Impressions

UNESCO’s increasing focus on literacy programming is worth mentioning here: in the 1970s literacy campaigns were among the few acceptable to the Western powers, because they increased capacity to consume any written media. Literacy was a “technical skill,” an essential “capacity”; its spread could be supported so long as there was no fundamental overhaul of the system that dictated what information your new literacy skills would allow you to access.

So, in sum, in the 1960s and 1970s forces within UNESCO attempted to translate research into underdeveloped book and media industries into specific strategies for reform. But Western opposition to this process was largely successful. The withdrawal of the US and the UK from UNESCO crippled it financially and the organization arguably spent the next decade trying to put its house in order so that they would come back. Simply put, the Western nations found a way to contain the emerging power of the newly decolonized and anti-colonial nations within UNESCO. The US has continued to threaten to withdraw funds, which hover around 25% of UNESCO’s budget, since it rejoined in 2003 – and indeed it just did withdraw again, this past Monday, in response to the agency having become the first under the UN umbrella to vote to grant Palestine membership.

Regardless of what UNESCO has become as a result, we cannot say that during this period it was involved in putting forward the book as the key artefact of Western modernity. Otherwise we deny that there are conflicted and competing modernities unfolding and being argued for at any given time. In future research I will consider further how UNESCO’s work at this time related to the “modernization” theses put forward by US social scientists after WWII – blueprints to encourage the wholesale transformation of “backward” nations into new Americas. By the 1970s these blueprints had been thoroughly questioned, but they lived on in academic and policy circles in competing guises: for example, conservatives were imagining an increasingly footloose free-market capitalism managed by expert authority figures as the model economy for all nations; their opponents were insisting that modernity could only mean a strong state guaranteeing human welfare, securing human rights, and encouraging “equalitarian inclusion in global decision making.”¹⁴

It is true that during these years at UNESCO Western interest groups were trying hard to preserve their role as producer and disseminator of copyrighted content.¹⁵ Uneven economic development was integral to this cultural dominance. Yet many within UNESCO, or working with UNESCO, actively contested this dominance. In the research that emerged in this agonistic milieu, the book is rarely presented as an object straightforwardly required if one hopes to achieve “enlightened” modernity and full human dignity. It is rather itself a site of intense contestation. Debates over the material book, and over the industries necessary to its existence, were indeed an important arena in which definitions of modernity and development were put forward, rejected, and revised.

UNESCO’s study of the transnational circulation of books was a crucial adjunct to its study of media domination and intellectual and cultural dependence. Promoting the book wasn’t about promoting it in any form and by any means – or at least not always. It was also sometimes about unearthing the total interdependence of economic and intellectual systems, and recognizing that the book had become a specific kind of tool: a tool controlled by a small part of the world’s population, but needed for participation in a global conversation about what kind of global order would unfold in the wake of colonialism. It is a shame that this conversation was quashed so handily. I this it is worth reviving.

1. Richard Hoggart, An Idea and its Servants: UNESCO from Within (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), 37, 38.
2. Ronald Barker and Robert Escarpit, The Book Hunger (Paris: UNESCO, 1973).
3. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: the World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 281.
4. Ibid.
5. C. Anthony Giffard, UNESCO and the Media (New York: Longman, 1989), xix; Claire Wells, The UN, UNESCO and the Politics of Knowledge (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 113.
6. Stanley A. Barnett and Roland R. Piggford, Manual on Book and Library Activities in Developing Countries (Washington, DC: Agency for International Development, 1969), 62.
7. Ibid., 60.
8. Curtis Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad: Neglected Ambassadors (Washington: Library of Congress, 1984), 70.
9. Ibid., 70-1.
10. Ibid., 72.
11. Keith B. Smith, The Impact of Transnational Book Publishing on Intellectual Knowledge in Less Developed Countries (Paris: UNESCO, 1977), 10. See also Philip G. Altbach, “Literary Colonialism: Books in the Third World,” in Perspectives on Publishing, eds. Philip G. Altbach and Sheila McVey (Toronto: Lexington Books, 1976), 83-101.
12. Chester Finn, “How to Lose the War of Ideas,” Commentary (August 1983), 42.
13. Wells, UN, UNESCO, and the Politics of Knowledge, 97.
14. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 276.
15. Of course “the West” is an inadequate label here. There is no essential “Western” position. Many of the most vociferous opponents of the dominant players’ “free flow” media ideology were, like Altbach, “Western.”

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