This week we're looking at neo-colonialism. Unequal patterns of cultural exchange between the Global South and Global North are sometimes labeled “neo-colonial.” What, if anything, is wrong with these patterns?
Neo-colonialism concerns the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era. One way in which neocolonialism can be seen is through unequal patterns of cultural goods between the Global North and Global South. Debates surrounding cultural globalization have traditionally divided proponents of free trade and cultural preservation. In this episode we are talking to two Political Scientists who's alternative account is grounded in a global application of the ideal of social equality.
Citizens of privileged societies ought to regard and relate to citizens of disadvantaged societies as social equals, and patterns of cultural exchange play an important role in promoting these relationships. Historically, colonized peoples were often regarded as inferior based on perceived failures to produce cultural achievements, to the extent that unequal global cultural production and exchange persist, and the colonial pattern remains. We are delighted to be joined by Prof Alan Patten and Dr Shuk Ying Chan, who argue that the duty to relate to foreigners as equals implies that Global North countries should stop pressing for cultural trade concessions and instead favor the import of cultural goods from the Global South.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:00] Emily: Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we'll be looking at cultural exports and imports, neocolonialism and injustice. Should we all be watching fewer Hollywood movies and more from the rest of the globe?
Hello. My name is Emily McTernan. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Global trade in cultural goods is deeply unequal. To illustrate with one striking fact, which opens the academic paper we'll be discussing today, in 2017 American films accounted for 88% of Mexico's box office, while Mexican films made up just 7%. Meanwhile in the US, foreign language films made up only 1% of their domestic box office.
And a similar imbalance is found for a range of cultural goods, from books and music to video games.
And so this week we'll be asking: is there anything wrong with unequal patterns of cultural trade? What's that got to do with colonialism? And what should be done about it?
Joining me today are the co-authors of a recent paper addressing precisely these questions.
Dr Shuk Ying Chan is Assistant Professor in Political Theory here in the Department of Political Science. And regular listeners may recall Ying's last episode on resisting colonialism.
And calling in from one of the most dominant cultural exporters of all, America, we have Professor Alan Patten, who is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics and Chair of the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you with us.
[00:01:27] Ying: Thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:01:28] Alan: Thank you very much.
[00:01:30] Emily: Let's get started by getting clear on the kind of trade we've got in mind here – trade in cultural goods. So what's included and just how unequal is the trade in cultural goods?
[00:01:38] Ying: Yeah, so maybe I can start.
So I guess by cultural goods here, we're focusing mostly on things like as you said like films, music, literature, video games even. And you know, usually these are cultural products that are commoditised and sold on the market.
And the statistics that you cited there are very illustrative of the general patterns of unequal cultural trade. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about in the paper is how, even as recently as 2004, more than 70% of cultural exports originated in Europe or North America.
So this has kind of changed a bit in recent decades. So, it fell to around 50%.
But, this change was really because of two main countries, China and India. So if you exclude those countries, the patterns of cultural trade are still very much dominated by what we often call Global North countries exporting to Global South countries.
[00:02:33] Emily: Is it-
[00:02:36] Alan: Emily, our definition of cultural goods follows the UNESCO definition.
So, as your listeners probably know, UNESCO is the UN agency that is charged with fostering international peace through education, science, and communication. I guess it's best known for preserving world heritage sites and for its reports on the, you know, the impact of wars and conflicts on cultural sites. But they also monitor international trade in cultural goods, and they define cultural goods in basically the way that that Ying just said.
[00:03:09] Emily: Fantastic. And there was a moment there where we said, where you said, it's Europe, North America. And then you added, if we now ignore India and China, things still look bad.
So interestingly, the paper is very much framed in terms of Global South, Global North. Is it justified to make those exclusions? That seems like quite a radical drop, right, from 70% being dominated to only 50%.
Are we seeing a move in the right direction? What motivates you to exclude those countries?
[00:03:32] Ying: Yeah, so I guess we're mostly focusing on countries that historically have benefitted from a relationship of domination and exploitation of others. And so most obviously, European colonialism.
