Media flows between countries have always been controversial. Fears of cultural consequences if imbalances occur and concerns about the symbolic value of cultural and media products have historically been at the heart of academic and political debates as well as public policies from governments. These dimensions of culture and media have generated great numbers of exceptions and qualifications in regional free trade agreements.
This was precisely the case when Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed a trilateral trade agreement that came into effect on January 1, 1994. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had as main goals: (1) to facilitate the cross-border movement of goods and services among the three territories; (2) to promote conditions of fair competition in the free trade area; (3) to increase substantially investment opportunities in the territories of the parties; and (4) to provide adequate and effective protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in each party’s territory. Lack of consensus with respect to cultural industries among the three countries left these, by and large, out of NAFTA, although the implicit approach has been to treat media and cultural products like any other commodity. Canada, historically overwhelmed by US imports due in part to the lack of cultural discount (particularly in Anglo-Canada) and the economies of scale of the American market, included an exemption for its cultural industries “to prevent the cultural standardization of content and the complete foreign control of distribution” (McAnany & Wilkinson 1996, 65). The United States, advocating the view that cultural industries produce commercial goods no different to any other, reluctantly agreed to the clause, but added a “notwithstanding” one that allowed it to take countermeasures of equivalent commercial effect if Canada were to introduce a cultural measure that would be inconsistent with the provisions of NAFTA. This clause has had the effect of dissuading Canada from resorting to legislative or regulatory measures that are inconsistent with NAFTA, prompting it to, in the case of the film sector, abandon any intervention concerning film distribution and, in the case of the magazine sector, agree to a settlement with the United States.
In contrast to Canada, Mexico decided not to ask for a cultural exemption clause. The dominance of local content in the broadcasting sector, due to the existence of large conglomerates like Televisa and TV Azteca, and the cultural discount of most US cultural products due to linguistic, historical, and cultural factors, inclined Mexico not to seek an exemption clause. In addition, Spanish-language audiences in the United States were very attractive to Mexican media industries, and the government was interested in avoiding barriers to that important market, not only for commercial reasons, but also for the political objective of preserving cultural and linguistic ties with the large number of Mexicans living and working in the United States.
After the NAFTA pact, media flows grew steadily between Canada and the United States and between Mexico and the United States, but not between Canada and Mexico. The growth seems to be explained mainly by factors unrelated to the provisions of the Agreement. In Mexico, the United States dominated the distribution and exhibition of films in theaters, with around 90 percent of the screening time (in the first years of NAFTA, Mexico decreased the quota of Mexican films’ screening time from 50 to 10 percent). In the first 10 years of NAFTA, the production of films in the country decreased from around 100 to fewer than 10 per year (Ugalde 2004). Also, most paid television channels came from the United States, dominating the supply of contents available for viewers. However, local contents accounted for more than 60 percent of global and prime-time schedules of over-the-air television (still dominant in Mexico, since only 20 percent of the population had access to pay-TV) and got much higher ratings than US imports.
In Anglophone Canada, audiences tended to prefer imported television contents over local contents by a factor of two to one (Statistics Canada 2007), though in Quebec local Francophone TV drama was popular. Despite Vancouver’s position as the second largest film and television production center in North America after Los Angeles, the situation of the Canadian film industry closely resembled the Mexican case. US companies controlled 83 percent of the share of theatrical exhibition revenues and 48 percent of home video distribution revenues (Leong et al. 1996). In the federal capital Ottawa, around 90 percent of total exhibition time was devoted to US or US co-produced movies (Martínez 2007), while Anglo-Canadian films accounted for less than 1 percent of Canada’s box office (Seguin 2007). In the United States, by contrast, foreign imports were almost nonexistent, both on television and in theaters. For instance, out of total screenings in commercial movie theaters in the federal capital Washington, DC, foreign films accounted for a meager 10 percent, of which 30 percent originated in Canada and none in Mexico (Martínez 2007).
With NAFTA, Canada, the United States, and Mexico formed the world’s largest free trade area. This economic integration, plus technological developments and the globalization of culture, has influenced the structures, flow, contents, and processes of consumption of the mass media. But what García Canclini (1996, 146) argued three months after NAFTA became law continued to hold: the changes in culture and media are “part of a longer process of the national and international reconstitution of cultural markets . . . in relation to the new requirements of production and international commerce.” Focusing exclusively on creating a free trade zone and not on cultural integration measures, as in the European Union, where regional bodies or cooperation projects were created to stimulate the audiovisual industries, NAFTA ended up legitimizing the treatment of culture as a simple commercial product, ignoring its socio- cultural, ideological, and symbolic implications.
References:
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