François Mitterrand has declared war on Mickey, Madonna, and all-American culture. Bad news, François: Mickey's winning.
François Mitterrand, 78 years old and stricken with cancer, can still play to the gallery. "Europe," declared France's president on a swan-song visit in January to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, "must be more than economic balance sheets and tons of freight. I would say, but I don't want to exaggerate, that it needs a soul.... Europeans," he concluded, "must love Europe."
But a stroll through Paris, city of romance, suggests that all is not well with this love affair. The films in Montparnasse and on the Champs Elysées are American - Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Mrs. Doubtfire - and the hamburgers are McDonald's. Turn to television and Magnum springs to action, the Selleck mustache not quite in time with the French-dubbed soundtrack. Switch to Radio Nostalgie and the songs are by Elvis and the Beach Boys. "Cool" is the cool word among French youth, and the coolest also say "fuck" - a habit picked up from Pulp Fiction. Even newscasters are succumbing to the lure of the American - describing last year's LA earthquake as "pas le Big One."
France's patriarchs are outraged. Europeans' love affair with Europe is threatened by this cultural flirtation with the Americans, and they are determined to put a stop to it - single-handedly if necessary, but with the full weight of the European Union behind them if possible. France's preferred weapon against the cultural invaders of Paramount, CNN, and MTV is quotas. Anything non-European must be strictly rationed. The majority of what appears on television and radio must be European - preferably, French. As for cinema, the French already have a levy on the ticket price, and plow the money straight back into French movie productions.
Slowly, but so far steadily, the French are maneuvering the European Commission into tightening restrictions on imports of American - or as they put it, non-European (but nobody is in any doubt as to whom the proposed laws are aimed at) - films, television shows, and music. And the hype over interactive television, video-on-demand, and music delivered over the Internet, only strengthens the French resolve. If they do not take a stand now, they reckon, it will soon be too late. But, on the contrary, it's too late already for the sorts of measures the French have in mind.
In an age of interactive media, cultural quotas will prove at least as self-defeating - and if anything, useless - as the Maginot Line, France's last great attempt to wall itself off from invaders. This "impenetrable" wall of fortifications was designed after World War I to prevent the Germans from ever again marching across French soil. What its designers forgot, however, was that the new technology of tanks and airplanes rendered fixed fortifications obsolete. Invaders simply went around the forts at high speed. The Maginot Line lasted only a few weeks at the opening of World War II, and, with its false security punctured, France collapsed.
New technology also mocks the quotas the French use to try to defend themselves against American firms. In sober moments, some of them would admit this is true. But the temptation for the French - and even for many other Europeans - to do something, anything, about the Americans now seems too strong to resist. Electronic communication has bred new familiarity, and familiarity is breeding contempt.
France stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from America on a variety of issues. Once a global power, it is now merely another medium-sized nation. Molière is no longer as famous as Shakespeare. French is no longer the language of diplomacy; English is. And even its former colonies teach English in schools - to children who listen to American rock, drink Coca-Cola, and eat hamburgers.
Unlike Americans, who see the highest morality in allowing individuals to choose whatever they wish to do - however stupid it may appear to others - the French believe, more than most Europeans, that the élite has a moral duty to lead the masses. Economically, this is the land of Jean Baptiste Colbert, central financial planner to Louis XIV, not Adam Smith and the "invisible hand of the marketplace." For example, take a peek at a 1993 interview given to the Financial Times by Edouard Balladur, prime minister of France and now the favorite to succeed Mitterrand in this spring's presidential election. "What is the market?" asked Balladur. "It is the law of the jungle. And what is civilization? It is the struggle against nature."
Culturally, France is the land of the Académie Française, which strives, albeit with partial success, to dictate the form of the language and to define the heights of culture. It is probably the only nation in the world in which a group of intellectuals talking about books can command near-prime time television. So, to hell with Mickey Kantor, Mickey Mouse, and all other Americans. Ils ne passeront pas. France is not about to agree to free trade in "audiovisual" products. Instead, it intends to protect its cultural heritage, and in the process also the patrimony of other Europeans, less alert than France to the incoming tide of transatlantic banality.
Of course, France's cultural outrage is all the stronger for being buttressed by a deeper layer of economic self-interest. Culture - films, television, music, computer games - is big business, and the business will get bigger with every digitizing leap of technology, and with every telephone or computer or cable company that decides to step outside its traditional boundaries.