And so that's why, you know, we try to diagnose the problem by looking along this axis of traditionally Global North countries versus Global South countries.
I mean, there's a further question, I think, that can be asked about what happens when some Global South countries are now so dominant culturally and also involved in, for example, in the case of China, involved in these relations of economic dependency between, you know, China and like, you know, Africa and Asia and so on, whether that also reproduces of the problematic dynamics that we see – that we diagnosed – in this paper.
But that's not the question that we're focused here, mostly, if Alan wants to add something.
[00:04:22] Alan: Yeah, I mean I do think that increasing cultural exports from China and India are a step in what I think we would regard as the right direction. You could look at South Korea perhaps as another example of a relatively successful case in recent years.
The point that we make at the start of our article is that many parts of the world, including Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, other parts of Asia, remain surprisingly flat. And that's kind of a cause of concern in the context of the broader concerns of our article, which are with global social equality.
[00:05:05] Emily: So let's turn to this diagnosis of the problem.
So your paper links this unequal trade that we've been discussing to neocolonialism. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about the main connection that you want to make between cultural goods and colonialism or neocolonialism.
Is it a historic one about the history or the origins of the imbalance or one based on a structural similarity?
[00:05:25] Alan: Do you want me to jump in first there, Ying?
Yeah, so I mean if you think about... You start from the concept of colonialism itself. Colonialism was a system of political, economic and cultural domination by some parts of the world – Europe, United States, Japan – on other parts of the world in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
And it was more or less explicitly based on racism. And in the typical case, I guess with the exception of Japan, it involved majority white countries dominating majority non white countries and extracting economic benefits from that relationship of domination. So that's colonialism.
Formal colonialism is mostly a thing of the past, but since the 1960s many have talked of neocolonialism. And we think of neocolonialism as something that I guess relates to colonialism, both historically and structurally.
So historically, the societies and countries that stand in a neocolonial relationship are basically the same ones which stood in relations of more formal colonialism a couple of generations ago.
And then structurally neocolonialism kind of reproduces a lot of the same inequalities that were present under colonialism. So there's the divide between the affluent and the less affluent. It remains the case that the countries that are the affluent beneficiaries of the global system tend to be majority white, whereas the countries that benefit less are majority non white.
And then finally, we talk about – we argue – that the imbalance in trade and cultural goods kind of coincides with this neocolonial hierarchy.
[00:07:19] Emily: Does it coincide there or is there a causal link you're trying to draw between the two? It just happens that this is the way the cultural exports are going and imports are going, or are we seeing a deeper rooted cause here? Colonialism, it's part of colonialism, is the explanation for why we see these cultural inequalities to the present day?
[00:07:39] Alan: Yeah, I think that's in a sense what the article is trying to explore.
And for us maybe the hinge is this idea of social equality versus social hierarchy. So the relations of colonialism, the political and economic relations that I mentioned, are kind of grounded in – were grounded in – profoundly inegalitarian assumptions and the absence of relationships founded in equality. And something like the same thing is true, we argue, of contemporary patterns of cultural trade and exchange.
[00:08:24] Emily: Let's get to grip with this idea of social equality. So some of our listeners are not going to be familiar with this now incredibly popular idea in political philosophy.
Would you mind briefly explaining to our listeners the core concepts and why we'd be thinking about this globally.
[00:08:37] Ying: Yeah, so, I guess I can start.
I mean, so the ideal of social equality I think is sort of a central idea in a lot of liberal political philosophy – the notion that, you know, people should have a duty to basically recognise and treat each other as moral equals.
And, you know, social equality, of course, is only really achievable if we have certain kinds of institutional arrangements.
Like, we think about the political institutions that we have. So some people argue that, you know, we have to arrange the political institutions in a way that give everybody an equal sort of share of influence. So it's a sort of democratic institution.
And, you know, the patterns of economic wealth and so on can't be so great that the inequality can't be so great as to make it impossible, or undermine people's ability to recognise and treat each other as equals.
