Leading Article: Let's be allowed to tune in to what really turns us on

Mmm, what's up, Doc? What is up, you long-eared pyjama sack, is that some of us Europeans have had enough of your homogenised American culture infiltrating our precious heritage and want to put a stop to it. As we report today, the Netherlands government wants to impose a quota on concerts, reserving 7 per cent of performing time for the work of Dutch composers.

This is only the latest instance in a long tradition of cultural protectionism, much of which is primarily a reaction against American dominance. Cultural protectionism is particularly strong in Canada, a country with a national psyche largely defined by its relationship with its massive, and massively vulgar, neighbour. It has controls on magazine publishing and quotas for popular music on the radio as well as pop videos on television. The purpose is not explicitly to build a dyke against a tide of American pap, but to foster "world-beating talent" of Canada's own. As if Neil Young and the Cowboy Junkies needed subsidy to succeed (and ask not who the Cowboy Junkies might be: Sir Jeremiah Harman, the "out-of-touch judge", has just been sacked for less).

On the other side of the Atlantic, France has been the most enthusiastic builder of ramparts to preserve its own cultural purity. It was France which led the failed initiative to require half of all television broadcasting in the European Union to be European-made. It was France which took the global free-trade negotiations, Gatt, to the brink because it insisted on - and eventually obtained - special treatment for its film and television industries.

And it is France which is now leading the charge against the attempt to liberalise cross-border investment in the 29 rich countries in the OECD club. Earlier this week, French film-makers demonstrated in Paris in support of the minister of culture, who is resisting a ban on discrimination against foreign investors. This would outlaw French attempts to protect their own film industry, and amounts to an American attack on French "cultural identity", according to Jean-Jacques Beineix, director of Betty Blue.

It is easy for us to sneer at French defensiveness. We like to think Franglais is funny, and to adopt an air of superiority about the ability of English to absorb words from French - and many other languages. But we speak a dialect of American, after all, and can share much more easily both in Disney fantasy and in Hollywood drama without being constantly aware that it is foreign. Despite our knee-jerk anti-Americanism, we consume American culture avidly, and our lives have been greatly enriched by it. Continental Europeans are mocked by history, too, in that the creative spark of the Californian film industry was exported from Europe, largely by Russian Jewish emigres.

But language, the substructure of culture, is a sensitive subject. French, once the lingua franca of an empire, now cringes before the global pervasiveness of polyglot English. The Dutch - the very name by which they are known to us marginalises them as an adjunct of die Deutschen - speak a frail and pasteurised compromise between English and German, in both of which they are often also fluent.

The United Kingdom has long accepted that special measures of legal protection and taxpayer subsidy are justified for a language such as Welsh. But it is a long step from preserving and promoting a language to drawing up quotas for cultural products. And this is where we must take issue with the Dutch government's decree.

However much our knees might jerk in sympathy with the protection of national cultural autonomy, this kind of crude quota must be rejected. It is as doomed in the cultural sphere as it is in the international trading of widgets. Cultural quotas open the authorities to ridicule and their effects will be counter-productive. Already opponents claim that the fact that composers can be considered "Dutch" if they have made a "long-term and significant contribution to Dutch music" could let in Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler. Getting around the 3 per cent quota reserved for living Dutch composers - those who have not yet popped their clogs - is a tougher assignment. Theo Verbey is the name cited by the Dutch Composers' Society in defence of the quota system: newcomers like him "need the opportunity to have their work heard". Perhaps, but do concert-goers need the opportunity to be forced to hear it? Such a requirement would lead to riots in the stalls in this country, being interpreted as an edict for the compulsory playing of Harrison Birtwhistle.

Quotas are bound to be abused. Apparently Marcel Poot, a Belgian composer, owes his fame to the fact that he once composed a piece which is just five minutes long - popular with Belgian orchestras entitled to extra state funding if they play a Belgian composition on foreign tours.

We are not opposed to official support for all forms of art and culture - on the contrary, we are campaigning for the Government to do more. But we are against this kind of Pooterism. In a free society with (despite some imperfections in the markets for newspapers and satellite television) free media, people should be allowed to see, hear and buy whatever art turns them on, wherever it comes from.