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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 April 2000 Issue No. 476 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 April 2000 Issue No. 476
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Summit Features Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Discussions of the impact of globalisation are seemingly endless and there always seems to be a new meeting or seminar to discuss the issue. Last Saturday the National Council for Culture, Arts, Literature and Information discussed a report -- Cultural Plurality and Globalisation -- while on 8 April the Supreme Council for Culture is organising a seminar under the title Cultural Institutions under the Shadow of Globalisation.
A member of the National Council, I was, of course, present at the meeting. Indeed, it fell upon me to present the report. Some interesting points were included which indicated that, on the whole, the compilers were less than antagonistic to the process. The whole gist appeared to be that if you can't beat them, then join.
The report referred to the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development, which convened in Stockholm between 30 March to 2 April 1998, and to the subsequent meeting held in Canada in June of the same year. Central to the Stockholm conference's position was Our Creative Diversity, a UNESCO report prepared by a commission headed by Javier Perez De Cuellar, former secretary-general of the United Nations.
I have dealt with that conference in an earlier column. More interesting, now, is to examine the response to the issue by the Egyptian National Council.
The Stockholm conference emerged with a simple, but difficult proposition -- space must be made in which people might create. Cultural policies, according to the conference "may become the means which allow this creative freedom."
The participants -- 2,400 of them -- came from 149 governments and 23 intergovernmental organisations, 135 NGOs, foundations, voluntary associations and other civil society entities, as well as including individual artists, scholars and experts.
This broad base of participants were unanimous in their call for the mobilisation of governments, civil societies and artists. This, as was explained in the final report of the conference, is necessary to ensure "that the gap between those having the resources to continue to re-create their languages and culture and those that don't have them, does not continue to grow; that the world doesn't split between the info-poor an the info-rich."
The conference warned against excluding the info-poor -- especially women, minorities and indigenous peoples -- from the development of cyber-history. Artists and writers should be able to continue to concentrate creativity in their minds and hands to produce the "symbols of tomorrow, especially in developing countries."
The conference called for the creation of "cultural citizenship" in such a way as to allow for the peaceful resolution of conflicts among culturally different peoples and, finally, to explore the seemingly boundless possibilities that new forms of communication and expression place in our hands.
Very noble aims, indeed, out of which was born the idea of culture for peace. Culture has now become an international issue exhibiting more and more complexities of scale, time and interaction as concrete policies and actions are delineated.
Within this rather ambitious framework, the National Council produced a number of concrete and courageous recommendations which I shall try to summarise: the creation of a new concept of the modern state, taking into consideration traditions on the one hand and the great technological developments on the other; broadening the horizon of cultural policy and making it a cornerstone of development while safeguarding cultural diversity since it helps to free creative abilities; increasing cultural pluralism; supporting the right to publish a plurality of opinion; calling upon the audio and visual media to provide access for the diversity of local cultures under the umbrella of the national culture.
The series of recommendations reflects a rather liberal stand, calling for objective political study across all levels of education and for political activities to be permitted in the universities.