But the central thing about social equality that we discuss is really that, you know, it's not just a kind of relationship or status that we realise when certain institutions or distribution of material goods are in place. It's really, at the end of the day, about a set of – a kind of robust set of – attitudes and dispositions that we have towards each other.
So how are we disposed to see each other, treat each other, whether, you know, we're subjected to the kind of socialisation that encourage us to see other people as somehow inferior to us and so on.
And so in this sense, we talk, we, you know, talk about in the article that there are two ways in which we can fail to treat someone as social equal.
There's a kind of recognition failure. So this is the failure to regard the other as an equal.
And a practical failure – that's the idea that you failed to arrange the world, the institutions and practices and norms in the way that, you know, actually treats other people as equal.
And the sort of connection with cultural goods that we make starts with this idea of recognition failure and the role it has historically played in, you know, contexts of racialised domination, like colonialism. Yeah.
[00:10:43] Alan: Maybe I could just add that one of the key moves in our discussion is to point out that the scope of social equality is something that needs to be kind of settled or filled in.
So some theorists, when they talk about social equality, for instance, they start with a relationship between two people like a marriage. And then you ask, well, what would it mean to realise social equality in that relationship?
But of course political theorists are interested in social equality typically at the level of the state. And so they extrapolate maybe from a small group or even a pair of people all the way up to the state.
And one of the arguments that we make in our paper is that actually you can think of social equality as crossing borders as well. And that we can be interested in and committed to realising social equality with people who live in other countries.
So that's an important part of our argument because we're interested in whether the contemporary trade regime adequately realises social equality on a global scale.
[00:12:00] Emily: And that move to the global is such an interesting part of the paper.
It did make me wonder... So in the paper you mentioned that one of the criticisms that you sometimes get of social equality is the thought that we start with these two person examples like your marriage case and then somehow we extrapolate to the state, and we just say, well, the treating and regarding and the attitudes and the behaviour are just the sort of similar sort as the ones we were talking about in the two person relationship when they're between citizens.
One might think that it's even more pressing for you if you go global. So are they the same behaviours and attitudes globally as they would be nationally, let alone as interpersonal relations of the kind that relational egalitarians, social egalitarians of the kind we're talking about, the people who are concerned of relating as equals to one another, are really talking about?
[00:12:40] Alan: Yeah, so I guess we do say in the paper that, you know, although the kinds of attitudes and dispositions are pretty similar in the sense of, you know, recognising the other person as an equal and treating them with respect and reciprocity and so on, but the practical realisation of that, of social equality, will vary across context.
So you're right to point out that I think domestically speaking the way that we realise social equality can be very different from globally. So, for example, I think at the global level, because there is a sort of general imperative to respect each society's right to self determination or freedom to sort of determine their own affairs, the one manifestation of treating others as equal could just be that you respect that society's own self determination.
But that doesn't mean that, you know... And sort of non interference is like a principle – non interference kind of exhausts all possibilities of social equality at the global level, because we do have a lot of relationships already across borders, like economic relations, and we think about things like the human rights regime where we're all, I guess, implicated in securing the human rights of others.
And that all has to be underpinned at, or is only really possible, if we are able to recognise people who don't share the same domestic context as us as equals as well.
And so, yeah, even though the institutional or practical sort of implications might be different, we argue that the ideal is still morally significant.
[00:14:07] Emily: Let's turn our attention back specifically to cultural goods. So the idea in the paper.
I think there are two ideas in the paper.
One is that inequality in cultural trade is bad. It's neocolonial, which is in itself to say it's bad. And that has something to do with failures of recognition. Failing to see others as equals.
And you think more equal trade is going to somehow make it better. We're going to be more or better. We're going to be better as social egalitarians if cultural trade is made more equal. We consume the Mexican films as often as we consume the American films and so forth.
I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about each of those.
So what's the failure of recognition? How does it get corrected?
