Limits to Liberalization: Local Culture in a Global Marketplace

Extract

Limits to Liberalization: Local Culture in a Global Marketplace, Patricia Goff, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007, pp. viii, 197.

This book is written from a concern that liberalization of the cultural sector will lead to cultural loss, the dilution of unique national idioms and the diminishment of diversity. This creates the need for governments to find ways and means of reducing or offsetting the cultural costs of globalization. The dynamics under consideration here are “the appearance on the trading agenda of culture industry regulation and the ensuing tendency to mischaracterize a defensive effort to offset the perceived contemporary costs of liberalization as veiled economic protectionism” (84). Accordingly, the book's focus is on government efforts to implement culture-sustaining policies in the face of condemnation by trading partners who view such measures as discriminatory trade practices. In this connection, two case studies are examined: measures taken by Canada within the context of the NAFTA agreement and by the European Union, in particular by France, in the context of the GATT.