Chapter 18 | Mircea Vultur

(continued)

In that context we can ask the following question: what are the mechanisms which impose elements of the American culture today on the world, especially in Eastern Europe, in a situation, as Robin Higham has observed, in which the USA has no national diplomatic cultural policy, but only a private one, which is not enclosed in pre-established norms? One of the reasons of course is the fascination of Eastern Europe with America. Apart from that, there is certainly a link between the characteristics of American cultural production and its dissemination. If, during the forty-five years of Soviet domination of Eastern countries, artistic expression was judged through the lens of communist ideology, today judgement is through the market. In a market situation, individual choice prevails. From that point of view, the force of the American cultural production rules world culture. The strength of American culture is based on the fact that it is centered on promoting not the modes of expression of a given community or a nation, but on the modes of expression of the individual. American culture represents the unceasing production and destruction of the meaning of life by individuals, not by a collectivity. One can say that America can be found in all the cultures of the world, since the whole world recognizes itself in good measure through its cultural production.

2.4 cultural policies and the role of the state in the building up of identity

More than one author has underlined the fact that smaller societies resist homogenization by promoting identity through cultural policies. What one finds in the views of a number of researchers is that the governments of smaller societies like Canada and Québec have been successful in developing policies for preserving and asserting an identity threatened by the superpower that is the United States. These smaller societies fear becoming a caricature of the American cultural model, which will impose its language, and its ways of thinking and creating. The fact is that today identity is dependent more and more on the State, which has replaced the traditional structures of social regulation.

But in Eastern Europe, cultural policies intended to promoting identity by the State are rejected since they had been largely used by communist regimes to legitimate their power. In smaller Eastern European societies, in order to legitimate its actions, the State has manipulated the feeling of identity. Individuals and social groups were not in a position to define themselves freely. The structures of State power assigned identities to individuals, in conformity with a unifying idea of social organization that was able to impose the logic of domination. Eastern Europeans have lived the terror of legitimating identity, instilled by the controlling institutions of the collectivist hegemonic society, in order to extend their domination over individuals.

Under those conditions, American cultural hegemony is seen by the smaller Eastern European societies as an element of de-communization and the result of modernization. The protection of the collective identity is not seen as a positive phenomenon, but as a means of delaying modernity at the price of economic, political and cultural stagnation. The discourse against globalization because of the protection of cultural identity is thought of as lying on a congealed idea of culture, based on the principle that no society can remain identical throughout time. When facing a possible institutional offensive to promote identity, Eastern European societies argue that this strategy can crush the individual who stresses his own originality in favour of belonging to a collectivity.

I think it is pertinent to question the intervention of the State to promote cultural identity, in that it ascribes a certain identity to members of a given society. This questioning does not consider the pertinence of State intervention inasmuch as it respects identity elements emerging from the overall social body, as well as, as Diane Saint-Pierre pointed out in her paper, the role and the impact of institutional actors involved in the construction of identity and also the values and the beliefs they convey. I see that wherever we are, the State tends to place special value on some cultural and identity elements but, in so doing, it decontextualizes those elements and places them outside history. However, from a cultural point of view, value is an historical concept; it is subject to a temporal setting. This is why one should re-interpret the meaning of cultural participation and lay new foundations for the relationship of the State to culture based on the recognition of more universal identities and of cultural norms adapted to the context of globalization. One should have a non-paternalistic eye on cultural participation, where individual autonomy is more important, and where the subject is defined more by individual projects rather than by the fact of belonging to a given nation or a particular society. Under those conditions, intellectual discourse about the dislocation of collective cultural values and the condemnation of triumphant individualism, which cultivates the narcissism of the resister, is not relevant any more. Resistance to change is not in itself a moral value, and there is no evidence that some forms of de-setting the relationship to values is the end of any relationships to values. It is only in forsaking the positions of strategists or narcissistic resisters that those responsible for culture in smaller societies can open up space for new settings of culture that the process of globalization has allowed to emerge.

Chapter 18, continued >

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