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.
Although trade negotiations and agreements are usually presented as a question of free trade versus protectionism and therefore a battle between those supporting and those opposing protectionist measures for domestic industry, culture industries do not easily fit into this paradigm. Patricia Goff asserts that culture industry protections reflect legitimate socio-cultural concerns to promote and preserve cultural diversity and collective identity, which are generally given short shrift in most discussions of protectionism. She argues that “government efforts to protect these industries go beyond economic concerns to a desire to uphold the distinctiveness of their respective cultures and to maintain control over what is perceived to be an instrument of power in the (re)production of political community” (18). Such efforts constitute a challenge to the notion that aggregate economic welfare should be the sole criterion for evaluating trade policies, since promoting economic gain takes a back seat to avoiding cultural loss as a key motivator of policy makers in this area (27). Goff insists that the language of protectionism is not able to capture this dynamic, which is better understood as a dimension of the effort to recreate or prolong the “embedded liberalism” compromise. The latter is defined as opening up markets while still retaining the capacity to make public policy choices that may be at odds with commercial or mercantile logic (Lamy, as cited in Goff, 123).
Trade negotiations and agreements, such as the NAFTA and GATT, challenge the legitimacy of culture policies by making aggregate economic welfare the sole criterion for their evaluation. Culture policy makers have been placed on the defensive by a generalized overreliance on the language of protectionism, and the US media industry's “strenuous and thoughtless” objections to other countries' interventions in support of their own cultural identity and diversity (Bhagwati, as cited in Goff, 35).
As detailed by the author, there is a significant body of measures supporting Canadian producers in film, television and radio, periodical and book publishing, and video and sound recording. The Canadian government sought to keep these measures intact by calling for their exclusion from NAFTA, setting aside economic goals to promote domestic culture industries that can contribute to the formation of a distinctively Canadian “imagined community” (47). This identity formation project has been motivated by the reality that there is no single national identity in Canada matching a single nation to a single state, but rather a complex and fragmented polity featuring strong regional loyalties, a plurality of minorities and multiple founding peoples. Government efforts to co-opt these differences and make them synonymous with “Canadian” has made culture industries and policies all that more central (42). Moreover, government support has been particularly important to Canadian culture industries due to a number of daunting commercial challenges these industries face: the small national market for cultural products (further sub-divided by language), proximity to and cultural similarities with the US, the huge advantages the latter enjoys in cultural production relating to simple economies of scale and problems with exporting Canadian cultural products (48–52).
Like Canada, and for some of the same reasons, the EU has sought to promote social cohesion and diversity through support for culture industries. “American domination of culture industries ostensibly interrupts efforts to use them as a means of identity formation by conveying a set of American ideas that … substitute for weak notions of what it means to be Canadian or European” (86). The EU position in GATT talks resembles the NAFTA case “in that goals associated with identity formation and cultural diversity intervene where economic considerations generally prevail. In addition, as is true for Canada, this approach did not emerge during trade talks, but rather dates back, in some cases, several decades” (122).
In conclusion, Goff refers to the arguments set out in her book as an effort to solve the “puzzle” of disagreement over the regulation of culture industries. Most important to the resolution of this long-standing disagreement is a change in discourse, moving away from the current international language of trade negotiation that focuses almost exclusively on protectionism. An alternative vocabulary, that of embedded liberalism, will allow the reconciliation of “the simultaneous pursuit of economic and sociocultural goals” (171).
