UNESCO’s universal mission and French cultural expansionism Is this the time for deep rethinking?

Hamstrung by bloated bureaucracy, riddled with nepotism and corrupt practices of the most egregious nature and completely out of its depth in setting the global agenda, UNESCO is fast falling into a state of intractable disrepute from which there seems no immediate salvation.

Once the central voice for education, science and the preservation of cultural heritage across the globe, the UN’s specialised agency is now an eviscerated monstrosity, beset with inter-organisational squabbles and representing the officialdom in Paris - the headquarters within the precincts of which cronyism reaches into every realm of the entity’s purview.

Post-war reconstruction and French exclusivity

The reasons behind such a shambolic state of affairs are manifold; the withdrawal of funds by the US, the insufficiency of internal auditing and accounting procedures and the extraneous politicisation of decision-making, to name but a few. Yet the least voiced issue which has cast aspersions on UNESCO’s role as the suitable agent for a universal mission is the disproportionate French influence to which it has been exposed since the very inception of its existence. If in the early days of the organisation, such clout was viewed as benign and deserved, but now, nearly 80 years on, it looks atavistic, out-of-proportion, corrupt and ultimately counter-productive.

Paris has long nurtured and sustained the belief that UNESCO’s universal mission is commensurate with its own outlook, which determines the instrumental objectives for the organisation as an adjunct to French cultural relations. In 1945, France, in search of strengthening its shattered global status amidst the aftermath of World War II, secured the central location of UNESCO in Paris, embarking on the determined policy to shape the UN agency around its own image. In a more practical sense, this drive mandated the diversion of the organisation from paths detrimental to French cultural policy and the preservation of the nation’s cultural predominance. In this vein, the French National Commission for UNESCO emerged as the agent for conducting French cultural diplomacy.

To understand the perilous side of the central role played by France within the operations of UNESCO, one should appreciate the organisation’s present predicament as being inextricably linked with the overall state of affairs pertaining to the UN and its central bodies, with flawed decision-making norms being largely shaped in the light of what the world looked like in the post-World War II scenario. Just as the UN is gradually evolving into an anachronism, a Franco-dominated UNESCO is also the living embodiment of a bygone age and a need for its reconstruction and reimagining has never hitherto been felt in such an undeniably palpable way.

The crux of the matter should not be merely envisaged through the prism of the declining status of Paris as the paragon of cultural excellence and moral superiority which it squandered after post-Second World War reconstruction. It is more of a question of how what was bestowed upon France, a post-imperial war-torn nation which found itself on the side of the victors, thanks to the American-British benevolence in 1945, was gradually weaponised to such a degree that it has eventually become inimical to UNESCO’s assumed universal mandate.

Rampant bureaucracy, waste and inefficiency

If in the 1980s, when the organisation faced fund-wasting accusations, the problem seemed to be one of generalised rampant bureaucratic inefficiency but, by the late 1990s, the lack of accountability had a distinctly Gallic flair. In 1999, a private memo obtained by The Guardian indicated that two French cabinet ministers directly interfered with the secretariat of UNESCO to ensure that former French presidential aides were availed of cushy senior positions in the entity’s headquarters in Paris.

It is not just that such an intervention grossly violated Article 6 of the Constitution of UNESCO, in accordance with which the Director-General and the staff members of the Secretariat “in the discharge of their duties, shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any authority external to the Organisation”, but also provided a glimpse of how French influence over the appointments at the headquarters level of the UN agency was exerted. At the time, an independent audit, commissioned and carried out by the Canadian government, revealed that only 40% of promotions within the organisation met UNESCO’s own fair competition standards.

With a spree of dozens of other cases pointing to the self-same practice, the instances of French attempts to monopolise UNESCO’s secretariat have another side, which is distinct from its mere utilisation for the perpetuation of the cultural expansionism pursued by Paris and the concomitant appointment preferences it entailed. For France, UNESCO is also a wider foreign policy device, not restricted to mere global cultural projections. Although it is not unheard of – in fact, it is generally perceived to be part of the normal practice – that nation-states may, within the limits of proscribed norms, lobby for their own candidates so they may assume higher posts in international organisations, it has never been presumed as acceptable that, through the agency of such candidates, international actors should be enfranchised to pervert the essence of this cultural-humanitarian organisation by implementing foreign policy designs through their operations.

Politicisation of UNESCO and France

The case of Audrey Azoulay, the incumbent Director-General of UNESCO (as of 2017) a protégé of France, is a distinct case in point. A daughter of an influential and highly-esteemed Moroccan-Jewish family, educated in Paris and well-integrated from early youth into high society in the French capital, she represents an example of what France is eager to present as its new face - a mobile, fluid and globe-trotter type of international character invested in the nation’s cultural principles.

It should perhaps not be overlooked that her father, Andre Azoulay, an advisor to the Moroccan King, is also the Head of the Board of the Presidents at the Near East Foundation, originally established as “The American Committee for Syrian and Armenian Relief” in 1915 which, despite its self-declared philanthropic purpose, is an organisation pursuing the political objective of contributing to the recognition of what took place in Eastern Türkiye during the First World War as a “genocide”.

A former Minister of Culture, Audrey Azoulay was propelled into the position of Director-General of UNESCO via aggressive lobbying in 2017 and then re-elected in 2021. The lady in question is not just a mere agent of French influence in the UN’s agency, but also one who transmits external manifestations of French politics into what should be apolitical.

When, after the liberation of Azerbaijan’s occupied territories following the Second Karabakh War, the question of UNESCO sending a mission to the region to evaluate the destruction of cultural heritage emerged as a viable realm of investigation for the organisation, under Audrey Azouloy’s alleged personal insistence, the process was derailed, for such a trip would have inevitably unearthed the Armenian destruction of Azerbaijani cultural monuments rather than the other way round. What was also particularly striking in UNESCO’s backtracking was its reference to the so-called “disputed” nature of the territory, in direct contravention of the resolutions of the Security Council of the United Nations, its own parent organisation.

There is a strong reason to believe that this case illustrates a very clear example of how the French foreign policy choices which, at present, firmly favour Armenia, have extended into the decision-making process within UNESCO, an organisation designed to serve universal ideals, through the none-too-veiled appropriation of its protégé. This denotes a new form of abuse that entails a wide range of mishaps, born out of the lack of accountability, favouritism and many other moments of perilous nature, sewn into a pattern that, if left unopposed will spawn implications too hideous to contemplate.

As Neil Watson, British Journalist and Art Critic commented: “Due to their superficially benign nature, cultural quangos are often likely to go under the radar, rendering them fair game for abuse of every description. The French are time-honoured masters of this”.