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CIAO DATE: 07/06
Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht teaches history at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Her first book, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-55, was co-awarded the Stuart Bernath Prize for the best first book in diplomatic history. Her second book, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in German-American Relations Since 1850, will be published by the University of Chicago Press. She has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Bielefeld, the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and Harvard University. n the 1981 film The Gods Must Be Crazy, a pilot flying across the Kalahari Desert of Botswana drops an empty Coke bottle into the midst of an African tribe. The natives instantaneously regard the bottle as a gift from their gods. But "the gift" changes the traditions and social mores of their world for the worse. Finally, the natives send a member of the tribe to cast the bottle away over what they believe is the edge of the earth.
This film offers insight into what has come to be known as "The Grand Debate": Are Americans "cultural imperialists" who conquer and corrupt the rest of the world by spreading popular culture everywhere?
It is true, as Richard Pells writes, that much of what constitutes American popular culture today originated in a m élange of foreign influences during the 20th century. But this does not explain why so many people around the world are critical of what they perceive as "American cultural imperialism." Nor does it explain why this idea has become such a force over the past century. If we wish to better understand this perception, we need to consider both the makeup and the influence of American culture abroad—as Pells does—and also its reception by non-Americans.
Historical Background
It is a curious paradox in American history that a nation whose cultural transfers became so controversial started out with little interest in the export of culture. Historically, Americans have found their distinctiveness primarily in their political system rather than in their poets, artists, and novelists. They generally view their popular culture as a source of private entertainment rather than as an instrument of foreign policy. They have never seriously contemplated establishing a department of culture in the federal government. In 1938, the State Department established the Division for Cultural Relations, but many U.S. officials criticized the use of culture as a diplomatic tool. Even today, most Americans believe that culture belongs to the realm of creativity, public taste, and free enterprise, not government.
But following World War II, the situation was different. During the Cold War, American diplomats decided that the United States needed to make the case for the American way of life abroad. At a time when the Soviet Union sought to export communism, public figures as well as policymakers sought to exert more influence through culture around the world. In the years following VE-Day, the U.S. government created a number of organizations and programs, such as the United States Information Agency and the Fulbright exchange program, which promoted the transmission of information on American culture.
From an objective point of view, of course, the United States was not the first nation to export its way of life. Since the Renaissance, European powers have fostered a variety of cultural exchange programs. The British in India and the Middle East, the Germans in Africa, and the French in Indochina all sent their own culture abroad as a powerful tool to strengthen trade, commerce, and political influence and recruit elites for their own purposes. A 1959 study by UNESCO revealed that more than half of the 81 states queried, including all the larger ones, had official cultural relations programs. Some of the European Community's activities today rest on collective cultural diplomacy—that is, the creation of organizations promoting languages and the exchange of cultural information.
Argentina, Mexico, Egypt, Sweden, and India traditionally export their media to adjacent countries. Moreover, the takeover of Hollywood movie studios in recent years by foreign-based corporations has raised the question of whether Americans have changed from "cultural imperialists" to takeover victims. But even if the United States was not the first nation to export its way of life, foreign critics have consistently focused their fears of the future on the United States.
In the 1970s and '80s, for example, Western Europe saw rising anti-American protests, peace groups, and mass demonstrations against the American military presence. In Europe, this anti-Americanism soon expanded to cultural matters. Critics believed that American products exerted an influence that went far beyond their popularity among consumers. U.S. goods seemed to dominate not only foreign markets but foreign minds as well. To many European intellectuals, mass culture, Hollywood movies, and commercialism seemingly threatened European sovereignty, traditions, and a social order based on print culture. Mass culture also seemed to blur social distinctions, override nation-state boundaries, and spread the capitalist marketplace.
Yet what Peter tells you about Paul tells you more about Peter than about Paul. What people around the world think about American culture may tell us more about these people than about the United States.
