Lack of Money, Leadership and Profile
The captains come and go, but the ship steers unchanged on its wavering course. Dominique Baudis took over from Yves Guéna as president of the Paris Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in February, but the problems of the Franco-Arab cultural centre, opened in 1987, have changed little since the outset.
Structural under-funding
The main difficulty is a lack of money. To understand the chronic financial state of the IMA, one has to take a look back at how it came about. The project was launched after the first oil crisis. The French were interested in strengthening their influence in the Arab world, and the Arabs wanted to polish up their tarnished image in the West.
A private foundation was set up in Paris in 1980, jointly funded by France and 19 Arab states (with Egypt, Libya and Palestine later joining their ranks).
The first construction project not far from the Eiffel Tower only made it as far as the excavation work. Then came the socialist election victory of 1981, and the new minister of culture, Jack Lang, had the architect Jean Nouvel transform the originally planned Moorish pasticcio into an icon of contemporary metal and glass architecture and remove the construction site to the other end of the city.
By the time the IMA was finally opened fourteen years after planning started, the money from the Arab states, which was supposed to have mainly gone into a fund, was already used up. So the Arabs were asked to dig into their pockets again to finance 40 percent of the institution's annual subsidies – a French attempt to catch them off guard, as regular funding was never mentioned in the foundation documents.
The funding states were accordingly unmotivated and payments remained extremely sluggish. In 1996, the original funding plan was resurrected: those Arab states, the suggestion went, which were prepared to pay their entire outstanding contributions into a "fonds de dotation", would be released from future payments.
Up to now, however, only just over half of the outstanding sums have been collected; the 39 million euro in the "fonds de dotation" earns only 1.5 million euro in interest per annum.
At 8.7 million euro in subsidies, France thus pays almost six times as much of the IMA's annual budget than the 22 Arab partners put together. But the 23 million euro funding budget for an institute with 150 employees has an annual deficit of around 3 million euro.
If the French state doesn't plug the gap with extra subsidies, the institute has to take out loans – the current debt level is 14 million euro. So the IMA is structurally under-funded. The French foreign ministry has not raised its subsidy levels for the past 17 years, but has, according to the IMA's PR officer Philippe Cardinal, signalised its willingness to top it up to the equivalent level of 1990 by means of an increase of 3 million euro.
The Arab states in turn owe the IMA a total of 35 million euro – the main debtors being Iraq (13.2 million euro) and Libya (14.7 million euro). The latter had proposed to pay all its outstanding contributions in 2002, provided an exhibition was dedicated to Seif al-Islam Ghaddafi, the son of the dictator.
So the IMA hung some twenty of the Sunday painter's works on the walls, including one showing crosses in the hands of three monks melting under the burning gaze of the revolutionary leader. The IMA is still waiting for the money today . . .
Lack of vision for cultural policy
But funding is not the only problem – there are also difficulties with the management structure. The President of the institute is officially appointed by the French state president, and the Director General is chosen by the Arab side.
The functionaries are almost always second-rate politicians, apparatchiks with no vision, chosen not for their skills but out of gratitude for services rendered.
Not only does the Janus-headed management lead to the formation of cliques in the institute, the lack of qualifications of most functionaries and their – to put it politely – exaggerated respect for the six Arab ambassadors on the twelve-person administrative board also prevents urgently needed reforms and the formulation of a clear cultural policy.
For instance, the IMA has always had problems reflecting current political and social situations. The weekly discussions do include some on Shi'ism, attempts at reform in the Gulf monarchies and the question "Does one have to rule with the Islamists?"
But the heated French debates of the past year on colonialism, the Mohammed caricatures and the death-threats against the Islam critic Robert Redeker are consistently ignored.
At the same time, the major exhibitions take a thoroughly patrimonial approach: they show only the past, the deader the better. The exhibitions – incidentally very well researched and often very popular – resolutely brush any references to current issues of how history is "made" in today's Arab states under the carpet, in favour of a conservative and conservatory discourse.
The museum itself is also very old hat. The originally planned large museum of the Arab-Islamic arts and civilisations never came about, and the replacement project of a "musée des musées" with exhibits on loan from the major Arab museums is still waiting for funding.
The current labyrinth, which leads over three floors from the pre-Islamic period to the height of the Arab-Islamic arts and sciences, is by no means degrading, but has an outdated air.
The IMA management is sceptical about the opening of a 4000-square-metre department of Islamic arts in the Louvre planned for 2009, as with the relocation of the library of the Institut national des langues et civilisation orientales (Inalco) to a spacious new building in the new Tolbiac quarter projected for the same year.
Very popular
That would mean no less than three institutions with significant stocks of Arabian books within only a few hundred metres of each other: the national library, the Inalco and the IMA library. There is no way of telling how the latter, whose tight reserves have led to a virtual standstill since the early 1990s, will stand up to the increased competition.
There has certainly been no attempt to find survival strategies such as forming reference areas in which the IMA would be indispensable. And part of the library staff was even made redundant last December for budgeting reasons.
The Institut du monde arabe turns twenty this year – but is still far from grown up. Three things would be necessary for it to stand on its own two feet: sufficient funding, reliable management with a clear cultural policy and project managers capable of facing the challenges of the future.
The fact that the institute is a chronic problem case in Paris's cultural arena is all the more regrettable in that it is very popular - and certainly possesses internal resources. But without fundamental reforms, the IMA's rich potential can only be partially exploited, if at all.
Marc Zitzmann
© Neue Zürcher Zeitung/Qantara 2007
Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
Qantara.de
Exhibition: "Venise et l'Orient"
The Triumph of Pragmatism
In its exhibition "Venise et l'Orient," the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris traces the history of Venice's relations with the "Orient." Susan Javad visited the show