IS THERE A FRENCH CULTURAL MESSAGE?
The question arises by default when we realize that culture, far from being absent from Brussels politics (subsidies for the cinema or translation, heritage labeling, “European cultural capitals,” Europeana Digital Library, etc.), does not provide much inspiration for the European project. The Treaty of Rome does not even mention the word “culture,” and the awareness of a European cultural unity is being defined only gradually as the cultural policies of the Union are developing. Too heavy-handed in its aspiration to universality, guilt-ridden under the weight of inquisitions, persecutions, colonialism, the Holocaust, and the Gulag? We lack the intellectual and political audacity that would affirm the specificity of European culture, of its limits and its crimes, but also of its progress and its future. This is where the sense of a “French cultural message” takes on an added depth and urgency: can the voice of France help promote a new European cultural consciousness while preserving its own national singularity?
The UNESCO Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) sketches a vision of multicultural civilization by proposing to preserve and promote the cultural singularities of all the peoples in the world as an antidote to this new banality of evil, which is the automatization of minds bent by the globish of globalization. But who is aware of this initiative that works not in favor of the diversity of skin color and of communities but rather with and through them, for the diversity of cultural expressions? Certainly not French public opinion. France itself, which energetically promoted it with Canada, has trouble applying it. And yet it is a French cultural message that serves as the basis for this vision perceived and adopted by the signatories of the convention.
Could we contribute to the renewal of international culture that the constructive criticism of globalization is asking for? The French conception, rooted in the Enlightenment and driven by republican goals, respects diversities while affirming that they are translatable, interpretable, and sharable; it runs counter to the universalism that trivializes cultural traditions and modern expressions, counter to identarian communities that juxtapose social and cultural entities. This third way that France is actively championing on the international scene remains poorly understood by its very promoters—the French—as well by their annoyed partners. It deserves to be spelled out. Leaving aside all nationalistic patriotism, the time has come to liberate national identity and assert the specific contributions of our country in various areas of social life: cultural development, its role in the history of the French, and its international value that other peoples can adopt and adapt for themselves.
DESIRE FOR FRANCE AND FOR FRENCH
While our investigation has brought out the deep malaise that touches all the sectors of foreign cultural life, the cultural message of France and the intercultural vocation of Francophony remain respected, desired, and expected realities. You think that the French language is declining in the world, and you are not entirely wrong. But do you know that, unlike English, which is regressing in certain regions of the United States in favor of Spanish, French has never been so widely spoken, and the number of its speakers is increasing for demographic reasons both in France and in Africa? Some 115 million people use French every day, or 7.7 percent more than in 1990, and 61 million use it “partially.” According to some demographic projections, the population speaking the language of Voltaire could increase fourfold in fifty years, thus attaining more than 8 percent of the world population.
You are persuaded that the International Organization of Francophony (OIF) is a colonial legacy, and Francophony is a circle of local, not really respectable, potentates. Do you know that the OIF has fifty-six state and government members and fourteen observers divided into three categories: those whose inhabitants use French as their native language; those for whom French is the official or second language (mainly sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb); and countries that have “chosen Francophony” for whom French is a foreign language but who identify with the respect of diversity embodied in France’s cultural and/or political message (since 1995, Eastern European countries but also countries in Asia and the Pacific)?
Did you know that Radio France Internationale (RFI), which you hear only in the Parisian area and which is going through an alarming crisis, records its highest audience ratings in … China? That with French aid the Polytechnic Tongji University in Shanghai has created an “Academy of European and Chinese Cultures and Religions” so that graduate engineers of this prestigious institution “do not become suicide bombers when they encounter a staff or social conflict,” explains the director of Tongji? That the Alliance Française in New York welcomes new demographics, delighted to discover programs where the charms of Vaux-le-Vicomte neighbor the surprises of our neighborhoods’ urban cultures? And that in Florida the only place Americans can see Spanish, Italian, Mexican, and German films is the French Cultural Center? Because the “cultural exception” à la française tries to balance old and new, and that is applied to cultural expressions of all nations whose diversity it respects. In the best of cases.