[00:14:41] Alan: Yeah, we use the term neocolonial when we initially set up the problem. But then we note that whether or not that label is apt or not depends a little on showing that the trade pattern that we're discussing is actually objectionable. So to use a word like colonial or neocolonial is to insinuate that there's something objectionable about it.
And but that's actually something that's kind of just disputed by people. Some people think that cultural goods are just another commodity, right? And the commodity... And that there's global division of labour and the production of different commodities, and that's just what you would expect in, I guess, a capitalist world economy, and that there's no real objection there.
But so our goal is to kind of set out to counter that argument and show that there is something to be concerned about from, again, from the standpoint of social equality.
And I guess, you know, we won't try to spell out the entire argument, but the kind of jumping off point is the observation that social hierarchies, particularly in the colonial era, were often justified by pointing to a supposed failure on the part of the colonised peoples to produce valuable culture. That was often the pretext that was given to sort of warrant the assertion that there was a social inequality there. And then that in turn was used to justify the forms of political and economic domination that instead ensued.
And so our idea is to try to undermine through changes in the global regime of trade in cultural goods, this kind of long standing pretext for unequal relations.
[00:16:28] Ying: Yeah. So, just picking up from that. I mean, because of this historic relationship between, you know, political domination and exploitation and so on, on one hand, and this idea that certain groups lack cultural achievements, we posit this hypothesis which we don't... You know, we don't go out – it's a theoretical paper, we don't go out and test it. But it's a hypothesis that is grounded on these historical cases that, you know, in the case where there's a persistent imbalance of cultural flows, especially cultural goods that are highly valued and so on, between what we often call Global North societies and Global South societies, then that reinforces this idea that some groups lack equal capacity to produce things that are valuable as culture.
And so we talk about, you know, the idea that social egalitarians or those who are committed to this idea of social equality should worry about this because even though obviously people in citizens of the Global North have an independent duty to just recognise other people as equals, regardless of whether they see any visible cultural achievements or not, the tendencies of human psychology to classify people into categories and rank them and so on is such that we also have a duty as social egalitarians to promote the conditions that encourage people to see each other as equals.
And so this is how we tie it to cultural goods, and I guess think about sort of the flow of cultural goods as one way to one small way amongst many other ways to address this problem.
[00:18:02] Emily: So the idea here is that if the citizen of, you know, some Global North country changes their consumption patterns such that they suddenly consume far more content from the Global South this will help correct their socially inegalitarian attitudes – the failure to recognise those in the Global South as equally good producers of cultural products.
Is that correct – that that's the hypothesis?
[00:18:22] Alan: That's the basic hypothesis. Yeah, that.
And we try to support that hypothesis both by exploring kind of the inverse, so the idea that it's because Denizens of Global North society tend to think that there's a lack of valuable cultural production from Global South countries – that they have these inegalitarian attitudes. So that's one kind of evidence that we point to.
And then we also lay out some of the what we call the theoretical mechanisms that we think could connect the consumption of cultural commodities produced by Global South producers with changes in the attitudes of consumers and citizens of Global North countries.
[00:19:13] Emily: One question that arises is how demanding this is of the Global North viewer.
So suppose I turn on Netflix and I pick something from the Global South, but I'm not very aware that it's even from the Global South, right? We assume it's been dubbed or the language, you know, the language is going to be English.
Is that going to improve my cultural attitudes? Do I need to be aware that it's from the Global South? Do I need to have a further reflection about the importance of this being produced by the Global South? Or is it enough for me to just be sat in front of the TV and passively consume this-?
[00:19:39] Ying: I guess this points to the theoretical mechanisms that Alan was talking about.
So, I think, you know, so we talk about sort of three mechanisms.
One is just about the likelihood that when cultural goods are produced by Global South producers, the content itself – the representation of people from these societies and their lives and so on – will be will tend to be less filled with objectionable stereotypes and so on.
Now, of course, that's not always a guarantee. So in that case, you know, perhaps even just consuming the good without knowing who created it will serve some, I guess, social egalitarian value.
