Culture News Blog

PARIS, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- France savored a victory in Paris this week as the world community adopted the cultural diversity convention in a vote that isolated the charter's only two opponents: The United States and Israel.

"This is a moment of great emotion -- the fruit of major work, the coming together of the international community," France's Cultural Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres told reporters after the vote in Paris Thursday evening. "Culture is not a good, like any other."

After a bitter split over Iraq, the European budget and the bloc's constitution, the European Union offered a rare moment of unity in voting in favor of the French- and Canadian-sponsored diversity convention.

Yet memories of the Paris vote may fade rapidly in the face of another protectionist vs. free-trade issue: agricultural subsidies, which this time pit France against a sizable chunk of the international community, including the many European nations and the United States.

On Friday, World Trade Organization head Pascal Lamy called on both Washington and the EU to make key concessions on agriculture to break the deadlock in the current Doha round of trade talks.

"Both need to make efforts, and that is the issue that will alleviate the concerns of many developing countries that want freer trade," Lamy said on France's LCI television channel.

While Lamy was speaking as the head of an international body, the fact he is French only serves to reinforce the perception that France's pro-subsidy argument is an increasingly lonely one.

The French government claims otherwise, maintaining that 14 out of the EU's 25 members support its position to keep price and other forms of agricultural support systems in place in Europe. The European Commission, however, says only five or six countries are in lockstep with Paris.

"The French arrived with a preconceived notion, and have not looked to change their view," a source close to European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson told Le Monde newspaper.

The issue of agricultural subsidies most obviously places the French government at odds with Britain, which holds the current rotating presidency of the EU.

The two countries have clashed not only over the Iraq war, but more recently over the EU budget: France wants Britain's special EU rebate to end, Britain wants an overhaul of the very EU farm subsidies that now threaten to foil the WTO talks.

Mandelson has offered to cut those subsidies in response to a similar offer floated by Washington. It many not help Mandelson's cause that he is close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair whose relationship with French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac is abrasive at best.

But much of Chirac's opposition to the agricultural subsidies is aimed at a domestic audience: the very French who opposed the EU constitution in a May vote aimed also to sanction the president's center-right government.

Indeed, the matter of farm subsidies has served to unite Chirac's fractious government in a way few other issues have. Even France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has clashed openly and frequently with the French President and with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, has closed ranks on the question of agriculture.

"French and European farmers can count on my commitment on their behalf to save what is left of one of the first and principal common policies," Sarkozy wrote in a commentary in Les Echos newspaper Thursday.

But instead of bolstering its support in Europe, France's pro-subsidies position may end up undermining its place in the 25-nation block.

Not only does France find itself "once again, isolated, or almost" in the EU, Le Monde wrote in an editorial, but "the continual attacks by Paris against the European Commission have diminished its force of persuasion."

"It's not in obstinately adopting a defensive tactic...that France will rediscover its role as an engine of Europe," the newspaper wrote.

Nor has France's stance on agricultural subsides burnished its image in the developing world. Just a day ago, Paris was defending the UNESCO cultural heritage convention for protecting not only its own embattled film industry, but also the cultural diversity of poorer countries.

"The adoption of the UNESCO text is one of the essential conditions to create a globalization that is better controlled and more human," French minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres wrote in an argument favoring the convention, published this week in Le Monde.

Today, France is defending EU agricultural subsidies that experts believe price these same poor countries out of international markets.

It is hardly the first time political self-interest has dominated a nation's agenda. But this week, France's contradictory arguments favoring protectionism seem particularly ironic.

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