I can hear the objections already: can one speak of “message” without bordering on arrogance that the misunderstanding about the “French exception” did not fail to worsen (when it was precisely about “excluding” cultural expressions from consumer products)? Contaminated by the ongoing homogenization and trivialization, a harmful “declinology” is at work, pushing “politically correct” thinking to challenge the creativity of nations within multiculturalism. Let us not give in to this defeatism: let us take on the innovative potentials of heritage, notably linguistic, in and by which cultural, regional, and national diversities are constituted, as well as the republic’s respect and promotion of individual and collective liberties.
IDENTITY AT STAKE …
Of the multiple facets of the French cultural message, I will take up two traits that underlie and could consolidate the consciousness of a European cultural unity: the challenge of identity and multilingualism; and two courses of action that enrich but also handicap France’s cultural politics: the role of the State and the importance of networks.
Running counter to current politics where identarian certitudes always and still pave the way for new and maybe nuclear wars, Europe—and France within it—is the space of an identity (national, ethnic, racial, religious, sexual) that a growing number of people experience less and less as an absolute and more and more as an anxiety or a question, which does not preclude them from being proud of it and claiming it as their own. Because the “I’m French, a woman, a teacher, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, mother, ecologist, etc.” is a refuge that comforts me. I prefer “to be part of it” when I do not know how “to be” simply, when I do not know who I am and even if I am: belonging is a transient antidepressant but no longer an absolute value. Subject to question, national identity is lived more and more here in France and in Europe as a living organism, evolving, constructible-deconstructible, an indefinitely surpassable identity, one that resists identarian and community tensions and ethnic and religious clashes in this beginning of the third millennium. A distinctive trait of the cultural message of France in Europe and of Europe in the world: it is a defused area of peace, fragile, never safe from fundamentalisms of all kinds but the only livable and enviable one, because its culture questions identity certitudes by trying, for better or for worse, to share them.
Where does this come from?
I hear the Jewish God’s words: Eyeh hasher eyeh (Exodus 3:14), “I am who I am” (or “I am what I is,” or “I am who I will be,” taken up by Jesus according to John 8:24: “You will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I Am who I claim to be, you will die in your sins”). It means that “I” does not define me, “I” am an unrepresentable and eternal return on my very being.
I also find it in the journey as defined by Saint Augustine, for whom there is only one country, one precisely of journey—In via, in patria:1 a journey indistinctly spiritual, psychic, geographic, historical, and political.
It guides Montaigne’s pen in his Essays devoted to the identarian polyphony of the Self: “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment plays its own game.”2
The mixture of the Greek miracle with the three monotheisms—Christianity with its Jewish substratum and its Muslim graft—has now led to secularization, this phenomenon unique in the world: nowhere else has the “thread of tradition” been severed as in France and, thanks to France, in Europe. This has opened the way to an extraordinary liberty, unknown anywhere else. But one laden with risks and, just as unheard of, that gave birth to Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms.
Yet France and Europe are neither a beautiful Harlequin’s cloak nor a hideous grinder of victimized strangers. No, a coherence has crystallized out of its diversities which, for once in the world, asserts an identity while opening it to its own critical examination and to the infinite potentialities of others. After having fallen prey to identarian dogmas to the point of crimes, and perhaps also because it fell prey and then analyzed it better than many others, a French-and-European “we” is in the process of emerging today, one that brings to light a conception and practice of identity as a questioning anxiety. And it is not because voters lacking purchasing power and threatened with unemployment shun the European elections, sabotaged by the political class itself, that this mutation of civilization is not making progress: slowly, with difficulty, but definitively.
… AND MULTILINGUALISM
Alongside this identity questioning that asserts itself against the tide of always threatening identarian clashes, Europe is a political entity that speaks as many languages as, if not more than, the countries that make it up. This multilingualism is the core of the cultural diversity to be respected—with national characters—and to exchange, intermix, and cross. The least one can say is that France is late in joining the movement. Why?
European linguistic diversity could generate in the long run a plural psychic space, because it is trilingual, quadrilingual, multilingual, and able to challenge the global English bilingualism imposed by globalization.
On the other hand, the French show notorious difficulty in acquiring fluency in foreign languages. This stems less from an alleged and imaginary “inaptitude,” often advanced to explain this failure, than from a persistent deficiency in teaching in this area, as well as an absence of a proactive policy able to break the still tenacious debilitating remainder of a “delusion of grandeur.” Plurilingualism is no longer a utopia: would it not be a concrete and nuanced remedy for the latest versions of trivialization and totalitarianism? Indeed, the stranger is different from one who is not one insofar as she speaks another language: this is now the case for any European passing from one country to another, speaking his or her country’s language along with that/those of others. We can no longer escape the condition of stranger that adds to our original identity and becomes the double of our existence. The French worship their mother tongue, more passionately than other peoples worship theirs, and it keeps them from adopting a foreign idiom with which they can create a place of life and thought equal to French. Yes, this attachment to native speech has many connections to the current strong tendencies for diversity that are shaking up the uniformism of globalization, for better or for worse.
