The European nations had been in the national projection business even longer than the USSR. In the 1880s private groups in France, Germany, and
Italy established cultural diplomacy organizations. Britain came late with its quasi nongovernmental British Council in 1934 and foreign-language broadcasts by the BBC which began in 1938. This work continued into the postwar period and acquired a Cold War imperative along with an increased emphasis on cultivating the developing world. West Germany established a new organization: the Goethe Institute, to make a clean break with Nazi cultural propaganda. Student exchanges and overseas student recruitment emerged as a favorite technique of the European cultural propagandists. Europeans also paid particular attention to the idea of establishing twinning agreements between towns across international lines. Such arrangements were an important mechanism of overcoming historical antipathies and building a sense of Europeanness in the shadow of the USSR, but were also used to reach out across Cold War fault lines.
West European cultural diplomacy organizations presented their respective political culture inside the Eastern bloc; Britain and France mounted exhibitions in Moscow in the years following the American exhibition. But these efforts were not simply a product of the Cold War. The British and French were still competing with one another to expand influence and reap material profits. France spent far and away the most money, but the bulk of its budget was allocated to promote French language and culture in its former colonial zone in West Africa.
Eastern European governments set up their own cultural offices, sent cultural attaches abroad, and opened their own exhibition pavilions. They exported their film and television programs, with Czechoslovakia making its mark in the world of animation. They especially focused on sports. Romania’s gymnasts, Czechoslovakia’s ice hockey team, and East Germany’s weight lifters were all presented as symbols of the health and vitality of their system. Sporting events like the contest between the East and West German soccer teams in the first round of the 1974 soccer World Cup gained immense propaganda significance (this particular match was won by East Germany 1-0, but West Germany went on to win the championship). Sometimes sports were a proxy for resistance within the Warsaw Pact. During the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, held in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams fought so fiercely during their match that it became known as the "blood in the water" match. Hungary went on to clinch the gold medal.
The Cold War cast a shadow over global artistic production. There were moments when art became especially politicized. America’s radio stations RFE and RL disseminated the works of dissidents like Boris Pasternak or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and in the same way the Soviet Union used art and literature to publicize America’s negative stories from the plight of Vietnamese peasants to the fate of the popularly elected leftist Salvador Allende regime in Chile. US and British propaganda bureaucracies both worked to ensure that the work of the most influential English-language voice of the Cold War - George Orwell - was as widely translated and disseminated as possible. Animal Farm and 1984 were invaluable to the Western cause.670 But Cold War culture was more than this. Artists and audiences across the world gravitated toward certain shared themes which, while already present in the culture, achieved a special prominence in the period and provided a mechanism through which the Cold War experience could be explored. Three broad subjects stand out as characteristic of the era: destruction (and especially nuclear destruction), espionage, and epic renderings ofhistory and fantasy. Stories woven around all three subjects evolved during the period and serve as a window on the development of Cold War attitudes among artists and audiences alike.
World History
