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.
This is an important contribution to the History of Ideas and Knowledge production. I however think there is no one story of the contributions to the development of the book and publishing. Also, do not forget that publishing included academic publishing. Children’s books, leisure and literature. What was UNESCO’s contribution? I remember the 1990s when I headed CODESRIA’s Book Division and we had to struggle with African conten, voices and publishing. UNESCO had by then surrendered culture and the book to market forces and had little or no capacity to influence the Global / International Division of Labor in knowledge. UNESCO seems to have been in a relatively disadvantaged position on the big knowledge issues since the 1990s. That needs to be interrogated too. That politics is important.
Thank you for this response. I agree that the variety of forms of Unesco’s engagement with book development need to be addressed, and that by the 1990s market forces had taken over. I’m interested in that transition and will be addressing it in my research. Could I contact you about your experiences?
Sure. I am just coming back to this after a week.
If it is ok, I can do the introductions privately, Dr. Aina.