Alexander Stephan, ed.  The Americanization of Europe: Culture,
Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945.  New York  Berghahn
Books, 2007.  444 pp.  $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84545-486-9.

Reviewed by Jessica Gienow-Hecht (University of Cologne)
Published on H-GAGCS (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Thomas Adam

The European Habitus: "Excuse Me, I am not Convinced"

It is difficult today to imagine a world without Americanization and
rampant anti-Americanism. And it is even more difficult to imagine a
world where this fact has not worried at least some segment of
American society.[1] This is, by no means, a contemporary issue. In
the 1950s, U.S. intellectuals, public figures, and diplomats agreed
that the United States needed to sell the American way of life
abroad. They worried over what they perceived as their worsening
reputation in a world of new nations, new rulers, and new weapons.
Journalists and academic observers, in particular, published widely
on how negatively people the world over interpreted the United States
and what could be done to reverse the situation. "America is the
greatest advertising country in the world," journalist Peter Grothe
complained in 1958. "Yet when it comes to the most important
advertising campaign of all--that of advertising ourselves and the
democratic way of life--we run a poor second to the Communists."[2]
Sociologists urged policymakers to use books, movies, and information
programs as tools to familiarize people the world over with American
history, politics, and entertainment. If we just did a better job to
explain our foreign policy to others, the subtext ran, if we
appointed or delegated nicer people to represent the nation abroad,
or if we changed our foreign policy altogether, the world would love
Americans as much as they loved themselves.[3]

That viewpoint still seems popular among observers in and outside of
the ivory tower today. U.S. intellectuals, like Juan Cole, an
esteemed expert of the Middle East and South Asia, continue to juggle
public opinion polls and argue that even in Europe "it's the foreign
policy, stupid," that accounts for European antipathies against the
United States.[4] One cannot help being reminded of those 1950s U.S.
liberals who were hoping for prettier faces, friendlier messages, and
perhaps a better foreign policy on the U.S. desk in the international
arena. Within the past fifty years, the view from Washington (or
Boston or Chicago or Michigan) has not changed very much.

While there is a certain diversity of authors in the English-language
world, it is striking to what an extent the debate continues to be
dominated by "senders" rather than "recipients," by U.S. scholars
looking out rather than experts working in one or the other
country--not numerically but ideologically.[5] And since for experts
in international relations it is typically far more difficult to
develop an understanding of local culture and continental diversity
than to argue along the lines of international politics, the U.S.
perspective often stresses politics (sometimes coupled with economic
policy) over culture, dismissing the latter as a mere side effect in
the global scheme of events. Part of the problem may be language
barriers: many foreign accounts do not get published in English.
Moreover, general knowledge of Americanization, often tinged by
current affairs and routinely unstable surveys, does not
automatically generate an inside view of influences and receptions in
a target region: one group's anti-Americanism often starkly differs
from that of another country. And when the debate comes to Europe, we
find many individual studies but hardly any synthesis.

Alexander Stephan set out to change all this. A scholar of German
studies at the Ohio State University by training, Stephan asked
experts from and of eleven countries east and west of the former Iron
Curtain to reflect on the "Americanization" of their respective
country by considering specifically four fields: First, what role did
the U.S. government, notably U.S. cultural diplomacy, play? Second
and third, how do authors assess the development of high culture and
mass entertainment during the period in question? Finally, what role
did and does anti-Americanism play--how did people in target
countries react to the influx of U.S. politics and culture? This set
of questions implies that in the postwar world Americanization and
anti-Americanism were closely interconnected, a fact often overlooked
by American scholars. Second, they point to the conviction that
politics as well as high and popular culture must be considered in
tandem, again a constellation often neglected by scholars of postwar
Europe who tend to focus on either one or the other but rarely both.
The core of the book is subdivided in four parts, following roughly
but not always geographical lines: The "Big Three" (France, Great
Britain, and Germany, "losers of the American century" [p. 8]);
Sweden, Denmark, and Austria (small countries, though it is hard to
find a common denominator here); countries behind the Iron Curtain
(USSR/Russia and Poland); and southern Europe (Italy, Greece, and
Spain).

