The Cold War embedded two different ways of organizing culture and defining modernity. While the Soviets' early engagement in cultural propaganda gave the Warsaw Pact states a tremendous edge in the battle for high culture, popular culture unexpectedly provided the vehicle for the United States’ triumph in 1989-91. Fostered by technological innovations such as satellite television, US films, cartoons, and fashion appealed to people in many regions east and west of the Iron Curtain before the Wall came down. In Western Europe, the arrival of consumerism went hand in hand with the internalization of many values such as productivity, efficiency, and the eternal quest for a higher living standard, as well as the development of a
Service sector, suburbs, youth culture, and the increasing preponderance of visual culture.
Still, this is not a story of winners and losers. For one thing, despite the domination of the two superpowers in the Cold War, their client states and peoples chose a process of cultural adaptation and rejection. West European consumers dismissed or reinterpreted many US products, often in an open effort to attack the United States. In Eastern Europe, the embrace of popular culture became part of the language of silent protest. Because popular culture bred the lure of capitalism and evoked opposition to the status quo, Warsaw Pact governments remained opposed to it.
Ironically, neither American nor Soviet officials intended to focus their cultural crusade on popular culture. In contrast, propagandists on both sides of the Iron Curtain concentrated their campaigns on the preservation and appeal of European high culture, and they shied away from openly employing popular culture for political ends. Communist officials everywhere derided the threat of popular culture while the USIA worked hard to rid the United States of the stigma of mass culture before realizing, toward the end of the Cold War, that popular culture helped to promote US influence abroad.
As a result of the bipolar competition for ideological and cultural preponderance, the Cold War privileged culture and cultural relations in Europe to an unprecedented degree. High culture remained front-page news despite a continuous shortage ofgovernment funds. Never before and never afterwards did governments, hegemonic powers, nongovernmental organizations, and private individuals invest as much money, energy, and thought in the promotion of the arts, academic exchange, and cultural representation. Never again did Europeans enjoy so many state-subsidized performances, exhibitions, and shows as during these decades. If Communist states suffered from a vacuum in the area of popular culture, they continued to score points by celebrating and exporting their classical dancers and soloists. And they never lost the argument that high culture flourished in the East.
US propagandists, in contrast, never realized the full dimensions of the battle they fought. They failed to see that Europeans continuously discussed culture, modernization, and the future of their countries in historical opposition to the United States. Instead, Americans were convinced that the United States had to win two cultural battles in the Cold War: one against the Warsaw Pact states and the global influence of Communism, and another against deeply rooted negative images of American civilization. Hoping to change what could never be changed, US propagandists failed to see that the European image of the United States reflected everything Europeans feared
About modernization: materialism, individualism, and loss of cultural identity. The United States may have won its "first" cultural war in 1989-91. But it did not win the second one, the battle against anti-Americanism with all its negative connotations about American culture.32 Like Holly Martins in Vienna, Americans in Europe remained innocents abroad, their ideological message triumphant but their cultural image forever tainted.
32 Jessica Gienow-Hecht, "Always Blame the Americans: Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century," American Historical Review, iii, 4 (October 2006), 1067-91.
World History
