EU’s culture clash highlighted by battle over TV without frontiers

Date: 25/07/1996

By Fiona McHugh

THERE have been more clashes in Brussels over culture than there have been battles in Rome over women. And most centre on a five-letter word - 'quota'.

Sparking fierce objections from the US, the quotas issue nearly sunk the 1993 GATT world trade talks.

The source of bitter division between member states, it may also foil efforts to update internal broadcasting rules.

Few things are more guaranteed to raise member state hackles than attempts to regulate what appears on television screens across the EU. In the era of the 'couch potato', governments know that this is a subject much dearer to the hearts of most of their voters than all their high-minded debates on the future of European integration, the single currency, enlargement and a common foreign and security policy.

Fear of cultural, not military, invasion prompted France to go on the offensive in 1993, launching a campaign to tighten the EU's existing quota regime.

Under the current rules, broadcasters are obliged to show at least 50&percent; home-made programmes, but only “where practicable”.

Paris argued that quotas were needed to bolster Europe's ailing film industry and to protect an ancient culture under assault. Without them, it claimed, Europeans would have nothing to look forward to but long days and nights filled with American soaps, sitcoms and movies.

Even though nobody is happy with the directive in its current state, attempts to amend it have so far proven fruitless and acrimonious in equal measure.

After almost a year of heated discussions and a string of compromise texts, ministers just about agreed last year to maintain the current system of non-binding quotas. A political agreement reached in November and endorsed last month reflected widespread political exhaustion and a grudging acceptance by both supporters and opponents of quotas that neither side would secure a clear-cut victory.

The denouement had been something of a let-down but at least, or at last, the curtain had fallen on a story which had become both tiresome and repetitive. Or so most observers thought.

In fact, the fun had only just begun. More than 200 amendments to the directive were submitted by MEPs anxious to show that they too had a thing or two to say about culture and Europe - and about institutional 'dos and don'ts'.

For not only is this a tale of two blocs, Europe versus the US, it is also one of two institutions, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.

Under normal EU procedures, MEPs, and not ministers, comment first on draft legislation. So when the latter reached a political agreement months before the former delivered its verdict, all hell broke lose.

Press release after press release attacked the Council for speaking out of turn and promised to exact revenge on it at the earliest opportunity.

“They usurp the Parliament's position at their peril,” warned the Socialist culture spokeswoman Carole Tongue. “We are taking this extremely seriously.”

And when the Parliament's turn came round, it staked out a radically different position to that taken by EU governments. MEPs voted to make quotas mandatory, impose severe restrictions on advertising, require the instalment of V-chips in TV sets and extend broadcasting rules to new online services.

Ministers were not impressed. They hit back in June, virtually ignoring what the Parliament had said. MEPs, who for a time had persuaded the Italian presidency to side with the assembly, had been hoping for a last minute turn-around by the Council. Luciana Castellina, head of the culture committee, leaned on her compatriots to plead the Parliament's cause.

But although at first she seemed to get her way, when it came to the crunch, Rome bowed to peer pressure. The Council took on board less than half of the changes demanded by the deputies - and none of the major ones.

Under the co-decision procedure laid down in the Maastricht Treaty, the two institutions should take decisions jointly in this field. In fact, however, the Council frequently sidelines its less powerful decision-making partner.

The television without frontiers story, lamentable though it may be, has become a test case of just how seriously national governments take the Union's only directly-elected institution.

Not very, most MEPs have concluded.

They are expected to reinstate the dropped amendments during the Parliament's second reading in autumn, and to go to the barricades to defend them. But, if the two institutions are forced into formal 'conciliation' meetings, the Parliament will be in a poor negotiating position.

After all, if no agreement is reached, the existing system will continue to apply. And that would suit the Council much more than the Parliament.

Given the kind of wrangling which has come to characterise attempts to pass a single set of EU-wide media laws, it is little wonder that the Commission has decided to adopt a new approach.

Rather than propose harmonised rules, it has opted instead to enforce existing EU legislation rigorously. That allows the Commission to ensure the smooth functioning of the internal market, while at the same time averting trouble and strife in Council.

In a discussion paper on commercial communications adopted earlier this year, the EU's executive arm proposed the introduction of guidelines for testing the legality of national broadcasting laws by assessing whether they could be justified on 'proportionality' grounds.

According to the treaty, member states may adopt legislation which restricts the free movement of goods and services within the bloc, but only in order to protect the welfare of citizens.

The proposed guidelines seem to be a good idea, designed as they are to prevent member states from using national advertising laws as protectionist barriers to trade.

Until they are formally adopted, however, Internal Market Commissioner Mario Monti will face an uphill struggle to pursue irresponsible governments.

He has been threatening to take Greece to court for almost a year over an allegedly illegal ban on television advertisements for toys. Monti claims the national measure was introduced to protect Greek toy-makers, and not to protect minors from guileful advertisers. Not surprisingly, Athens emphatically denies the charge and insists that it has Greek children's interests at heart. Unconvinced, Monti has been pushing to have the matter settled in court.

But few of his colleagues are willing to do that. Tackling an EU government on as sensitive an issue as children's welfare, at a time when emotions about national sovereignty are running high, would after all require a certain amount of courage.

What that means for broadcasters is that they will have to continue to cater for 15 different markets governed by 15 sets of rules, instead of a single one governed by one.

Given the current situation, it is hardly surprising that US film and TV programme-makers, catering for a huge and relatively homogenous market, have a competitive edge over their European partners.

And until the single market is up and running in earnest, EU film-makers will have to rely on crutches such as quotas simply to stay in the race.