In the essay dedicated to Great Britain, Hugh Wilford argues, not
surprisingly, that England may be regarded as a rather tame case of
Americanization and anti-Americanism. Thanks to historical and
cultural ties, during the Cold War the British felt much less called
on to resist American influences and politics than their continental
neighbors have done in the past. Indeed, it may be Great Britain's
proximity to and skepticism toward continental Europe that has
contributed to the country's affinity for North America and its role
as a transmitter of U.S. culture and ideas to Europe. At the same
time, Wilford points to the British openness to other cultural trends
as well, such as Indian, Pakistani, and Caribbean music since the
1980s and 90s.

France, as Richard Golsan describes it, provides a stark contrast to
Great Britain and a highly contradictory position in and of itself.
Despite all historical political ties as well as several wartime
alliances, French people have traditionally exhibited strong cultural
anti-Americanism, even and particularly when political relations were
amiable. French politicians, like Charles de Gaulle, exhibited little
interest in American life and history and consistently pursued a
policy of political, military, and cultural distance. If leaders
supported U.S. foreign policy, this did not necessarily reflect
French public opinion. On the one hand, France's minister of defense
resigned when François Mitterand backed the Gulf War. On the other
hand, for all the quotas imposed on language and film imports, the
presence of Disneyland and such U.S. franchises as Pizza Hut,
McDonald's, and other chain stores leave no doubt about the appeal of
American consumer culture to individual French people. Golsan's
verdict on the French scene, then, is adamant. Even if U.S. foreign
policy changed, even if U.S. leaders presented a more likeable face
to their French allies, anti-Americanism would not disappear:
"Anti-américanisme is a constant in postwar France...inextricably
linked to the processes of economic and cultural Americanization...
inspired as much by myths and distortions as it is by realities" (p.
66).

Germany probably constitutes the most investigated case, thanks to
the long presence of American troops and politics on German soil and
the evident and profound influence of U.S. consumer goods since 1945.
The subject of numerous cultural and information programs throughout
the Cold War, Germans were subjected to a thorough process of
Americanization during the Cold War, complete with highbrow programs,
mass entertainment, and the country's integration into the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Indeed, Stephan talks about a
process of "self-Americanization" that replaced the process of active
Americanization of German culture in the early 1960s (p. 78). Yet, as
he shows, diplomatic disenfranchisement led to the Federal Republic's
timely commitment to European integration. Moreover, West Germans
exhibited profound and early political protest deriving from earlier
forms of cultural anti-Americanization both on the political
level--from the Easter Marches in the 1950s to recent demonstrations
against the Gulf War--as well as on the cultural level: "Both in the
educated middle class and among German intellectuals, deeply rooted
prejudices closed minds to cultural expressions from the United
States, on the grounds that they were poor copies of European
originals or that they compromised the standards of high culture by
their commercialism" (p. 75). Even the postwar protest generations on
both sides of the Atlantic have been drifting apart since the 1970s:
while in the United States, yuppies (and their children, one might
add), observed passively the power politics of Ronald Reagan and
George H. W. Bush, their German counterparts marched straight into
party politics (witness the rise of Gerhard Schröder, Joschka
Fischer, and others). Germany today has "an attractive form of
culture in which high and popular culture nourish each other, state
support and the free market exist side by side, and much of the
population have learned to compose their own cultural program,
depending on their needs and education, from the wide range of
entertainment, knowledge, and information on offer" (p. 87).

