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Beyond Culture Vs. Commerce: Decentralizing Cultural Protection To Promote Diversity Through Trade, Sean A. Pager

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

For the past three decades, culture defenders and free traders have fought a pitched battle over global regulation of audiovisual industries, a collision of seemingly incompatible worldviews whose destructive repercussions policy-makers and scholars have struggled to contain. The battle has played out at multiple levels of international trade law, investment treaties, and UNESCO conventions. Now, the culture-trade war threatens to engulf e-commerce. Fortunately, there is a better way. The extraordinary flowering of Korean popular culture in recent decades—commonly known as the "Korean Wave"—can be traced directly to a set of decentralized policies enacted by South Korea's government in the 1990s. …