Cultural protectionism

Last week, the current majority in Ukrainian Parliament hammered another nail in the coffin of the national information space by adopting amendments to the Law of Ukrai­ne “On Television and Radio.” According to the bill, submitted by MP from the Party of Regions Olena Bondarenko, quotas for the national audio­visual product on TV (in other words, for programs of Ukrainian origin, made, we should note, not only in Ukrainian) was reduced from 50 to 25 percent and quotas for “works of Ukrainian authors and artists” in radio programs (which previously was at the level of 50 percent of the total weekly broadcasting amount) were abolished all the more so. Thus, while before one could see interesting Ukrainian TV programs and listen to Ukrainian singers on the radio at least late at night – in a kind of time ghetto, due to which the owners would get their 50 percent of the weekly broadcasts, it seems that from now on even such possibility will totally disappear.

Justification for these changes, suggested by Bondarenko in a memorandum to the bill seems delusive and even more so inconsistent. She refers to the European Convention on Transfrontier Television, according to which every TV and radio organization “provides the greater amount of broadcast hours for European works,” and makes quite a sophistical conclusion: individual quotas can not be established for music compositions by Ukrainian authors and artists because they belong to the category of European works.

The statement Bondarenko builds her argument on is, indeed, right: Ukrainian works are European in their nature, but it would be reasonable not to establish individual quotas for it only if it was any other European country, let say, France. It is only possible to imagine that this country would, out of the blue, set some individual quotas for the works of Ukrainian authors and artists, if you have very rich imagination. While presence in its legislation of indivi­dual quotas for works of French authors and artists is not just logical, but also obvious – considering the exis­tence of the concept of national culture, it is the task (and, by the way, existence condition) of every nation to provide special care for it.

However, Bondarenko perfectly knows that the establishment of “national” quotas is totally possible (and not “impossible” as Bondarenko is trying to prove), otherwise, she would require to abolish them not only for “musical works by Ukrainian authors and artists,” but for “national audiovisual product” in ge­ne­ral as well. The quotas for the latter have not been abolished for some reason but only reduced by half (the memorandum doesn’t say a word about why the quotas were reduced and why exactly by half – but it is obvious anyway).

The bill author makes another arch statement that abolishment (and reduction) of quotas “will lead to increasing pluralism of audiovisual mass media in Ukraine through the diversification of Ukrainian TV and radio programs” and, thus, will let the Ukrainians contribute to the “European cultural heritage.” You can easily see what “diversity of programs” and “European heritage” Ukrai­nian audience faces every day if you switch on any leading national TV channel in prime-time, which for the past couple years has been given up without a fight – due to some unwritten law – to Russian TV series and Russian entertainment shows.

Mental, and, therefore, cultural dependence on Russian Federation formally resembles the gas depen­dence. The gas dependence hinders the development of new technologies of using renewable energy sources to the same extent to which the informational dependence holds Ukraine within the orbit of post Soviet world and becomes an obstacle for the growth of national culture, which serves as basis for any powerful nation. However, it is obviously a rhe­to­ri­cal question whether care for the Ukrai­nian culture belongs to the tasks of Bondarenko’s political acti­vi­ty. In the memorandum she mentions the alleged lack of Ukrainian songs to fill the radio broadcast, but instead of encouraging the development of the local music industry, she proposes to make them not obligatory in broadcasting. Good decision, isn’t it? It is in the spirit of a doctor, who diagnosed a patient with vision problems and instead of finding the cause of illness suggests to amputate his eyes.