The book then turns to the lesser-known cases of European interaction
with American culture and politics. Section 2 lumps together various
central and northern European countries. Sweden, as Dag Blanck tells
us, experienced a much lighter form of anti-American criticism than
its neighbors. Sweden did not play a large role in the
conceptualization of the Marshall Plan and remained a nonaligned
country, following the country's tradition to stay outside of the
major military conflicts for the last 150 years. Consequently,
"questions of Swedish dependence on or subservience to the U.S. never
have played a very prominent role in the Swedish public debate" (p.
110). Like the rest of continental Europe, Swedes have long looked
down on U.S. culture for the familiar reasons. For all the Nobel
Prizes given to U.S. writers and all the U.S. influences on the
Swedish educational system, Swedish politicians and intellectuals
displayed the usual continental fervor to limit the influence of
American mass culture. Blanck concludes that cultural
anti-Americanism has framed political protests, that the latter
focused principally on the Vietnam War, and that the historical
perspective is key to anti-Americanism in Europe: The "Anti-American
discourse transcends the immediate context in which the U.S. is being
discussed, making it possible for individual participants in the
conversations about America to be part of a longer negative (or
positive) discussion" (p. 103).

Next-door Denmark, in contrast, was liberated in 1945 by the
British, not by the Americans. This fact, authors Nils Arne Sorensen
and Klaus Petersen argue, is key to Denmark's relationship to
America. For the last fifty years, the country has been more
receptive to British than to American influences. For English
teachers at Danish schools, English meant British, not American,
culture. Britain has always been Denmark's "local great power," both
as a trading partner as well as a cultural model (p. 116). However,
in the early Cold War, the United States worked hard to win over
Danish hearts. Once the country joined the Marshall Plan, Denmark
received the most per capita aid ($278 million), became part of the
Western alliance, and joined NATO in 1949. Popular culture has been
very receptive to U.S. influences, notably in the sector of cable TV
and music. While Danes once protested fiercely against the United
States' involvement in the Vietnam War, for the larger part of the
Cold War anti-Americanism in Denmark was and is clearly limited to
cultural complaints against U.S. commercial culture and did not even
exhibit much of a political twist during the war against Iraq in
2003-2004.

Like the Germans, Günter Bischof shows, Austrians welcomed American
soldiers in 1945 as liberators rather than as occupiers who stayed on
for a number of years. And like Germany, Austria found itself divided
(though not perpetually) and subjected to a program of
denazification, democratization, and reeducation. Unlike Germany (but
very much like Sweden), the country remained neutral during the Cold
War but open to American influences. Bischof stresses the importance
of people exchange and contacts, ranging from the tens of thousands
of U.S. soldiers who entered the country in 1945 to the formalized
student and expert programs spanning several decades of the Cold War.
To many Austrians traveling to the United States, an exchange
fellowship to the United States involved more than an informational
trip--it often changed their lives and, not surprisingly, infused
them with a more positive interpretation of the United States. All of
this, Bischof asserts, did not challenge Austrians' preference for
European culture, including classical music, though U.S. musicals
appear to have done better than modern classical music. "The American
cultural 'blitz' was short-lived and elites retained the upper hand"
(p. 171). Bischof wonders to what extent Americanization is the
proper word to describe what happened to U.S. influences in Austria.
In closing (and in line with many other authors in the volume), he
points out that in times of political crises, "cultural"
_traditional_ stereotypes about the United States ("America")
resurface and can be politically instrumentalized quickly. They have
always been there--Americanization after World War II has not managed
to wipe them out" (p. 173).

_The Americanization of Europe_ then turns to two countries behind
the former Iron Curtain. In the Soviet Union Marsha Siefert detects
a clash between the mesmerizing images of Fordism as a model for
future socialist societies in the 1920s and anti-American propaganda
of the Cold War period. Soviet officials ranted against American
influences and the evils of capitalism since the 1930s but suspended
these criticisms both during the wartime alliance in World War Two
and the 1950s "thaw." Soviet citizens, by tradition skeptical of
any form of propaganda, were confused by the antipathetic images
circulated in public media and what many perceived as fascinating,
promising messages dispersed by Western media and covert channels.
Pop singers enjoyed high appeal in the Soviet Union while officials
branded Donna Summer for eroticism, Tina Turner for sexual display,
Julio Iglesias for neofascism, and Van Halen for anti-Soviet
propaganda. Cultural competition in the fields of music and ballet
only heightened the confusion: Siefert detects a curious if not even
contradictory note in the official propaganda battle between East and
West when both governments staffed highbrow tournaments and exchanges
with artists who were often trained behind the Iron Curtain. As
world-famous violinist Isaac Stern commented: "We send them our
Jewish violinists from Odessa, and they send us their Jewish
violinists from Odessa" (p. 193). The author continually underlines
the collision between reception and rejection of American cultural
and political influences, even and particularly among young people.
Whatever Americanization there is in today's Russia, Siefert
concludes, it always has and always will clash with the "Russian
idea," a vision of Russia as a distinct, independent non-Western
country with a rich cultural and historical heritage that is a
prerequisite for its future welfare.