When experts for the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, did their sums last year, they reckoned Europe's audiovisual sector to be worth some US$325 billion, with software sales accounting for just over half the global total. More to the point, the sector supposedly employs 1.8 million "in software alone" - and the number could grow to 4 million, directly or indirectly, "if we devote the necessary efforts to it." With one tenth of Europe (17 million people) now jobless, it is no wonder that Eurocrats are tempted to take extraordinary measures to grab those jobs.
True, these are extremely self-interested calculations, and the Hollywood lobby scoffs at the arithmetic. (As do Europe's assorted computer and software companies. Even using the broadest definition, can software really employ more people than an automobile industry dominated by giants like Volkswagen, Renault, and Fiat?) But it does not take heroic calculations to come up with enough to worry the French. Take the economic balance sheet dismissed by Mitterrand. Of America's audiovisual exports, from films to CD-ROMs and computer games, some 60 percent are sold to Europe. Since precious little gets sold back to Americans, the result for Europe is a whopping deficit: $3.6 billion in 1992, a tenfold increase in less than a decade.
Part of the evidence is in virtually every movie house in Western Europe. At the end of the 1960s, American films took one-third of the box office in Europe. By the end of the 1970s, the share was almost one half. Now, the figure's up to 80 percent, and even France, fighting hard to buck the trend, last year saw takings for its own films dip below 30 percent for the first time. And Europe's exports to the United States? Even with such hits as Chariots of Fire and Four Weddings and a Funeral (both of them, the French will note, English-language movies), European films usually take a miserable 1 percent of the American box office.
The figures are depressing from every angle. Europe's regular cinema audiences - the kind who still consider Saturday night movie night - are a shrinking breed, down over the past 15 years from 1.2 billion to 550 million. But that decline has affected only European films; the audience watching the American imports has remained stable, and presumably satisfied, at around 450 million. Whichever way you cut the figures, Europe loves American films and American stars. Gérard Depardieu may be the darling of French cinema, but he will never match the European or the global audience of Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone.
Things are worse at the top. In 1975, nine of the ten highest-earning films in France were French and only one was American. Compare that with the 1992 list: seven American, one British, and just two French titles. Or 1991, when the top 10 were all American. True, last year marked something of a comeback for the nationalists: five French films attracted audiences of more than 2 million each. But the top three in France were all foreign - Disney's The Lion King, England's Four Weddings and a Funeral (ah, perfidious Albion...) and Mrs. Doubtfire.
Given those sorts of statistics, even the sensible French people have come to worry that, if current trends continue unchecked, no European cinema will bother to show a Depardieu movie - so no producer will bother to spend the time and money to make one (not least because dominant cinema chains, like Warner Bros., are the offspring of the American production houses).
Unfortunately, even the sensible French people seem to have jumped straight from an understandable worry into self-defeating panic. The reason Mitterrand has taken to lecturing European parliamentarians on the need to defend Europe's culture is that France, for the first half of this year, has the rotating presidency of the European Union. So the French government sets the agenda for joint action by all 15 EU member states. High on the French agenda is a revision of a 1989 EU directive somewhat ironically known as Television Without Frontiers, which lays down the law for the member states on trade in audiovisual goods.
What the directive says is simple enough in its essence: member states shall "reserve for European works ... a majority proportion of their transmission time" and will "reserve at least 10 percent of their transmission time ... or alternately, at least 10 percent of their programming budget, for European works created by producers who are independent of broadcasters."
Reading between the lines is just as easy. Television companies create and deliver mass culture; they are also the biggest single buyers of movies. If they are left to themselves and to the forces of the free market, they tend to buy American. For two reasons. First, Hollywood is the world's greatest star-making machine, and is the source of most of the names people recognize and the media brands they want to buy. Second, and not unrelated, America is the world's largest media market: it can export films, television shows, and other media products to the rest of the world at very low prices. Having recovered their costs (and probably made a profit) in America, any extra revenue studios can garner from exports is pure cream. So European program makers - and the zealots would claim, European culture - will survive only if they are guaranteed a share of the market, including a special requirement for the big TV companies to buy their programming from the small independents (or so the protectionists argue).
Jacques Toubon, France's culture minister, claims that without quotas and other regulations, the number of European programs shown on TF1, France's most popular television channel, would dramatically drop from 4,000 a year to 600. Certainly, there is no shortage of regulations - for France has gone well beyond the minimum laid down in the original Television Without Frontiers directive. France insists on 60 percent European programming on its television, rather than a simple majority as is specified in the directive, half of which must be in French. Television cannot show films on Wednesday evenings, when movie theaters present new releases. Nor can TV show films during prime-time hours on the traditional movie-going nights of Friday and Saturday. Moreover, each television channel can show an average of only two films a week.
