Coca-Colonization and the Cold War

The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War

Reinhold Wagnleitner

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807866139
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Reinhold Wagnleitner argues that cultural propaganda played an enormous part in integrating Austrians and other Europeans into the American sphere during the Cold War. In Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, he shows that 'Americanization' was the result not only of market forces and consumerism but also of systematic planning on the part of the United States. Wagnleitner traces the intimate relationship between the political and economic reconstruction of a democratic Austria and the parallel process of cultural assimilation. Initially, U.S. cultural programs had been developed to impress Europeans with the achievements of American high culture. However, popular culture was more readily accepted, at least among the young, who were the primary target group of the propaganda campaign. The prevalence of Coca-Cola and rock 'n' roll are just two examples addressed by Wagnleitner. Soon, the cultural hegemony of the United States became visible in nearly all quarters of Austrian life: the press, advertising, comics, literature, education, radio, music, theater, and fashion. Hollywood proved particularly effective in spreading American cultural ideals. For Europeans, says Wagnleitner, the result was a second discovery of America. This book is a translation of the Austrian edition, published in 1991, which won the Ludwig Jedlicka Memorial Prize.

Chapter 1: The Problem of America as Artifact of European Expansion

European Stereotypes and Clichés, Dreams and Nightmares, Imaginings and (Mis)Perceptions

Europe and America no longer exist; there is only the phase of Western civilization which we call American because it came to birth in a European colony named America. … Today Europe is a colony of its colony—and well on the way to becoming a second America.

—Ludwig Marcuse, European Anti-Americanism (1953)

It is wiser to confront American culture as something as alien as that of the Eskimos.

—E. N. W. Mottram, American Studies in Europe (1955)

In the revolutionary year 1849, the Austrian satirist Johann Nestroy posed the penetrating question in his play Lady und Schneider: Would Europe become a province of Pennsylvania, or North America a suburb of Frankfurt. Even today, after the apparent victory of the American way of life in Europe, this question cannot be answered easily: while both became the other’s counterpart, they also remained each other’s other. “America, you have got it better,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exclaimed. Was this the reason why, during the years of writing Dichtung und Wahrheit, he still found ample time to advise Karl August of Weimar to speculate with dollars in New York as well as to invest in Mexican silver mines? Or what are we to make of the poet Nikolaus Lenau’s famous (and incorrect) lament that a poetic curse must be hanging over the promised land on the other side of the Atlantic because the United States lacked nightingales?

The discovery of the American continent by Europeans not only increased the living space of the Old World by five times—42 million square kilometers were now available in the New World for European colonization and imperialism after 1492, a nice piece of real estate indeed! This discovery also opened unlimited possibilities for European experience and knowledge, hopes and dreams, judgments and misjudgments, actions and misactions. Our difficulties with America already begin with the seemingly magical number 1492, with the heroic phrase of the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, whose Spanish name, Cristóbal Colón, most appropriately means bearer of God as well as colonizer. Naturally, in the discourse of the European victors, the four-hundred-year war against the “Indians” became divine destiny and a mission pleasing to God, presenting the European “superrace” with the opportunity to establish total hegemony over “primitive and pagan barbarians.” The year 1492, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, quite simply marked the beginning of an epoch in which European pirates began to cheat, rob, and murder the peoples of the New World. The City upon a Hill, the New Canaan, the New Jerusalem, could not be built without war and destruction—a tradition, by the way, that was quite in step with its biblical models. The European conquerors disguised their land-grabbing expansion with the more-than-handy fable of America as an unpopulated continent, and “barbarians” as proverbial nonhumans. This unfolding of Europe’s Lebensraum thereby became the premise for the suffering of the subjugated; Europe’s living space turned into the death space for the Americans.

Was America, then, paradise or hell? Or perhaps both? Since the discovery of the New World, that continent preoccupied the fantasies of the Europeans. This preoccupation includes not only those who opted for emigration but also particularly those who remained in the Old World and had, for the most part, access only to inaccurate information. The waves of this America fascination swept over all of Europe, with a certain time-lag from west to east. The increasing emigration and the improved means of transportation and communication brought a growing number of Europeans in direct or indirect contact with America. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, by the way, the term “America” in Europe mostly signified Central and South America, to be usurped by the United States only after the War of Independence. These changes of meaning and transpositions not only signify the character of “America” as a construct; they also show that to name is to take over.

America became a metaphor for total enthusiasm, but also for total rejection. The mental baggage of many Europeans was filled with images, clichés, prejudices, and stereotypes in which the New World became situated somewhere between El Dorado and barbarian wilderness, paradisiacal deliverance and hell, noble savages and bloodthirsty cannibals—in short, between wishful thinking and nightmares that most likely had been dreamed in the Old World since antiquity. In any case, the phantasmagorias that were provoked by the discovery of the real existence of America definitely show that the discovery of the New World was accompanied by a simultaneous invention of America.

