UNESCO and Book Development
This is the first piece of proper writing to emerge from research I have just started. I offer it, tentatively, hoping that readers might point out problems, or suggest overlooked sources or further avenues of inquiry.
The broad focus of this research is the fundamental role that UNESCO, or the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, has played in post-WWII publishing.
As the main cultural agency within the UN system, UNESCO is enjoined to foster respect for human rights and to promote world peace – “global security,” in current parlance – by promoting international collaboration in the fields of education, science and culture. In attempting to fulfill this mandate it has collected and archived a staggering array of statistics about worldwide cultural production. In the words of former UNESCO employee Richard Hoggart, a founding figure within cultural studies, UNESCO is “a world resource centre, a complex of information banks” and “a great market for the traffic of knowledge.”1 For example, it publishes an annual Index Translationum, listing book translations by language and by subject, and a Statistical Yearbook monitoring national levels of cultural import and export. More than collecting these statistics, UNESCO has been a key player in defining what to count and how to count it. It was UNESCO that formulated the first official definition of a book – a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, excluding covering matter – accepted by the publishing industry. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN), easing the international sale and tracking of titles, was backed by UNESCO. International copyright law was debated, made, and reformed at key UNESCO-backed conferences. UNESCO has long advocated the treatment of books as a unique category of commodity that should not be subject to regular tariffs, taxes, or postage. It is UNESCO that has been at the forefront of organizations devising strategies for addressing global illiteracy.
UNESCO has also been heavily invested in research on the publishing industries. From the late 1950s through to the early 1980s it was in fact the premier sponsor, facilitator and consolidator of research on the book trades in the developing world in particular, conducting avant la lettre what we now define as book history, and supporting the research of scholars who have since been embraced as founding figures within the field, such as Robert Escarpit, and Lucian Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, whose The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, is one of book history’s founding documents. Indeed when book history did emerge as a self-conscious practice in the early 1980s, it was informed by a public conversation that UNESCO had instigated about the ways social, economic, and political circumstances shape and are shaped by books and their readers.
It is surprising, then, that the history of UNESCO’s impact on the book industries has yet to be written. In studying this history my concern thus far have been what appear to be the three major book-related programs that UNESCO has pursued since its inception in 1946. The first program is the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, which was devoted to translation and cross-border dissemination of the world’s classic literature. This program emerged with the organization’s founding after WWII, when it was dominated by the US, Britain, and France. It treated books as objects of diplomacy whose exchange would foster cultural understanding and thus help secure world peace. The second program is 1972’s International Book Year, which was promoted by an official Charter of the Book that put forward ten principles advocating the global spread of the printed word. This program emerged with the rise of a new majority within UNESCO, made up of the recently decolonized and anti-colonial nations. It sought to address a so-called “book hunger” in the developing world,2 and soon lent data and terminology to supporters of a controversial New World Information Order. Its appearance suggests a movement within UNESCO toward treatment of the book not as an elite object of portable cultural knowledge, but instead as an agent of social and economic change within the underdeveloped world. The third program is the recent City of Literature initiative, which awards this official designation to the place best able to position its literary traditions or book cultures as a competitive advantage. This program emerged in the early 1990s, as member nations appeared to unite around a conception of books as part of a national cultural heritage and creative economy and as a crucial resource for cultural tourism.
My specific arguments about these programs’ historical emergence and significance will come from archival research about the struggles that went on behind the scenes at UNESCO when they were proposed and ratified, as UNESCO’s representatives and consultants attempted to affirm particular uses and particular types of books and book industries. Tracing these struggles may reveal how the world’s premier international cultural organization arrived at decisions about the impact books might have on society, politics, and economics. My hope is to thereby illuminate the broader cultural history of the post-war period, by understanding how an initial liberal cosmopolitanism was unsettled by a postcolonial critique of the dominance of developed-world interests, and how both moments were superseded by a neoliberal consensus that what matters is culture’s private-sector potential.
Because this research is all still in my future, though, what I can offer here are only tentative thoughts on the period of UNESCO’s history that I have found most fascinating so far: the 1960s and 70s turn toward thinking of the book as an agent of development. In his important recent book Human Rights Inc., Joseph Slaughter critiques what he calls the “writing man’s burden,” defined as the “humanitarian injunction” that “reading nations must help nonreading ones (to read).” He writes that after decolonization a developmentalist attitude, committed to functional and spiritual modernization, “coalesced as the predominant discursive paradigm in the industrialized West.” Caught up in this paradigm was the technology of literacy, along with the specific “artifactual form of the book,” which became, in Slaughter’s words,” something of a fetish within certain humanitarian strands of developmentalist discourse and human rights.”3
It is here that he slots UNESCO, which he claims “sought to fortify the conceptual connection between literacy and development—and illiteracy and underdevelopment—with its declarations of the Charter of the Book and of 1972 as International Book Year.”4 In this context he directly links UNESCO to the US Agency for International Development’s programs for book development, programs which did read the extent of production and consumption of books as a measure of social and economic development. But it is unwise to collapse something like the US Agency for International Development into UNESCO. To do it is to ignore the very real distance between the American foreign policy establishment and UNESCO programming. In a sense the fetish here is Slaughter’s, as he strips various and often competing book development campaigns from their constitutive history.
