Limits to Liberalization: Local Culture in a Global Marketplace

by Patricia M. Goff

The so-called culture industries―film, television and radio broadcasting, periodical and book publishing, video and sound recording―are noteworthy exceptions to the rhetorical commitment of Western countries to free trade as a major goal. These exceptions threatened to derail such high-profile negotiations as NAFTA and its predecessor, the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, as well as the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Conventional wisdom did not foresee trouble from this source, because these established industries are not commercial national champions, nor are they particularly large providers of jobs. As Patricia M. Goff shows, the standard trade literature considers the monetary value but doesn't recognize the symbolic importance of cultural production. In Limits to Liberalization, she traces the interplay between the commercial and the cultural. Governments that want to expand free trade may simultaneously resist liberalization in the culture industries (and elsewhere, including agriculture and health care). Goff traces the rationale for "cultural protectionism" in the trade policies of Canada, France, and the European Union. The result is a larger understanding of the forces that shape international trade agreements and a book that speaks to current theoretical concerns about national identity as it plays out in politics and international relations.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 14, 2006

Reviews

[Patrick F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book arguing that the reasons Europe, led by France, and Canada, respectively, fought to have sociocultural protections regarding various free trade agreements such as NAFTA, GATT, and CUSFTA were not for traditional protectionist reasons, mostly restricted through the WTO (established through the Uruguay Round concluded in 1994), but for cultural reasons.

How do you - at once - believe in free trade yet also believe in keeping your culture industries such as print publications, music, film, tv, etc. replete with domestic and national identity? Embedded liberalism (Ruggie 1982) is the framework we should think of conclude Patricia M. Goff.

A good supplement and complimentary essay (in book form) for students trying to understand globalization post-WWII and especially relevant since culture and identity is at the forefront of our lives nice as seen by Brexit, Trump, #BlackLivesMatter and many more movements dedicated to identity concerns.