REINVENTING FRANCOPHONY
Indeed, a hallmark of French culture lies in the close links that the country’s history has forged between various cultural expressions and the French language itself. The French Academy Dictionary and the enthusiasm for literary prizes are striking examples of this attachment that makes our literary culture a privileged place of thought, fields in general having to do with philosophy or theology. From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment until today, the conversation on language and the profusion of literary experimentation have become the laboratory of this “French exception” called secularism. This alloy, which makes language and literature almost sacred in France, and at the same time calls for the universal respect of others, is unique in the world. The desire for the French language persists through globalization perceived as a way of being in the world (subjective experience, taste, social and political model, etc.).
And yet the very term Francophony has become a trap. Younger generations with immigrant backgrounds as well as those of French origin mistrust it; writers challenge the discriminatory risks (what difference is there between “French” literature and “Francophone” literature?); political personalities want figures. Concepts and institutions of Francophony must be reinvented for it to become an important factor of social cohesion within the country and an intercultural message vehicle for the world. The first step would be to associate the defense and promotion of French culture as a whole in a spirit of diversity, cooperation, and solidarity.
A UNIQUE AND PRESTIGIOUS NETWORK
France’s foreign cultural policy has a tremendous cultural network, unique in the world in its diversity, scope, and functioning. In addition to its Service for Cooperation and Cultural Action (SCAC), headed up by a cultural adviser reporting to the ambassador, this network includes 151 institutes and cultural centers reporting directly to embassies; 449 accredited French schools and lycées hosting more than 253,000 students, of whom only 95,000 are French; the Alliance Française, which today number 1,071 associations now grouped in a foundation and established in 131 countries. Each year they train over 450,000 students and accommodate 6 million participants for French-language events. Their attendance increases by about 4 percent a year; 85 percent of the alliances are independent nonprofits, run by volunteers at their own expense in their respective countries.
Thus constituted, the French cultural network—in its conception, in the management of its organization and players, and in its activities—suffers from an often very traditional approach concerning the world’s sociocultural reality. There are also problems linked to the many places and participants involved as well as to the fact that one cannot be sure how long an action can go on and what its means are, while the British Council and the Goethe Institute offer a single and clear image. Last, and above all, it has to deal with new partners (private, public, and individual) growing exponentially to adapt to a decentralized globalization. Despite its considerable efforts to modernize, the players in foreign cultural policy, its users and recipients, do not clearly perceive its specificity. Given the complexity of cultural options and their promoters on the international scene, the multiple French departments are struggling to be in the center of diplomatic action and to find their specific place that will be attractive.
This network must continually adapt to changes in the world and budgetary constraints. Nineteen centers were closed in Western Europe from 2000 to 2006. But others opened in other regions of the world: in Tashkent and Tbilisi in 2002, Baku in 2003, and Beijing in 2004. The closings are the object of much criticism, especially as all the centers suffer from credit cuts for the overall management of the network (71.9 million euros in 2008, 65.8 million euros in 2009). All the contributors and concerned parties denounce a “disaster-stricken budget” that provides no vision in terms of restructuring.
AN AFFAIR OF STATE
Last—and one of its main features from the monarchy on, including the Enlightenment and the evolutions of the republic—France’s foreign cultural policy was and still is a state affair: it is the foundation of its diplomacy, and the promotion of the French language is at the heart of this arrangement. Concerned about safeguarding cultural autonomy and freedom, other countries have chosen not to include it in diplomatic parameters with the risk of seeing political action reduced to economic and strategic management. It is clear that even before the present financial and social crisis, many countries turned to the French model of foreign cultural management in order to make cultural inroads more effective than the French and better adapted to ongoing changes, while the centralizing French statism borrows rather a more managerial approach relying on agents’ greater responsiveness. At a time of these crisscrossing influences, the French experience of promoting the inclusion of culture in state political action must be even more vigilant than others in preventing political manipulation of cultural creations. For this purpose, France’s cultural message guarantees freedom of expression and pluralism; defends the absolute right of choice and access to knowledge and expertise; encourages the assistance of independent agents capable of multilateral effectiveness; assures the open exchange of ideas; supports the diversity of languages and practices and their translatability in terms of languages but also mutual interaction and acculturation among the various areas of social life. And it contributes—through culture too—to refounding the meaning and practice of democracy.