But importantly for our argument there are two other mechanisms.
So one is this idea that the cultural producer that produces this is exercising and displaying the fact that they have these – they have these capacities of creativity and critical thinking and so on and so forth. And it's this idea that you see someone from a group that has historically been sort of stigmatised and inferiorised and racialised exercising these capacities and what we call a testimony to the lie of colonial racial hierarchy. So that itself exerts some force to chip away at these inegalitarian attitudes.
And then finally it's not just, you know, what people see in terms of the cultural producers capacities, but also because cultural goods are produced within a certain social environment. So the cultural producers are drawing on the kinds of narratives and myths and things are important to the group of people that they interact with regularly. So it also serves as a display of their agential capacities.
And so in that sense, it is important then for the viewer to reflect on to be aware of who is producing these things, and that's why it's important for, I guess, things to be credited to the right to the right kinds of artists.
[00:21:36] Alan: Ying and I are, I think, both quite influenced by a 19th century African American political thinker named Martin Delany, who is often thought to have been one of the first great Black nationalist writers. He wrote a – published a – book in the early 1850s called The Condition Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.
And one of the interesting themes in that book is the relationship between what Delany calls the attainments of a people, their achievements and their recognition as social equals. And Delany argues... He points in the book there, through a number of chapters, at the many different attainments of African Americans in the context of the United States, but argues that they haven't been given credit, I guess in the eyes of the white majority, for those attainments.
So to go back to your question, Emily, that sort of giving of credit is actually a really important stage in the recognition process. And that's an important part of our argument as well.
[00:22:45] Emily: And it has a wonderful implication that you draw out in the paper as well about cultural appropriation.
So listeners will be familiar with this term, right – the idea that there's something that goes wrong when we take things from other cultures. And then, of course, the long running problem with that is that all cultures seem to draw from other cultures, right? They're not these kind of static, uniform things. We tend to draw influences from all over the place.
But you guys have an answer for what's so wrong – one of the things that's wrong – with cultural appropriation. And that is this lack of credit.
Is that right? Does that mean that a solution to cultural appropriation is just that we all credit things more?
So I had this vision of the kind of white yoga teacher who just... You know, this comes from India at the start. Does that let them off the hook for cultural appropriation or do they have to do more work than this?
[00:23:24] Alan: Yeah, I mean, I don't think we claim to have totally solved all the all the ethical puzzles surrounding cultural appropriation.
But, you know, I think we do have some reservations about the kind of unconstrained use of that as a moral complaint for the reasons that you just said, Emily – that history is full of cultural borrowing. And also the sort of language of cultural appropriation seems to suggest a kind of private property, like ownership of cultural practices, which, as you say, in the case of yoga, seems like an odd way of thinking about, you know, a meditative practice as being something that could be privately owned by a group.
So we don't, yeah, we don't have a solution to some of those puzzles. But what we do say is that one way in which cultural appropriation, or cases that get called cases of cultural appropriation, seem problematic is when the creators and producers are not given credit by the appropriators for their work. And that actually I think does track a number of the most plausible cases that get called cultural appropriation.
[00:24:39] Emily: Great. I wonder if we could get a tiny bit clearer, just as we draw towards the close, on two more things to talk about.
So one is exactly what follows from the paper and for whom.
So do you see the primary duties as lying on the consumer, on government? So, you know, Hollywood ought to face more taxes on its products so that cultural products from other countries get more of a looking at the box office, or something like this, or on creative industry bodies somehow to manage this? Who do you think bears duties as a result of it?
[00:25:09] Ying: Yeah. So I guess I think we think it's both. But we mostly in the paper talk about governments, especially Global North governments, in part because there is this history, especially since sort of the 1960s – Alan was talking about in the beginning – of Global North countries like the US pressing for liberalisation of trade, even in sort of cultural sectors.
I mean, of course, this has benefitted industries like Hollywood a lot, but at the same time has been quite detrimental to countries that have not had the same bargaining power as China and India to push back and to implement, you know, certain protectionist policies that help nurture their own cultural industries.