Television channels must also invest the equivalent of 15 percent of turnover into French fiction, documentaries, or animation; the equivalent of 3 percent of turnover must be spent on domestic film production. Canal+, France's "deregulated" pay television station, is required to invest 20 percent of turnover in new films, half of which must be in French. Although the French courts recently overthrew (as unconstitutional) a law that would have forced private-sector TV stations to eschew borrowed English words - le weekend, le meeting, le leader, and so on - that are sprinkled through every newscast, there is a law that will soon require the country's eight FM radio networks to increase the French content of their music to a minimum of 40 percent, half of which is to come from "new French talent."
No wonder that Jeanne Moreau, François Truffaut's star and collaborator, recently complained to Newsweek that the new generation of French directors is more interested in bureaucratic maneuvering for subsidies than wooing audiences with art. Subsidies are where the easy money is. But a larger problem, and one that threatens to ridicule Toubon's claims for the usefulness of subsidies, is that the French programming requirements seem to be outstripping French creativity. To meet their quotas, subsidized French producers are expensively re-creating American banalities. French TV is full of soaps that make Dynasty look like Shakespeare. It boasts a French music channel called MCM (which is a rather good copy of MTV), and it broadcasts a subsidized news channel called Euronews - a vain attempt to compete with CNN.
In his determination to block Europe's gates to any audiovisual or cultural cheval de Troie, Toubon doesn't seem to have asked himself which is the more powerful force of cultural infiltration: an original American program, or a Frenchified copy of similar ideas and characters. According to the law, what makes a film or program French, or European, is simply where the film is shot - not where the ideas come from. And Toubon and his allies are determined to keep the European cameras rolling by keeping the products of American ones out.
France must be taken seriously in its determination to produce a "better" version of the Television Without Frontiers directive. Some sort of revision is required, because the law demands reconsideration now that it is five years old. While some Europeans might argue that, because the directive has failed, it should be scrapped, the French culturecrats reply that if it has failed, it shouldn't be scrapped but improved. Presidency of the European Union now gives the French the political clout to make these improvements - which they will no doubt pursue with the same aggressive, hard-headed negotiating tactics they used two years ago, in the closing days of the Uruguay round of trade talks under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
Mickey Kantor, negotiating on behalf of the US, was then adamant that Europe must stop its cultural protectionism; Sir Leon Brittan, his EU counterpart (and, in French eyes, an untrustworthy Brit), was sympathetic; and Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, wheeled into action the Hollywood lobby. Was France really ready to prevent the best agreement on free trade that had ever been dangled before the world, merely to restrict America's access to European screens? We shall never know. In the standoff, first France's EU partners blinked, and then the Americans did. France got what it wanted: a "cultural exception" - the exclusion of any audiovisual trade from the rules of the GATT and its new successor, the World Trade Organization.
The British are, not surprisingly, the freest cultural traders. Not only is their government by instinct laissez-faire, but most of the cultural imports that worry the French are in English - which can hardly arouse the same suspicions in England as in France. The Belgians care passionately about language, but are themselves divided among Dutch- and French-speaking inhabitants - and so, quite literally, do not speak with a single voice to the rest of Europe. Germans are increasingly irked that the rest of Europe insists on learning English (83 percent of the EU's high-school students learn English as a second language, only 32 percent learn French, and 16 percent German). But like Italy, Germany is a relatively new nation, not much more than a century old. Regional cultures and loyalties still tug harder at German and Italian hearts than national ones, leaving them instinctively pluralistic.
Were television broadcasts the only issue at stake, France might well find itself standing vainly alone against the American invaders. But there is still a second strand to Europe's cultural unease - new technology, which is all the more worrying because it is all the more unknown. In optimistic moments, liberal Europeans gush about technology's potential for crashing across cultural and national boundaries, leaving a fresh wind of democracy and new ideas in its wake. But those benefits are of course for other, less enlightened peoples. Among enlightened Europeans, the fear is that new ideas will inevitably be bad ones - not just banal American soap operas and brainless game shows but also alt.sex along with (heaven help us) its interactive video equivalent. The prospect of lycées and hochschulen full of fresh-faced Euro-adolescents devoting their leisure hours to the pursuit of international "relations" makes even those normally cautious Eurocrats wonder if perhaps some safety precautions might quietly be slipped into place.
