Untitled - socium.ge

390 Imma TubellaStates. During the concluding phase of the GATT negotiations, the EuropeanUnion insisted upon a cultural exception for audiovisual products, refusing toconsider them just as any other commercial product or to accept that globalizationmust mean Americanization.The problem is that these debates were based on the primacy of the sovereigntyof the state. A French minister wrote at this time that if he had torenounce being French or being European he would prefer to renounce beingEuropean. It has been a typical French problem: imposing a quota of Frenchproduction to protect French identity and, at the same time, rejecting suchcultural identities as Corsican, Catalan, or Basque. Another example is that,although the French state forbids the use of anglicisms in the mass media,people include them in their everyday language; for instance, the use of “Bye”is general.So far, in the field of media and culture, the dependency model hasconcluded that the communication interests of the United States conditionedcommunication systems and that the result has been destructive to culturalidentities. The cultural imperialism argument holds that imported media products(usually from the United States) contain ideas that will lead to the declineof traditional lifestyles and values: “By importing a product we are alsoimporting the cultural forms of that society” (Mattelart et al., 1984). Thecontention that imported cultural forms will weaken a country’s sense of itselfand erode national identity has not been unique to Latin America. France hasbeen a leader in promulgating this view. Mitterrand affirmed the right of everycountry to create its own images, saying that a society that abandons the meansof representing itself would soon be an enslaved society, though when he saidcountry, he meant state.Constructing identity is both a matter of disseminating symbolic representationsand forging cultural institutions and social networks. We catch themeaning of a collectivity through the images it casts, the symbols it uses, andthe fictions or narratives it evokes. It is about a system of collective imaginingsand symbolic representations. The United States has used the cinema, andaudiovisual production in general, to spread an image of itself both across theworld and within its own borders. The Japanese mass media have used theconcept of kokuminshugi or “civic national consciousness” to strengthen thesocial construction of the Japanese and the Japanese self-image. Nihonjinron,theories of Japaneseness, have been used by the mass media inside the countryto recover Japanese self-esteem. The first product for television in Japanwas: Watashi wa kai ni naritai (I will become an oyster), a model of behaviorfor the people of post-war Japan, and a bet on a positive future. Authors likeMuruyama (1963) use concepts such as “healthy civic national consciousness”(kenzen na kokuminshugi), which combines democracy with civic nationalism,to theorize behaviors broadcast by cinema and television.