And so one of the implications of the paper that we talk about is just that Global North countries have a duty to, you know, stop pressing for these kinds of concessions.
And sort of taking a step further, they could even have a duty to give preferential access to market access to the cultural goods produced in the Global South. And that's something that if you read these UNESCO reports where they interview artists from the Global South and artists organisations and so on from the Global South, it's something that they are very concerned about and have been pressing for years.
And so, yeah, I guess that is the level of the state.
But there are also other implications as well, that maybe Alan can talk about.
[00:26:44] Alan: I would just add to that that one thing that we're not arguing is that the primary duty holder, or that the primary implication of our argument is that people in the Global South should produce more cultural goods.
This is an argument that's really about the attitudes and practices and policies in Global North countries. And it's saying that Global North countries should stop pressing so hard for their own advantage in trade liberalisation discussions, and they should find other ways of kind of opening up their up their markets so that they consume more cultural goods produced in the Global South.
[00:27:11] Emily: So the paper, as it has come out through our discussion – I think listeners may have picked this up already – is walking this really careful line between being a piece of philosophy, so having these theoretical arguments for why consuming these cultural goods is going to be really good for your egalitarian attitudes, and backing up, but not having to back up too much, the empirical claims that seem to undermine that. Right? Something like, the content produced by those in the Global South will be less othering and less full of stereotypes than that produced in the Global North, for instance.
So what I wondered is, was it easy to find, to steer that line, or did you find that challenging as you approached this paper?
And my other question is: if you could commission one study to support your arguments from the political scientists who might be listening to this podcast, what would it be? What do you really want to find out about people's unequal consumption of cultural products from the Global South as compared to North?
[00:27:58] Alan: I mean I could take a stab at answering that. I think figuring out what was theoretical and what was empirical was definitely one of the major challenges that we faced in writing the paper and revising it multiple times. And I think we were kind of rightly pressed by different readers of the paper on how exactly we wanted to formulate that.
We did end up kind of trawling through empirical literature a little bit, looking for evidence that pertained to the problem that we were discussing, and we couldn't really find a lot.
There is some empirical literature that considers the relationship between how groups get represented, for example, by the media, and then what attitudes about that group are. And that's sort of relevant to at least one of the mechanisms that Ying was describing earlier. So that literature is relevant.
But our hypothesis is especially about the group identity of the cultural producer, right? So where does the cultural producer come from, and how does that identity impact [inaudible] attitudes about that group.
So if there's more producers that come from, to use the example we started from, the more producers are coming from Mexico, let's say, then what impact does that have on American attitudes about Mexicans?
And we would love to see more empirical exploration and investigation of that relationship – of the hypothesis that the more goods are produced by people from a disadvantaged group, then the more that attitudes about people in that group get changed and elevated by members of the more privileged group.
[00:29:55] Ying: Yeah. And just to add to that, I mean, there are studies about American perceptions of regions of the world, like the Middle East and their support for things like the war on terror, but not really specifically looking at, you know, where the country fits in those attitudes.
So, yeah, again, it would be really interesting to know, kind of, this relationship between consumption of a group's culture and perceptions and also, you know, the kinds of global relations that people end up supporting.
[00:30:25] Emily: Thank you so much. Ying and Alan. That was a fantastic conversation about colonialism, neocolonialism, and the unequal trade in cultural goods.
Hopefully we'll all be choosing something different next time we open Netflix.
So we've all been discussing the article, ‘What's Wrong with Neocolonialism: The Case of Unequal Trade in Cultural Goods’, by Shuk Ying Chan and Alan Patten, published last year in the American Political Science Review.
Full details, as ever, are in the show notes for this episode. And I encourage you to read the article. It's a great piece.
Next week we'll be looking at the political challenges of enacting stringent climate policy in fossil fuel producing communities.
Remember to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was researched by Alice Hart and produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.
References
Martin Delany (2019) The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Good Press.