Libertarianism With the Cultural Exception

Perhaps culture is the most important role of governments 🆓

La Liberté, by Nanine Vallain (1794)

God most high help me, over the past year or so I have become somewhat more of a libertarian. The argument that most swayed me — although it took me a while to grok it — is that libertarianism is, in an important sense, more moral than the alternatives. Every action taken by a government is, no matter how well-intentioned, rooted in coercion: to do anything, governments use money obtained through the threat of physical violence. We almost never see it, that violence. Few people actually end up in prison for not paying their taxes.¹ But the violence is there, and everything that it buys is a bit tainted by this foundational immorality.

So I have become somewhat more of a libertarian. But not completely. Several things still bother me with the idea. One of these things, perhaps the main one, has to do with culture.

It seems correct to say that people who lean more liberal or libertarian don’t think governments should be directly involved in culture — i.e. the promotion, funding, operation, and regulation of things such as the arts, the media, and language. Examples of government involvement include language laws (prescribing the use of certain languages in certain situations), public media corporations (like the BBC in the UK or the CBC in Canada), and grant programs to fund the production of films, festivals, concerts, etc. Liber[als | tarians] would usually say that such cultural matters should be left for the market to decide, perhaps even more so than non-cultural matters. If people don’t want to use a certain language, support a particular media company, or pay for a particular film/festival/concert, they shouldn’t be forced to, indirectly, through their taxes.

I’ve grown sympathetic to arguments based on the free market in general. But I fear that something important would be lost if we left culture fully in its invisible hands. So to the extent that I’m a libertarian, I seem to be a special, rare kind of it. Let’s call that stance “libertarianism with the cultural exception.”

The phrase “cultural exception” refers to a policy introduced by France in the 1990s as the country was negotiating free trade agreements. It holds that cultural products should be considered differently from other commercial products for the purposes of international trade. This would allow countries to support their own artists with subsidies, and limit the diffusion of foreign culture with protectionist measures, both things that free trade supporters generally seek (and generally rightly) to abolish.

The concept of cultural exception is controversial. Its greatest opponent is also the world’s premier cultural power: the United States.² This isn’t surprising, since a cultural exception would make no sense to the US. It has a large and healthy cultural industry (including, for instance, Hollywood and most popular musicians) that is virtually entirely private, and extremely competent at exporting itself to other countries. And the US feels absolutely no threat from the cultural products of anywhere else.

But the US, in this respect, is unique. It is able to not worry about this because of its immense economic size and power. Its cultural products, driven by its giant internal market, can attain extremely high quality and benefit from intense marketing effort, making them attractive to the people of other countries. When those other countries imitate the US and leave cultural matters totally into private hands, what tends to happen is that their people end up consuming a lot of American art and media,³ and relatively little of their own cultural production. This makes it even more difficult for local artists and creators to compete and creating a vicious circle that favors the current cultural hegemon.

This is especially true in small cultures. Big countries like India, China, Japan, France, or Germany have sufficiently large markets to support healthy private cultural industries. So government support and protectionism is, for them, a bonus. In smaller places, however, it is arguably vital. I’m writing from Quebec, a small culture of fewer than 10 million people, whose continued distinct existence is furthermore considered uncertain by many, due to being part of a larger country with a mostly different culture. The government here greatly subsidizes the arts, and has put in place laws to protect the local language. Outside, especially in the English-speaking world, such laws make no sense and even seem an attack on the ideal of individual liberty. But here there is a fairly stable consensus that they are necessary for the persistence of the local culture. That is probably even truer for smaller societies and ethnic minorities.

One possible response to this line of thinking is, “Eh, whatever, if Japanese or German or Quebecois people prefer Anglo-American culture to their own, so be it. The market decides.” This is especially easy to believe if you are yourself Anglo-American. But there are some of us who think that the idea behind the cultural exception is valuable: it is good for the world if non-hegemonic cultures make special efforts to express their own art, language, and random quirks. It makes the world more diverse. More interesting, more beautiful. And, I suspect, more resilient to mistakes.

So it makes sense, I think, to consider cultural matters as something special, distinct from ordinary products like copper ingots or computer chips or whatever. It doesn’t necessarily mean that any specific cultural policy is good: protectionism can be too extreme, subsidies too wasteful. Plus there’s the specific failure mode of extreme patriotism, to the point that people consider their culture as innately superior to others. So it’s healthy to argue about the topic, and try to find the right balance. But outside of large powerful countries that don’t need governmental shepherding of culture, it’s plausibly a bad idea to abandon it altogether.