In their essay on Poland, Andrzej Antoszek and Kate Delaney show that
Eastern Bloc countries provide by no means identical samples. Though
closely monitored by the USSR, since the mid-1950s Poles have been
very open to Western cultural impulses, importing artists, journals,
and magazines. Polish emigration has consistently served to tie the
United States and Poland together. Soviets interested in Western
affairs often learned Polish to get access to information and
cultural trends censored in the USSR but available in Poland. As a
result, "Poland served as both a translator and transmitter of
American culture, making American works accessible to others in the
Eastern bloc" (p. 224). Moreover, in "good times," appropriations of
American cultural products had primarily an "aesthetic" character,
while in bad times they served to oppose the regime (p. 234). Not
surprisingly then, Poles consistently experienced a mix of openness
and restriction: For example, in 1975, Warsaw saw the major American
Bicentennial Exhibition "The World of Franklin and Jefferson" but the
year before, censors in the city turned down students' application
for a production of Allen Gainsberg's _Howl_. Poland was the first
former Warsaw Pact country to join NATO (in 1999), but at the same
time Poles continue to contest American culture and politics, then
and now. As the authors point out, like in many other countries
Polish anti-Americanism often serves as a "reaction against
modernity," blaming the United States for everything from economic
depression to drugs, crime, and moral decay (p. 243).

The final section looks at various south European countries. David
Ellwood's essay reflects on the modernization of Italy: Where, he
asks, does one "locate the American challenge in the rise to global
status of the land of pizza, pasta, and cappuccino, of Armani and
Benetton, of Alfa Romeo and Ferrari, of Fo, Eco, Benigni, and all the
other miraculous products of the world's sixth-largest industrial
power?" (p. 253). A keen insider of the field, Ellwood stresses that
Italian scholars have long rejected the "Americanization" thesis in
favor of an argument about the "selective adaptation or appropriation
of the American inspiration" (p. 254). In Italy, the arrival of
American troops, in 1945, whom locals--like in Germany and
Austria--viewed more as liberators than as occupiers, marked the
beginning of American influence in Italy. But to Ellwood, the key
period for the consideration of American culture in Italy is the
decade from 1967 to 1977, after reconstruction and before the
"reconsideration of the postwar settlement" when both the Right and
the Left agreed to accept "limited sovereignty and constant
supervision" by the United States (p. 255). In those crucial years,
Italians shattered the American myth, created a counterculture, and
eventually learned to understand the distinction between antagonism
against and alternative to the U.S. model. Today, Italians dangle
between appropriation and dismissal with doubters continuously
complaining about the U.S.-inspired tyranny of the market,
privatization of social services, and the cultural downside of
capitalism.

Looking at Greece, Konstantina Botsiou finds that Americanization and
anti-Americanism both derived from the country's dependence on the
United States during the Cold War as well as its deep roots in Slavic
culture. Since World War Two, Greeks continuously blame America and
U.S. interventionism for everything that seems to have gone wrong in
postwar Greece, from civil war and the Cyprus question to
commercialism, consumerism, and materialism among young people. Many
Greeks never forgave the United States for backing the military
dictatorship between 1967 and 1974, a dictatorship that, in turn,
supported the influx of American TV programs into Greece. Americans
tried to counter Greek anti-Americanism with a series of cultural,
information, and exchange programs. But their message collided with
Greeks' preference for the "'unpretentious' man of the land,"
traditional gender role, age-based authoritarianism, and a
Slavic-communist enemy image (p. 283). Like elsewhere in Europe,
Europeanization led young Greeks, in particular, to deviate from the
trans-Atlantic alliance and lobby instead for a "Third World
neutralism" (p. 298).

