Internationalizing Culture
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the optimism generated by the possibilities of creating a democratic world, many people turned to culture in search of new avenues for political reorganization and development.
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Chapter 3
Internationalizing Culture
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the optimism generated by the possibilities of creating a democratic world, many people turned to culture in search of new avenues for political reorganization and development. As I repeatedly stated at UNESCO, culture became the last frontier in development programmes, after the environment, population and women had been highlighted as major international concerns. Conflicts in which culture was invoked were on the rise, mainly in developing countries, bringing a new agenda to international meetings. While the UN Decade on Culture and Development had stimulated interest in this field, the celebration of hundreds of cultural events in many countries had generated impatience with the inconsistent international narratives about culture. To develop new guidelines in this field, the Group of 77 (which included many developing nations who had been promoting endogenous development for decades) and the Nordic countries, with the full support of Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO, presented a resolution that was adopted in the report of Commission IV of the UNESCO General Conference on 6 November 1991.1 Soon after, a resolution was presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations to establish “an independent World Commission on Culture and Development” to prepare a report and proposals “for both urgent and long-term actions to meet cultural needs in the context of development”; this resolution was adopted on 19 December 1991.2 It would be a policy-oriented report based on the collection and analysis of information from all regions and from diverse sources. It would engage the general public and assist those responsible for formulating and implementing cultural and development policies at both national and international levels, including the different multilateral banks and UN organizations and programmes.
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Resolution adopted in the report of Commission IV of the UNESCO General Conference at the 26th plenary meeting, 6 November 1991, document 26C/3.4. 2 Resolution adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, 19 December 1991, report A/ 46/645/Add.4. © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 L. Arizpe Schlosser, Culture, International Transactions and the Anthropocene, The Anthropocene: Politik—Economics—Society—Science 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41602-6_3
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3 Internationalizing Culture
The UN World Commission on Culture and Development (WCCD) that resulted from the December 1991 resolution was chaired by the former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. In my professional capacity as an anthropologist I was a member of the Commission; later on, after I had been appointed as UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture, Mr. Pérez de Cuéllar requested that I be in charge of the Secretariat for the Commission. The two Directors of the Secretariat were Jerôme Bindé and Yudhishthir Raj Isar. The Commission adopted an active international approach, holding nine regional meet
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