ENDEMIC FRAGMENTATION AND LACK OF DIRECTION
The advantages of these specific features of the French cultural message only reveal more cruelly the shortcomings that handicap it today. They can be summarized in a phrase: the French cultural policy abroad suffers from endemic fragmentation and lack of direction. This is the consequence of a “cultural Yalta,” already criticized by André Malraux, and by most observers (“to the Culture Ministry goes French culture; to the Foreign Affairs Ministry goes the monopoly of culture abroad”), and this dangerously harms the efficiency of our foreign cultural policy. Only a real interministerial interaction will enable the state agencies and their different agents to properly carry out the various missions under their responsibility. The separation between missions in the traditional Quai d’Orsay and those of the former Cooperation Ministry is still very much alive, in spite of the integration of its activities with the Foreign Affairs Ministry in 1996 and the new general management of globalization, development, and partnerships. Two cultures and management styles coexist: the world remains divided between industrialized and developing countries. The Francophony galaxy is dispersed between the OIF and its agents (in particular the University Agency of Francophony [AUF] and TV5) and the various ministries and their departments. As for the French language, the basis of Francophony, it comes under the General Delegation of the French Language and Languages of France (DGLFLF) under the Ministry of Culture and Communications, in charge of French usage in France and interministerial coordination. Last, the Ministries of National Education and Higher Education and Research play an essential role in teaching French and foreign languages as well as in welcoming foreign students.
Faced with the blurring of boundaries between “home” and “foreign,” culture and economy, and cooperation and development, the administrative fragmentation brings out the inadequacy of our foreign cultural action and calls for political will as well as structural changes. The assessment is that in spite of the undisputed assets and the expectations it raises around the world, foreign cultural action reveals a lack of real direction and a crisis of cultural diplomacy that translate into a strong gap between political discourse and reality; poor interministerial action; insufficient priorities in terms of influence and funding given by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (MAEE); scattered and uncoordinated actions; flowchart reforms in the place of substantive reforms; and steady reduction in budgets.
Foreign cultural policy is more than ever confronted with a recurrent dilemma: Will it be a defensive patch-up job to manage the inexorable decline of an old country? Or will it become, on the contrary, a catalyst for political innovation inside and outside the country? A strategy of “beautiful leftovers” to make us forget the insults of history? Or a search for a “politics of civilization”? Foreign cultural action seems reduced to a relic, to the superfluous, when it is not condemned to a chronicle of death foretold. Indeed, the vigor of the official commitment cannot hide the fuzziness of its project as well as the devaluation of its institutions and its professionals. Without a vision, this assessment spares neither politicians nor public opinion. It is blatant in the obscure pile of administrative “reforms,” “rationalizations,” and “restructuring” of a privileged but fragile sector, burdened by its budgetary cuts that seem to fall on it naturally.
There is a resounding urgency to build a strategic project and to undertake decentralized measures to clarify France’s cultural message and adapt it to the different regions of the world.
BUILDING A STRATEGIC PROJECT
To effectively respond to this situation, it is necessary to reiterate this message and develop an international cultural offensive in priority areas with selected measures that would accompany an active strategy in international media.
Such an international cultural offensive requires first a proactive stewardship at the highest level of the state in order to build a strategic plan and carry out a decentralized action.
It would be helpful to create a Council of Foreign Action for Development and Culture attached to the president of the republic, as there already is for national defense and strategy. And to form an Agency for International Cultural Action.
Some priorities for foreign cultural action could be singled out and implemented: to develop an uninhibited French language and Francophony policy in France and abroad; to provide more content and visibility for the policy of plurilingualism: to effectively organize the teaching of two languages in French secondary school and higher education; to rely more heavily on translation, interpretation, and subtitles; to implement a more dynamic strategy to spread France’s message; to reinforce the place of foreign broadcasting: TV5 Monde, France 24, RFI, and also ARTE and RFO, as well as the legal provision of online content together with books, movies, and artistic exchanges. Last, welcoming foreign students is a major part of France’s cultural message, and its shortcomings continue to worsen the paltry international image of our higher education. We shall not be able to remedy the debacle of the university without an energetic modernization of exchange policies and follow-up of foreign elites, moving from a passive attitude to a dynamic recruitment supported by international action from autonomous universities. And it is urgent to implement a French-language editorial policy for advanced scientific research to compete with publications in English.