Last but not least, Dororthy Noyes investigates "Spanish American
Dreams" under the telling title "Waiting for Mr. Marshall." The key
date in Spanish-American relations, to her, is not 1945 or 1989 but
1898, when Spain lost the last tidbit of its once formidable empire to
the United States: Spaniards still like to point out that they may
not be a world power but they do have a world language. In other
words, Spain's relationship with Latin America has continued to frame
its relation with the United States. Equally important, within the
Cold-War European context, Spain constitutes an exception in so many
ways: Spain did not participate in World War Two, the United States
was not interested in creating a democracy here, and Francisco Franco
seemed to take care of anticommunism on the Iberian Peninsula. Hence,
Spain was no target for U.S. cultural diplomacy. Americanization
arrived in Spain via informal levels, most notably in the form of
tourism and foreign investment. Spain's special relationship with the
United States, the fact that it did not participate in the Marshall
Plan nor in the European Community and that "Americanization" was
blessed by governments from Franco to Jose Maria Aznar, meant that
Spanish "consumer society preceded political liberalization" (p.
330). While there is much anti-American criticism in Spain along the
usual lines (materialism, etc.), it is often buffered by the
conviction that Spain, too, is a great cultural power (witness the
appeal of Spanish food and film stars like Antonio Bandera and
Penelope Cruz) as well as a market model preferring "undemanding
cultural products: 'cultural light'" (p. 330).

The book derives its particular quality from the fact that all
contributors either come from, live in, or have extensive expertise
studying the country they are presenting. Each author brings a deep
political and cultural understanding of their subject to the table
and each purposely avoids the American gaze or "the view from
Washington" that so often marks U.S. analyses of Americanization and
anti-Americanism abroad. But the real merit of this book,
unpretentiously outlined by Stephan in the introduction, is that it
provides a fine survey of the similarities and differences in the
European response to American politics, culture, and economic
influences: Germany, France, and Great Britain all count among the
losers of the presumed "American Century." Poland, Sweden, and Greece
both have large émigré communities in the United States. In Spain
and Sweden, 1945 did not mark the turning point as it did in Italy,
Austria, and Germany, where locals welcomed U.S. troops toward the
end of the war as liberators rather than occupiers and were therefore
more receptive to American goods. Austria and Sweden, in turn,
remained politically neutral but culturally open to American goods.
Greece and Spain both experienced a dictatorship supported or at
least tolerated by the United States. Stephan also points to the
significance of certain topics across Europe: the erosion of
boundaries between high and popular culture; the opposition from both
conservatives and the European Left; the anti-Americanism of the
churches; the protest movements; and the fact that U.S. culture has
not evolved into a dominant culture in any European country. And the
fact that while state censorship and a shortage of funds prevented
all countries behind the Iron Curtain from direct exposure to
American cultural products, those limitations vanished with the end
of the Cold War.

In the final section, Dutch scholar Rob Kroes offers another example
of his typically sophisticated insights. The influence of American
ideas and culture, and the public and intellectual discourse that
comes with it, he argues, has great promise for Europeans. Instead of
posing a constant challenge to European identity, it may eventually
do exactly the opposite. U.S. perceptions may eventually deliver the
new European vision in the sense that they inform the latter about
their shared identities, preferences, and their multifaceted
cosmopolitanism. Post-Cold War Europe could "offer a model to the
worlds ... of a civil and democratic order far more tempting than the
imposition of democracy through preemptive military invasion.... If
there is a neo-Wilsonian promise, it is held by the new Europe" (p.
358).

