Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO by Miia Huttunen

Author:Miia Huttunen [Huttunen, Miia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781003222606
Google: aBuYzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 59790158
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-01-15T02:18:08+00:00

Three halves of the Cold War world

The world the Orient catalogue emerged from was drastically different from the one that originally gave birth to UNESCO. The Allied and Axis powers were now on the same side, working together towards a world of peace. Even the US and the Soviet Union had found in UNESCO not another ideological battlefield, but a platform for co-operation – at least for the time being. Clearly, it was time to forget about what had gone wrong in the past and focus on what the future could bring. With the old hostilities set aside, it made very little sense to play a new game by the old rules. For its first decade, UNESCO, like the whole of the UN, had remained essentially a Western organisation. In its early years, the cultural differences UNESCO had to deal with within its own system were thus more a question of gradience than clear-cut distinctions. It would therefore have been rather easy to imagine that given enough time, the differences could have been smoothed over, if not erased altogether. The problem of conflictual difference was solvable.

Largely resulting from the accelerating decolonisation process, UNESCO had nearly doubled in size since its founding by the mid-1950s. UNESCO was now turning into a truly global organisation, which brought about a new set of challenges that needed to be tackled to honour the principles stated in the UNESCO Constitution. In 1955, representatives of 29 governments of mainly newly independent countries from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East had gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss decolonisation, economic and cultural co-operation, and the role of the Third World in the Cold War (Acharya, 2016). Representing over half of the world’s population, the Bandung Conference constructed the foundations for the non-aligned movement during the Cold War (Jansen, 1966). More importantly, it was a demonstration of the demands of the emerging Asian and African nations to be treated as equal actors in world affairs (Köchler, 1982). However, in many cases, the Third World countries remained economically dependent on the “developed” nations, often their former colonising powers (Alavi & Shanin, 1982). Their independence meant therefore not so much economic independence, but rather a formal acknowledgement of “nationhood” within organisations like UNESCO (Tomlinson, 1991, p. 15).

Whether by design or merely an intriguing coincidence, about half of the countries featured in the Orient catalogue had participated in the Bandung conference. Thus, it seems, it would have made sense to separately distinguish the “third” part of the world in the catalogue to recognise the inadequacy of such polarisations as the East and the West in the first place. However, as the Orient catalogue’s conception of the world implies, in practice the East-West discourse is fundamentally embedded in the conceptualisations of the Third World as well. The East-West division the catalogue turned to was not based on the West and the Third World as polar opposites either. Japan, for example, could by no means be positioned as a part of the Third World, even though it was one of the Bandung participants.

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