Fields of dreams.

• Author: Vargas Llosa, Mario
• Position: Protectionism in the French audiovisual industry

A MOBILIZATION OF intellectual, business, and political figures, with socialists, communists, fascists, Gaullists, and democrats marching side by side, is taking place these days in France. Their demand is that cultural products, especially cinema and television products, be excluded from the GATT agreements. Because if markets are opened indiscriminately in these fields, the mighty audiovisual industry of the United States will crush its European rivals, dealing a "mortal blow" to "French culture."

Writers sign manifestos, cinema directors appear on TV, alerting public opinion to the danger that the pestilential vulgarity of "canned" Yankee programming will flood the screens of their homes, smothering the creativity of native artists, heirs to one of humanity's richest cultural traditions. Actors and actresses come out on the street to defend their jobs, and also the language, the sensibility, imagination, and arts of France, under threat of invasion by the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.

The central argument of these adversaries of the total opening of markets is that "culture" is a matter apart, and that products of the artistic spirit and fantasy of a nation cannot be put in the same bag with washbasins, computers, automobiles, and other manufactured products. Unlike these other wares, artistic and cultural creations must be protected, shielded against a competition in which they might disappear, thus depriving the nation that created them of its tradition, its idiosyncrasy, its spiritual identity. The nation that produced Ronsard and Moliere, Proust, and Baudelaire, cannot permit its young people's future audiovisual diet to consist of Dallas, Robocop, and similar trash.

How to prevent the consummation of this catastrophe, which some impassioned voices do not hesitate to compare to the medieval destruction of Latin civilization by the savagery of the Germanic tribes? With protectionist barriers, of course. Such barriers would set limits on the importation of American audiovisual products. Also, there would be minimum quotas for the showing of French works in the cinema distribution networks and TV channels. There are various points of view as to how far these prohibitions and impositions should extend: but no doubt a majority of the GATT opponents consider that to leave unsheltered more than about 50 percent of the cultural audiovisual market would be a treason against France. The honor of the nation and the survival of its culture require that, at the very least, half of the films the French see in the cinemas and half the programming they watch on the box be produced in France.

The first question is whether, to fulfill...