Culture and Globalization
Today, many politicians and cultural critics around the world lament the influx of U.S. movies. European representatives, for example, are concerned about their cultural distinctiveness and fear that they have already lost much of their audience to American products. Under the headline "The Higher the Satellite, the Lower the Culture," the former French Minister of Culture Jack Lang vehemently condemned U.S. cultural imperialism in a 1991 interview. This criticism was not new. In the 1970s, Chilean professor Armand Mattelart and novelist and critic Ariel Dorfman had written an influential pamphlet titled Para leer al pato Donald (How To Read Donald Duck), which excoriated Hollywood's distorted vision of reality and advocated liberation by the Chilean people of their own culture.
Tiny nations, remote people, and unknown tribes find their way into the headlines of international journals through their vocal protest against Western influences. From Iceland to Latin America, Central Africa to the Philippines, representatives reportedly deplore the demise of their cultures with the rising influence of Anglo-American television and culture.
In many ways, however, the idea of "American cultural imperialism" is inadequate. The American sociologist John Tomlinson has argued that this phenomenon may simply be the spread of modernity, a process of the loss of local cultures and not of cultural expansion. Global technological and economic progress and integration simply lessen the importance of national culture. It is, therefore, misleading to place the blame for a worldwide development on any one nation. Instead, all countries are affected by a global cultural change.
In the future, the term "globalization" has the potential to replace the criticism of U.S. cultural imperialism. Globalization refers both to the compression of the world and to the growing perception of the earth as an organic whole. Although many speak of globalization as simply an economic phenomenon, it is multidisciplinary in its causes and its effects. The rather vague term includes many characteristics of modernization, such as the spread of Western capitalism, technology, and scientific rationality. The central idea remains, however, that cultures and societies do not necessarily overlap with the boundaries of the nation-state. In other words, the spread of modern mass culture may not be the responsibility of the United States.
In recent decades, much of the international criticism of "cultural imperialism" has moved away from its anti-American line to a more global level, with no one identifiable enemy. Even major critics of the United States have aligned their earlier reproaches along these lines. Already in 1980, Armand Mattelart warned of the broad and inappropriate usage of the notion of "cultural imperialism." He emphasized that the term did not imply an external conspiracy but could only be effected by a combination of international and native (elite) forces.
If the concept of U.S. cultural dominance is so questionable, why then has anti-Americanism ballooned nearly everywhere in the past decades and today? The reasons often have less to do with the United States than with the protesters themselves. In a sense, there is no one cultural anti-Americanism but only a variety of very heterogeneous expressions of this phenomenon, conditioned by geographical concerns and historical cycles. The shape and content of the phenomenon not only differ according to dimensions of space but also according to dimensions of time: Each époque and each group has its own forms of anti-Americanism. In the 20th century, much of this criticism focused on the economic aspect of U.S. cultural exports. In the 21st century, it seems, people around the world worry more about the global political implications of American power.
In the Cold War, French anti-Americanism originated in the rift between communism and socialism. Public debates denounced American expansionism, NATO, and what was seen as the corruptive influence of American art, all of which horrified French elites but not the mass of voters. Instead, the "American Way of Life" fascinated a generation of young French in love with consumerism, better living standards, and economic growth.
The French case is instructive because it points to the most fundamental paradox of cultural anti-Americanism: At any point in time this criticism was and is unthinkable without the flipside, philo-Americanism. The tension between the two represents the very condition necessary to support the existence of both: High expectations and bitter disillusion are always joined at the hip.
Still, most powerful states have experienced the basic historical lesson that power generates suspicion, and the more power a dominant nation exerts the more antagonistic other nations turn. In the interwar period and even during the early Cold War years, a number of political and cultural observers grasped this point, and they alerted U.S. policymakers to the consequences of this development. As the United States became a world superpower, it was inevitable that people abroad, in the words of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, would "hate those who hold power over them"—this is true in both cultural and political terms When pondering the future of globalization and the role the United States will play in this context, we may wish to remember the words of this wise man.