Impressions

We must notice the difference between this approach and the UNESCO model. Many of the programs UNESCO supported were designed to offset imbalances in the communications system. Identifying a “book hunger” wasn’t always about claiming that there was a necessary connection between being a book reader and being a “modern,” fully developed human. It was about the fact that part of the world had an inordinate hold over resources, including intellectual resources; it was about the pressing realities of a complete disparity in control over communications activated during the colonial period.

In research supported by UNESCO, Philip Altbach wrote and edited a number of books and articles objecting to the ways that developing nations were dependent on foreign scholars to interpret their own situations. Objective scholarly inquiry was, to his mind, stymied by this situation. He also wrote against use of US and British book donation schemes as a means of rectifying the problem. Likewise Keith Smith, in work published by UNESCO, opposed the continued domination in the postcolonial nations of a metropolitan elite; he claimed that the metropolitan and transnational orientation within postcolonial nations meant that local writing struggled not just to find outlets but to find legitimacy, blocked by a “syndrome” of intellectual dependency that originated in colonialism.¹¹

Their voices were heard at UNESCO. I have already intimated that the Charter of the Book and International Book Year were products of struggles and concessions, and I have called them quiet preludes to later media policies. It is also accurate to call them opening salvos in a war that UNESCO eventually lost. The main attack was the larger communications policy that UNESCO attempted to advance. The concept of a New World Information Order apparently first came about at a 1970 UNESCO conference, in which the developing nations, led by India, demanded the language of free flow be replaced by that of balance. This conference was followed by a series of meetings that took place in the developing world from 1972 on. Many of the early versions of the communications policy put forward at these sessions mirrored the logic behind the Charter of the Book and UNESCO statements around International Book Year: for book production, as for general media making, cost of production meant the hard choice between isolation and dependence on major corporations’ exports; and the doctrine of “free flow” perpetuated by the Western powers, like most of those book donation schemes, meant a one way traffic between the dominating and the dominated.

These media policy meetings led to the articulation of claims for radical new human rights, like the right to self-interpretation, the right to inform, and the right to be heard. These goals echoed those expressed in many book development documents that issued from UNESCO at this time and earlier, which promoted developing world cooperation in sharing regional resources and in moving together to acquire more; a reordering of tariff rates to benefit local production rather than penalize it; advocacy for the making of more space for Third World content in the West; and more state funding to support indigenous authorship and book production. It was as a result of these discussions, many focused on the form of the book, that UNESCO supported and authored a number of communications studies in the late 1970s. One example is 1978’s “Mass Media Declaration,” whose early drafts were torn to shreds by the criticisms of the US and Britain. The dominant Western powers were willing to admit that structural imbalances existed in the global distribution of media resources, but they would only explain these as natural market mechanisms that should be corrected through private enterprise, perhaps supported in the short term by one-off Western charity in the form of donations and training programs. State regulation was entirely off the table.

As a result, to the consternation of key figures like then UNESCO director-general Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the Declaration had to be heavily modified. Any reference to “the rights of peoples” became “human rights” because, in the words of one particularly hostile US commentator, to refer to “the rights of peoples” is to make “individual rights into group interests [and to make] the state their source and arbiter.”¹² All references to the responsibilities or duties of the state or media organizations were also eliminated. As was any prescriptive statement that the state “should” do something, or even that it was “invited” to do something; these were replaced instead by statements with vague agency like “the mass media contribute to promoting human rights.”¹³

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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