While some of UNESCO’s programs and documents did imagine the book as the core technology of progress, as an aid to sophisticated reflection and intellection, and as a path to modernization, just as often its laments about “book hunger” were a reaction against the dominance of Western book producers in the developing countries, and an accompaniment to a dawning information and communications nationalism. It seems more fruitful to read UNESCO’s actual 1972 Charter of the Book, a three page document stating 10 articles of faith, along with its public pronouncements about International Book Year, a s cleaned up facades that hide intense struggles. Evident in the research that UNESCO undertook or facilitated during this period are conflicting interpretations of modernity and of the desirability (and means) of achieving it. Also apparent are concerns about the domination of Western corporations and the means of overcoming it, and about the pressures that arise when intellectual and cultural legitimacy is thought to reside in and be bestowed from within the Western nations. A further debate concerned whether one should advocate the “free flow” of books across borders and Western book donation programs, however driven by ideological interests and however indifferent to local circumstances, or whether one should instead promote state regulation of the transnational flow of books, to favour “balance” and encourage indigenous ownership.
Small wonder these debates took place. UNESCO is no monolith. Many interest groups were involved at this time in consulting with UNESCO about book development, including book industry employees and consultants, academics, and people from NGOs and from state-based foreign-aid schemes. UNESCO’s new and newly postcolonial member nations were inclined to maintain that UNESCO’s focus should be basic education and the alleviation of poverty. Indeed the claim to viable indigenous cultural markets – elite and mass – came to be positioned as a sign that nations had achieved certain standards of development. And what would secure peace? An international coterie sharing in each other’s elite culture, or the movement of all the world’s peoples toward the same basic standard of quality of life and access to political representation? UNESCO’s Charter of the Book, International Book Year and related programming during this period should be placed within this context of struggle. They reflect the transformation that took place with the emergence of a two-thirds anti-colonial majority within the organization in the 1960s; and they were a crucial prelude to the highly controversial media policies that UNESCO articulated throughout the 1970s, most notably its investment in the idea of a New World Information and Communications Order. These are the same policies that purportedly necessitated the partial withdrawal of US and British funding from the organization in the 1970s, and then the total withdrawal of the US, Britain and others in the 1980s. They left after a tightly controlled and orchestrated media campaign against UNESCO, designed to suggest that the organization was pushing “statist” – read: socialist – regulation of industry.
So while some of the member nation representatives to UNESCO would have, during this era, surely sympathized with the vision of development that Joseph Slaughter castigates, the majority may not have. The problem was precisely that the majority was eventually overpowered by a minority that was more economically powerful and could control the same media of information dissemination that it so loudly claimed should be “free.” Actually “control” isn’t quite right: some Western publishing industry and media advocates regularly lobbied and advised UNESCO representatives. As historical accounts of the period have shown, they became in effect judges of their own case. Their key weapon in fighting media reform – reform aimed at righting the imbalance in access to the means of production of information – was their control over the media itself.5
The book donation programs put together by the US Agency for international Development, the US Information Service, and the British High Commission, to name a few, tell us a lot about what the Western powers could tolerate. These were programs designed largely to distribute US and British books overseas, and most research suggests that they actually stifled local production rather than encouraging it by, for instance, offering titles at highly subsidized prices and thus driving more expensive local books out of the market.
To focus for just a moment on US efforts: they were – no surprise – designed to promote US interests. A 1960s US Agency for International Development manual emphasized both the more abstract means of promotion – distributing science and engineering textbooks that might help “develop economically viable democratic societies”6 – and the more direct means of subsidizing export and purchase of titles that would reflect “the full spectrum of American life and culture”7 (while castigating communism and the Soviet menace, one gathers).
In a 1984 report lamenting the decline of US book donation schemes, Curtis Benjamin, an industry consultant and one-time president of McGraw-Hill, perhaps best captures the logic linking the book to the spread of capitalist modernity and promotion of US interests. Benjamin writes that books “cultivate the intellect, the spirit, the creativity, and the innate yearning of every individual for freedom and opportunity to improve his or her way of life and give it more meaning.”8 This lofty tone isn’t long maintained. He soon writes that “[t]o businessmen, industrialists, and financiers, they condition overseas markets and increase exports of U.S. products and services […] for most multinational corporations and traders, books serve as invaluable tools for indoctrination and training of the vast indigenous personnel required for overseas operations,” while “[t]o engineers, architects, and construction firms, [books] often are precursors to the winning of overseas contracts.”9 So books are great for business, and yet magically they are also, according to Benjamin, the best antidote to the “denigrating propaganda” through which the US’s competitors and detractors castigate it as a “nation of materialistic, money-mad, ruthless ‘Yankee Traders’ who have little or no regard for the finer things of life.”10 Exporting books eases commercial exchange, but also presents a nation of people motivated by goals higher than commercial exchange. What harmony.
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