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Vedrine, Jaswant protest American domination of culture

External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh today called for a global congress on culture and said that India and France should take the initiative in organising it.

Addressing a seminar along with his French counterpart, Hubert Vedrine, Singh said globalisation must be a celebration of global culture and the world will be much poorer if it had only one culture.

Both Singh and Vedrine argued forcefully against the domination of the United States in all aspects of life, especially culture. Vedrine said that while India, due to its own thriving and rich culture, had managed to escape the overweening American influence, Europe was completely swamped by it.

"It is estimated that 70 per cent of all pictures transmitted worldwide daily originate in the US," the French foreign minister said.

The theme of the two-day seminar, which concluded today, was a multipolar world, an issue in which both India and France have evinced much interest in recent times.

"We thought the end of the Cold War would lead to a multipolar world but that has not happened. And at the start of the 21st century, I would like to use a new idiom to describe the emerging world. I use the term 'polycentricism'," said Jaswant Singh.

Singh added that polycentricism meant a world of overlapping networks where power sought legitimacy, and a stable world order. "It is a world where power overlaps with economic strength and there is thus a convergence of the different process," he said.

The Indian foreign minister warned that unipolarity should not mean the arrogance of certainty. "History teaches us that a movement based on such arrogance of certainty will create challenges," he said.

"It was believed that unipolarity would lead to freedom from vice, but it is found that unipolarity leads to intoxication of ideology, the belief that a particular country's sovereign interest is the same for all," he said.

Singh criticised the United States, pointing to its failures in recent events such as the WTO talks in Seattle, the Kosovo crisis, and the US interference in matters of human rights.

The minister warned that peace occurred not through the absence of war but through justice in the world, and called for the United Nations' Security Council to be more representative of the present world and for the UN to play a more active role in the world.

Singh said that the emergence of a strong and stable European Union would help the world achieve a multipolar structure, which would include a more politically active Japan, Russia, China and India.

The French foreign minister also agreed that India would play a major role in providing for a multipolar world, given its size and stable democracy.

However, he said, the new multipolar world must not view the different poles as confronting each other but as co-operative partners.

"The world needs multipolar co-operation because only that will guarantee peace. Many people thought that the bipolar world was stable but they forget it was a dangerous world based on confrontation," he said.

Vedrine, who spoke before Singh, took a different line on the issue of values, an issue that India sees as interference in the garb of social issue.

"The world does have shared values and we cannot allow human rights violations in the name of sovereignty," said Vedrine, adding, "the issue is to find a balance between human rights and national sovereignty".

The French minister also called for a strong UN Security Council to play a major role in the globe. He said France supported an expanded Security Council and for India to have a permanent seat in it.

He said it was the French belief in the need for a multipolar world that was pushing forward the integration of the European Union. "I hope that our British friends will accept the euro soon," he said.

Vedrine also spoke about the increasing co-operation between India and France and referred to the spate of visits between the leaders of the two nations.

"Our relation may have started a bit late, but it has caught up and even gone ahead of other countries," he said.

Both Singh and Vedrine spoke of improving bilateral relations between the two countries.

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