will not become effective until thirty countries ratify it, and its efficiency will depend on the way it is put into practice in the coming years, all the more so since it contradicts some of the basic tenets of the World Trade Organization, according to which any form of goods or service is merchandise, and any form of subsidy obstructs market forces.

Much of this diplomatic success is owed to the work of the Canadian Coalition for Cultural Diversity, which led a very active campaign at home and abroad, rallying national coalitions for cultural diversity in more than twenty-three countries, and acting as their secretariat. Robert Pilon lobbied heads of state and ministers for the better part of five years. Pilon understood the perspective of the American government better than most. Films, he explained, are costlier than ever, and the American economy, as well as the film industry, depends more than ever on exports. This is increasingly true for TV, books and also music. In all, entertainment exports make the biggest contribution to the U.S. balance of trade. “In my opinion, the American government’s attitude is not motivated by the will to dominate. Hollywood controls eighty-eight percent of the Australian film market and they have ninety-five percent of Canada, but they
need
ninety-six percent, or ninety-seven percent. They won’t stop because they don’t have a choice. But then, neither do we!” Pilon did not single out the Americans for opposing the Convention because he knew that the Convention was also designed to protect Quebec from France, and Latin American culture from Spain’s.

Why can’t culture and language be left entirely to the free market? Over the two years we spent researching this book, we gave careful thought to this question, which is more difficult to answer than it seems. One great myth about the French language, which is entertained by the Anglo-American press in particular, is that France and Quebec are the only societies that have raised language and cultural barriers against the influence of English or against American entertainment (implying that everyone else welcomes them with open arms). This is somehow interpreted as proof that French is on the decline. Yet Canada, Great Britain and Australia all have measures in place to protect their cultural industries against the onslaught of American production—and their cultural production is in English. If such measures are justifiable for culture, it’s hard to understand how they wouldn’t be justified when they concern another language, which is, after all, the main source and vehicle of culture.

In a way, it is easier to explain why French-speaking countries have been at the forefront of language and cultural protection than to explain why protection measures are necessary at all. When it comes to culture and language, there are good practical reasons for countering the laws of the market. The first reason for supporting cultural diversity is that protecting language and culture allows societies to modernize in their own language, without becoming a mental colony of another, more powerful country. Ivan Bernier, a professor of international trade law at Laval University in Quebec, was trained at the London School of Economics and is one of the world’s rare experts on how culture and trade accords are linked. Bernier wrote much of the first draft of the UNESCO Convention. As he told us, “The stakes of cultural diversity are not just a matter of money: They have to do with identity, that is, with the capacity of a Quebecker or a Frenchman to see and interpret the issues of the world in his own terms rather than those of others.”

The second, more practical reason is that strong domestic markets are a great boost to trade. As Robert Pilon explained,

The Convention on Cultural Diversity is not
against
trade. Rather, it sets the stage for more trade—but both ways. At the moment, entertainment is very much a one-way street. But if Quebec exports its music to France, it’s because it is good music, and because we have developed our own domestic base; we cannot export without this. And this domestic base was developed thanks to measures of cultural protection. The Convention will bring a more balanced trade in culture by allowing Quebec, or countries like Burkina Faso or Senegal, to develop their own domestic markets as much as they see fit, and then make their own exports.

And this, as it turns out, is exactly what is improving the global perspective of French.

Chapter 19 ~

Global Hesitations

While we were attending the UNESCO conference on plurilingualism in Tlemcen, Algeria, we were invited for dinner by Abdelkader Tebbal, the most important farmer in the
wilaya
(prefecture) of Tlemcen. Contrary to what we expected, Tebbal and his family didn’t live in a farmhouse in the countryside, but in a lovely house in the lower town. We ate hors d’oeuvres in a living room encircled by cushioned benches, and after dinner drank mint tea in a superb courtyard filled with banana trees and grapevines. Like all Algerian families, the Tebbals talked at great length about the civil war. A former fighter in Algeria’s war of independence and mayor and deputy of Tlemcen in the 1980s and 1990s, Abdelkader was dismayed to see his country then being torn apart by religious fundamentalism. The Tebbals had their share of horrible stories, but they also spoke of their hope. As proof that things were improving, these avowed francophiles happily informed us that Tlemcen’s French Cultural Centre was finally being re-opened after ten years of inactivity.

During dessert Jean-Benoît was surprised to see three copies of a Quebec farming magazine,
Le Québec Agricole,
sitting on the buffet next to the dining table. It turned out that Abdelkader’s son, Mohammed, was a veterinarian who specialized in artificial insemination. The Quebec town of Saint-Hyacinthe is a world-renowned centre in the field, so in some ways it was natural that Mohammed would subscribe to Quebec’s main agricultural magazine. He and Jean-Benoît were soon joking about a Saint-Hyacinthe celebrity, Starbuck, a bull who had fathered more than a quarter of a million cows during his lifetime and whose sperm was so valuable it outlived him for ten years (he fathered another quarter-million cows post mortem). Mohammed dreamed of visiting the Quebec centre one day and seeing their state-of-the-art techniques for himself.