This is a great book. Instead of simplifying the topic or getting
lost in details, it presents a logical structure and a strong
argument nuanced by local peculiarities. The Congress of Cultural
Freedom's success, for example, differed widely. In Denmark, the
local branch made no effort to behave as it enjoyed any America
influence--it looked like a private club, displayed a different name,
distanced itself from the American organization with no regard to the
latter's mission, and even enjoyed relative economic independence.
But it is the discreet collective argument that makes this a strong
book: Taken together, the essays argue that the history of
Americanization and anti-Americanism after World War Two need to be
viewed within a broader historical context. Some even preface their
comments with historical details from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Nearly all agree that the cultural perceptions often frame
or take precedence over politics and that fascination and rejection
are often joined at the hip (e.g., Bischof, Golsan, Sorensen,
Petersen, Blanck, Antoszek, Delaney, Ellwood, and Botsiou). Politics
are important to our understanding of Americanization and
anti-Americanism but a change in policy will not do away with
anti-Americanism.

Today, edited volumes are facing tough times. Who, many review
editors reason, is going to read a collection of essays that
presumably did not make it into a top journal in the field? But such
reservations often let us forget the promise of this literary genre.
At best, an edited volume turns its reader overnight into an
international expert in the field. Stephan's volume on the
Americanization of as well as anti-Americanism in Europe since World
War Two is such a book. Some readers may squabble with the fact that
Eastern Europe could have been more visible in the volume, that the
GDR does not enjoy a sufficient amount of prominence when juxtaposed
with West Germany. But these are minor points. Rarely do editors
succeed in assembling such a distinguished and, at the same time,
international and multicultural group thinking and writing about the
same broad constellation of historical facts.

Stephan passed away in May 2009, but he left us with much to think
about and one big question: Where might our thinking go from here?
One of the insights emerging from a collective reading of these
essays is that in contrast to U.S. influences and relations in other
parts of the world, the European-American circuit does not reveal a
major racist but, instead, a latent class component along the lines
of Pierre Bourdieu's _Habitus_.[6] While Americans are hated in Asia
and Latin American for their racist attitude toward the locals, for
whatever reasons Europeans feel a priori more advanced and
cultivated. For all the Americanization there is, they are the ones
to look down on Americans, and unlike in Asia and Latin America, this
European arrogance bothers U.S. observers tremendously. Perhaps this
is the reason why the academic analysis of Americanization and
anti-Americanism has caused more than one culture clash on both sides
of the Atlantic. While U.S. leaders along with many intellectuals
continue to hope that a change in U.S. diplomacy will do away with
anti-Americanism in the world, their European counterparts are
shaking their heads in disbelief: the German Federal Center for
Political Education, for one, a branch of the German government,
recently commissioned a full issue on the cultural framework of
anti-Americanism in Europe with an estimated publication of eighty
thousand copies for free distribution among students at high schools,
universities, and adult education centers. "European
'anti-Americanism' is primarily a cultural phenomenon that often
blossoms in a particular political climate," Ludwig Watzal stated in
his editorial. "The German criticism on the Bush administration's
policy was not 'anti-Americanism' but the expression of worry about a
reckless policy." Or as Joschka Fischer once replied to Donald
Rumsfeld when the latter claimed all diplomatic options in Iraq had
been exhausted: "Excuse me, I am not convinced."[7]

Notes

[1]. Max Paul Friedman, "Anti-Americanism and U.S. Foreign
Relations," _Diplomatic History_ 32, no. 4 (September 2008): 497-514.

[2]. Peter Grothe, _To Win the Minds of Men: The Story of the
Communist Propaganda in East Germany_ (Palo Alto: Pacific Books,
1958), 234.

[3]. I have fleshed out these ideas a bit more in "Shame on US?
Cultural Transfer, Academics, and the Cold War--A Critical Review,"
_Diplomatic History_ 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 465-494.

[4]. Juan Cole, "Anti-Americanism: It's the Policies," _American
Historical Review_ 111, no. 4 (October 2006): 1129.

[5]. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, "'Always Blame the Americans':
Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century," _American
Historical Review_ 111, no. 4 (October 2006): 1067-1091.

[6]. Pierre Bourdieu, _Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

[7]. "Westliche Wertegemeinschaft?" _Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte_
5-6 (January 28, 2008): 2.

Citation: Jessica Gienow-Hecht. Review of Stephan, Alexander, ed.,
_The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and
Anti-Americanism after 1945_. H-GAGCS, H-Net Reviews. November, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25063

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
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