Okay — but does the protection and promotion of culture need to be done by a state, using money obtained through the threat of force? Couldn’t there be a voluntary equivalent way to provide these services, that people could freely choose to give resources to?

I’m not sure. An optimistic libertarian answer is that if, right now, enough people care about a particular local or national culture to elect governments that defend it, then it shouldn’t be a problem to find sufficient people to patronize companies and organizations that did the same thing. Maybe that’s true; I’d actually be curious to test it. But I’m not very optimistic. I suspect that the markets for local cultures would become much smaller than they already are, accelerating the vicious circle towards the dominance of culture produced in larger markets.

There’s a line of argumentation against governments that goes, “if people truly want X, why do we need a state to force them to have it? And if they don’t want X, why not abolish it?” The answers to this make me uneasy. They often boil down to thinking that you know what people want better than people themselves. (The radical idea that people are the best positioned to know what they want is another reason I’ve grown attracted to the free market and libertarianism.) But how do I square this with being in favor of some level of government-managed culture?

I think the answer comes down to what a government is for. A full libertarian’s answer would be “nothing” — governments are just relics of a time when we used force to achieve anything, and should be disposed of altogether. A mainstream centre-left answer might be that governments are a necessary wealth redistribution mechanism and counterweight to the power of corporations. A centre-right liberal might say that governments are mostly for maintaining a useful legal framework within which economic and social activities can take place without fear of conflict. And a long time ago, the answer would have been that governments are for accomplishing the will of the divinely appointed monarch.

Somewhat unfashionable these days is the idea that governments are expressions and guardians of collective culture. Yet this is central to how modern governments were formed. Many of them were born during the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the heyday of nationalism; many others were greatly transformed during that time. Most countries today are still nation-states. In several of them, especially in Europe, it has become suspect to call oneself a nationalist; but fundamentally, almost everyone is one.⁴ Almost everyone sees their government as a place that symbolizes and embodies the national culture. And lots of people love to argue about politics, not in the sense of caring about the technical details of policies, but in the sense of determining the values that the symbolic government must display. This is what we call the “culture wars.”

I think it would be a mistake for libertarians to try to get rid of this function of governments. Maybe that’d be fine at the end, once everything else is gone and the role of states as cultural focal points is the only thing left before the advent of the global anarchist utopia. But my guess is that it would be a sensible agenda for convinced libertarians to gradually remove everything except culture from the hands of governments.

In almost all countries that aren’t the United States, I think it would be pragmatic, too — people care about their national culture, and libertarians might become more popular if they show they care, too. It might help them gain the favor of artists and media people, and thereby greatly improve their aesthetics — which is also an important step towards victory.

Liberty Leading the People, by Eugène Delacroix (1830)

1. State violence takes other forms, like the military and the police. But these forms of violence would probably still exist in some form in a completely state-free society, since dealing with bellicose neighbors or local violence like theft and murder would still be needed. Penalties for not paying taxes would be the one thing that would be completely gone.

2. And to a lesser degree the rest of the English-speaking world, although there is also a form of cultural protectionism in countries like Canada, precisely to guard themselves against the pull of the Americans, which is even more irresistible when you speak the same language as them.

3. In large part because it’s good! Although the cultural exception — and this post — may be interpreted a bit as anti-American (ironic since I’m publishing this on a 4th of July), it’s important to note that it makes no “ranking” of cultures as good or bad. American culture isn’t worse than French culture or whatever; it’s just that it’s healthier if each country is primarily concerned with its own culture rather than foreign ones.

4. Interestingly, Quebec is a place where to be a nationalist is not only normal, but expected of most politicians. This is in total contrast with France, where nationalism is associated with the far right, as well as most other European countries. My explanation is that nationalism means very different things in places that are already nation-states compared to places that aren’t. In the former, the existence of the national culture is obvious, so there’s no reason to call yourself a nationalist unless you’re advocating for something quite different, for instance by preaching a return to traditional values or something. In the latter, as in Quebec, Scotland, or Catalonia, nationalism merely means expressing a desire that the national culture be recognized. So I’d say that almost everyone in France is nationalist in the Quebec sense: they all agree that France is a nation, but there’s just no point in saying it out loud.