So the Commission's relevant Eurocrats (most of whom, you may already have guessed, are interventionist French) also quietly propose to extend trade "safeguards" for new technologies, such as video-on-demand. The original 1989 directive simply ignored new technologies: today's proposed revisions exclude them from regulation. Online services and "personal communications," such as the vast majority of Internet traffic, have never been included in the quota system. Drafts of the proposed revisions also state that quotas "shall not apply" to local broadcasts (such as "ethnic" stations) nor to "communication services that operate only on individual demand" - jargon one assumes for video-on-demand and pay-per-view.
But in Euro-regulation, practice and principle can, and sometimes do, quietly diverge. While there are no production quotas on interactive video, a clause already in the 1989 directive allows any member state to "lay down more detailed or stricter rules in particular on the basis of language criteria." Apply this clause to new technologies - to video-on-demand or to the rapidly blurring boundary between (unregulated) personal communications and (regulated) video entertainment - and all sorts of interesting things happen. Most of them are absolutely outrageous, absurd, or both.
To what does a quota apply in an individualized, demand-driven system? Everything in the database? (Even if some of it is never viewed?) Or each individual's viewing patterns? Even long-suffering Euro-consumers might start to complain if they are denied the film of their choice from their new video-on-demand system because they have already exceeded the week's quota of foreign films.
And it does not take video-on-demand, development of which is still some years off, to make regulations look silly. One force driving France to embark on its "cultural offensive" is its fear of being outflanked by the growth of European TV - from about 100 channels now to probably 500 by the end of the century. But many of those channels will be delivered by direct-broadcast satellite, whose reception footprint is confined by the laws of physics rather than national boundaries. So, will the French take defense of their language to the point of jamming German-language stations broadcast from shared satellites? Now, that would be a step toward European unity.
The enforcement of cultural quotas on the explosive growth of new technologies could succeed only through authoritarian supervisors - "thought police" - tuned to every satellite dish, monitoring every signal plucked from the air or whizzed down an optic fiber. Technically, the authorities might be able to control every European-based program provider. But could they really monitor all transmissions from outside, even if they wanted to? And do they want to? While defense of culture is politically popular in Europe for now, even the French might pause when they realize that the staunch defense of European values in the face of changing technology also requires monitoring and censorship on a scale now practiced only in North Korea and Singapore.
But it is unlikely to come to that. Talk of a compromise, driven by economic self-interest rather than cultural chauvinism, is already circulating through the political corridors of Brussels. In the GATT negotiations of 1993, Valenti, the short-but-strident icon of the American film industry, was breathing fire against Europe. Now he preaches reconciliation: "The way to the future is cooperation, not controversy nor a collision with reality. The American movie and TV community wants to reach out to its European colleagues in a spirit of cooperation." Valenti means that Hollywood will provide the Europeans with help in making films that more Americans (as well as Europeans) want to watch: better dubbing techniques, help with scriptwriting, perhaps some marketing expertise, and maybe better access to American-controlled distribution networks both in the US and Europe. At the same time, American media companies are investing in Europe, even in France - witness the recent decision by Time Warner Inc. to enter into a co-production agreement with state-owned France Television.
So, at the end of the day, will all the quotas and cultural arm-twisting have been worth it? The French are likely to declare victory no matter what happens. But at best it will be a hollow one. A nation's soul cannot be manufactured by regulatory fiat. And a nation's culture, the expression of its soul, cannot be preserved in a regulatory museum; it must evolve. There will always be subsidies for the arts - from state support for opera in Britain to tax incentives for film production in Ireland. But to set quotas is to stifle the conversations and the evolution that keeps culture alive. French TV soaps with their guaranteed market share are no better than the American ones, while good French pop groups, like Les Negresses Vertes, don't need any state-guaranteed FM air time.
The irony, of course, is that if any culture can be said to be under threat from foreign ideas, it certainly isn't France's. The French language will no more weaken just because it incorporates le weekend than English has been weakened by using words like sangfroid; nor will French cuisine disappear because there is a McDonald's in every town. (Quite the contrary.)
What is at risk in the arguments over culture, however, is France's - and Europe's - stake in the future. Any culture or nation that does not come to grips with the technologies changing our lives is, quite literally, living in the past. While the French argue over the culture of communications, they inevitably discourage investment. Who is going to invest in building an "information superhighway" if they do not know what traffic it will be allowed to carry? Europe is already behind in joining the new technological world. One of the key steps, complete liberalization of all telecommunications, has stupidly been allowed to wait until 1998. If Europe falls even further behind on that highway, it will no longer have to worry about its cultures, for it will have effectively put them all in a museum. As Molière once said: "Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses."