The European Union and UNESCO have put culture at the heart of their policy. France has the necessary means to be more active and imaginative in the implementation of the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.
Intellectuals, prompt to get involved in the Middle East or African conflicts, are in no rush to construct the new European culture by transvaluing the old. Could that be because intellectual discourse is confined to a discourse of confrontation, contradiction, and polemics once it leaves archives and high technology? While, on the contrary, the specificity of European projects and the UNESCO Convention is the wager that the coexistence of diversities is possible. And far from being resigned, weak, or lazy, this coexistence demands the most difficult courage: that of putting one’s self into question and questioning others instead of affronting them and the most subtle of languages: translation. This wager demands time, thrives on peace, and enjoys diplomatic influence more than bellicose pathos.
To contribute to the affirmation of an awareness of European cultural unity, France could take the initiative to create in Paris a permanent European Forum on the theme “What European Culture Today?” with the participation of intellectuals, eminent writers, and artists of the twenty-seven countries representing the European linguistic, cultural, and religious kaleidoscope. Its purpose would be to think of the Union, this plural and problematic body, in terms of history and current events to bring out the originality, the vulnerabilities, and the advantages. It would be interesting to continue the identification of symbolic sites of European heritage and to expand this idea to literary and artistic works, giving an annual title of “European exposition, work, or spectacle” to three achievements of this type in the member states and in third countries. The creation of a European Bookshop containing books translated or in their original languages of all of Europe would go in the same direction.
France should participate right now in UNESCO’s actions and propositions sharing this aim, such as the “Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity” that tries to foster cultural diversity by developing cultural industries, trade, and best practices; the “Observatory on the Artist’s Status” that optimizes training and assures social protection for multicultural exchange participants; and World Anti-Piracy Observatory, likely to help countries who have not signed the convention to join in certain actions in favor of diversity.
France should conceive of measures to sustain this convention in the North/South partnership with the creation of a Global Translation Observatory for translation as the “language of diversity” that opens new potential for human thought; or the organization in Paris of an international college for cultural diversity and plurilingual development, with chairs awarded in turn for intellectuals, writers, and artists from various countries whose work and world renown contribute to informing and promoting these objectives (it could take over from the Universal Academy of Cultures presided by Elie Wiesel).
FRENCH PEOPLE, KEEP TRYING!
In the eighteenth century the Marquis de Sade addressed the French in these terms to appeal to them to rise up against obscurantism and to be republicans. Today the time has come to free up the French by mobilizing them to bring their rethought and renovated cultural experience to the world, like an invitation to found multipolar governance on the respect and sharing of cultural diversities around the world. For culture is neither a remedy against declining purchasing power nor an outlet for social malaise but rather the privileged space where new languages come together, where thought and the meaning of living and taking action are renewed.
Yes, in France’s foreign action for culture and in Francophony, there is room for a message. When emergent movements tempted by totalitarianism and fundamentalism threaten democracies shaken by neoconservative inflations, there is no other recourse to outdated political and administrative models than to mobilize cultural energies, our era having the advantage over the others to look for them not in a civilization but in the sharing of diversities everywhere and among everyone.
Thus understood, France’s cultural message can be used also as an incentive to protect and promote other cultures in the same spirit of appreciation, dignity, creativity, and mutual sharing. French “exceptionality” is not the issue but rather the universal philosophy of cultural experience to forge from our ambitions and our impasses and to encourage other countries to assume and to grow their own specificities.
At a time when the base of the economic and social models that yesterday were still arrogant and supposedly infallible is collapsing and ruining all certitudes, the role of culture in this fragile international context becomes a priority. It is urgent to appeal to governments and public opinion to valorize France’s cultural activities. Since culture has no meaning other than to make incommensurable differences sharable; since it is the exchange among differences that creates this universal complexity called humanity and its world—Frenchmen, Frenchwomen, onward and upward, so as to exist in the world!