La convention sur la diversité Culturelle: Anatomie d'un succès diplomatique

Abstract

The adoption of the Convention on Cultural Diversity by Unesco is quite an achievement for French diplomacy. Not only has France imposed cultural diversity, a notion which it holds dear, confronting the cultural hegemony which liberalism leads to, but it has also succeeded in uniting the overwhelming majority of the voting countries around the principle that everything cannot be subject to a commercial logic. How was this outcome reached and who were its architects? This success is the result of the combination of three factors: the invention of an innovative and federative concept, the establishment of a coalition gathering a multitude of networks and actors, and the application of a negotiation method based upon a careful management of time, location and action.