It was certainly odd to find ourselves in a courtyard in Africa surrounded by banana trees talking with an Algerian veterinarian about the fertility of a bull from Saint-Hyacinthe. Yet there we were. The conversation was all the stranger because it couldn’t have happened even a generation ago. But French has globalized tremendously in the past decades. Like English speakers half a century ago, French speakers who live thousands of kilometres apart are busily building networks beyond borders and creating a world of ideas that is spreading across the planet.

It is simply ridiculous to deduce that the world is passing francophones by because they are clinging to their language. English speakers, particularly the British and Americans, have been so effective at building an empire of the intellect that they have branded “global” and “international” as exclusively English-language concepts and virtually synonymous with English: If it’s in English, it is therefore global and international, and if it’s not, it’s local. Since French has a strong reputation as the language of high culture and luxury, people tend to overlook the fact that it is widely used not only in business, but also in research, technology and higher education. The circulation of ideas between different parts of the francophonie today is immense; ideas and concepts travel from Montreal to Casablanca and from Dakar to Brussels—and often skip Paris entirely.

At present the biggest obstacle to francophone globalization is not English, but the French themselves. The French are typically hands-off when it comes to the francophonie. To start with, they don’t consider themselves francophones. Some even consider it insulting to be labelled a francophone. To them,
francophone
is a term that applies to speakers of French who are not French. In addition, the term has colonial undertones to many. As a consequence, the French do not feel as strong a bond of solidarity with other societies that speak their language as one might expect them to.

We have already explained (in chapter 18) that the French don’t see English as a particular threat to their language the way, say, Quebeckers do. Yet paradoxically they do see English as a threat to French’s status as an international language. Actually, many French and francophones alike believe the battle is already over. They claim very seriously that French is finished as an international language and that nobody wants to learn it anymore. Much of the French elite has, at least psychologically, thrown in the towel on French. The Institut Pasteur replaced its famous journal
Les Annales
with an English journal called
Research in Microbiology.
The lure of English is so powerful that Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, issues communiqués and makes speeches to European deputies in English, even though the only English-speaking country in the euro zone is Ireland.

The consequence of this defeatism and of their lukewarm feelings towards the rest of the francophone world is that, in some ways, the French are really letting the world pass them by. But contrary to what the Anglo-American media tend to argue, the world the French are missing out on is a French-speaking one.

The French language began globalizing, in the modern sense of the term, as soon as France’s and Belgium’s colonial empires started crumbling. In order to survive and progress on the international stage, newly independent countries turned to other francophone societies in the world. This sparked a movement to create links between francophones. Quebec journalist Jean-Marc Léger was an early pioneer of the movement when he created the International Union of Journalists from the French-language Press in 1951 (discussed in chapter 16). But many others contributed to the circulation of ideas among francophones as well. One of the early advisors of King Sihanouk of Cambodia was an Acadian diplomat named Alexandre Boudreau. In Quebec, Father Georges-Henri Lévesque opened the first school of social science in the 1930s. He trained most of the up-and-coming generation of reformers who would modernize the Québécois and Acadian societies in the 1960s. Then, in 1963, seeing that his ideas were progressing on their own in Canada, Lévesque accepted an invitation to Rwanda, where he opened the Université nationale in Kigali. He ran it until 1972, and even had the honour—rare for a white man—of being named a
père de la patrie
(father of the country) of Rwanda in 1968.

The earliest and most intense networking among francophones took place in the university world. This new phase in the story of French started when francophone scholars created the Agence universitaire francophone in 1961 (see chapter 16). The results are obvious in the world-wide exchange of technologies and expertise today. For instance, Senegal, a rice-eating nation heavily dependent on imported rice, recently hired a hundred Vietnamese agronomists to carry out a multi-year project to develop a homegrown supply of rice—in French.

In 1999, when we lived in France, Jean-Benoît was surprised to see his hometown, Sherbrooke, in the pages of the French daily
Libération.
The newspaper was reporting on a trend among North African students and postgraduates from France of leaving for Canada to pursue their studies, a phenomenon that evidently incensed the journalist. Actually, this was old news in Sherbrooke, home of the first university to develop an MBA program in French, in 1985, and the first to set up an MBA program in Morocco through a partnership with local scholars. The University of Sherbrooke’s department of medicine now trains doctors in seventy cities across the francophonie: in Belgium, Switzerland and Morocco but also Brazil, Colombia and Chile—including twenty in France. Among Canadian universities it earns the most from its patents, the most famous of which is the voice compression technology that is vital to the cellular phone industry everywhere in the world. As a result, the city of Sherbrooke, population 125,000, is gradually turning into a lively cultural zone where old-stock Catholic French Canadians rub shoulders with Arab and African graduate students, professors and department heads.