The importance of this discovery and invention for the European imago mundi is reflected in the immeasurable quantity of publications in which authors were forced to adapt to a radically different view of the world. Usually these discourses reflect Europe in a kaleidoscopic image of America. More often than not, America appears to be filtered and broken by the distorting mirror of European inadequacies, European frustrations, and European failures. Very rarely do we find answers to the actual questions posed by the real America. For the most part, we find an America only in the eyes of others, the image of a Strange New World as a European vision.¹

Had the Europeans, as the new Adams (where was the new Eve?) found paradise in America, or was America perhaps even a European mistake? Merely to formulate these questions shows clearly the construct character of America.² The absurdity of the counterquestion—whether Africa, Asia, or Australia were Europe’s mistakes—proves that in our context of the creation of European images of America, we must not construct a cognitive hierarchy between the reality of America and the New World as a symbol. Quite obviously, we are moving here in a realm in which fact and fiction intermingle: in the realm of faction.

The ever-increasing presence of U.S. culture in Europe and other parts of the world is not just an unstoppable phenomenon accompanying the rise of the United States as an imperialist world power since the middle of the nineteenth century. For the products of American culture collide(d) with already-existing powerful European clichés, stereotypes, associations, perceptions and misperceptions, images of foreign people and places—in short, all the reflections and (mis)representations of this Strange New World in the cognitive maps of Europeans. This has been especially true for the products of the consciousness industry, which, since the First World War, were particularly pushed by a complex comprising economics, the military, diplomacy, and the media.

The European helplessness vis-à-vis the enigma “America,” the fata morgana in the West, is further deepened by extremely complex interactions between, and even jamming of, European clichés about America and U.S. prejudices toward Europe.³ A speech by General George S. Patton, delivered to his troops immediately before the landing in Italy in 1944, may suffice: “Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, but remember that those ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty. The ancestors of the people we shall kill lacked the courage to make such a sacrifice and continued as slaves.”⁴ I really wonder how those about to be liberated would have reacted?

But we must be careful. To point one’s finger blamefully at the other all too often leads to the tendency to compare the worst of the foreign with the best at home. Although the impact, influence, and power of these mental pictures have very little to do with “reality,” these stereotypes still influence feelings, thoughts, and actions. We know only too well how history has always been distorted in myths, legends, and hagiographies disguised as scholarship, not only producing hero worship and amnesia, but also serving as the apologetic blinders for the powerful. And then, the textbook wisdom of the victors again makes history. Autostereotypes and heterostereotypes are not only exceptionally long lived; they actually exist in a symbiotic relationship, feeding one another in a circuit of utter simplification. All this results in limited perceptions and creates behavioral dispositions.⁵ Like self-fulfilling prophecies, then, only information that fits into our preformed patterns of thought and feeling is allowed to pass through the filters of our tunnel vision. In our case of America stereotypes in Europe and Europe stereotypes in the United States, we are rarely dealing with the requirements of necessary simplification that we need to make some sense of the world. Instead, we are mostly confronted with mental defense mechanisms and extrapunitive means of assigning fault to the other.⁶

Comparative image research has shown that the acceptance and continued influence of stereotypes and national prejudices are dependent upon personal factors such as age, gender, class, social status, education, profession, mobility, and political views as well as upon one’s psychological disposition (e.g., introversion or extroversion). In addition, general social developments such as the general political situation, the relationship of one’s own country to the United States, the reputation of a nation in the international community, and the degree to which an individual has experienced the United States must also be taken into consideration.⁷ Clearly, the origin of national stereotypes can be traced to early childhood. Comparative long-term studies indicate that European images of America, never exactly defined and always highly ambiguous, belong to the realm of the longue-durée.

Naturally, European stereotypes of America have become modified as a result of an increase in geographic knowledge, colonization, and immigration; the growth of economic, political, and military interdependence; and the apparent conquest of geographic distance through technical developments. However, technical progress in transportation and communication has mostly increased the quantity of information available while doing little to change the substance of stereotypes.⁸ Today, El Dorado is encapsulated by Dallas, Dynasty, and Miami Vice. The part of Hernando Cortés and the robber barons has been usurped by the Ewings and Carringtons; the role of the savage barbarian by Marlon Brando and all his successors. In an ironic twist, the Old Empire seems to have struck back—with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

These stereotypes, “that the United States is a country where …,” are socially transmitted. At the same time they function like a hall of mirrors of the superstructure, in which information and experiences are reflected by the distorting mirrors of deeply ingrained prejudices. They develop a self-propelled cognitive dynamism, which has already been proved in the observation of children’s views about their own environs and their conceptions of foreign countries.⁹

I do not want to deny that the ever-increasing ties between Europe and America have not promoted both formal and material forms of acculturation.¹⁰ A review of all cultural encounters, cultural clashes, and cultural relationships until now, however, indicates that even the split-second transmission of news will not substantially change geocentric and ethnocentric stereotypes. Furthermore, most bits of information are—consciously or unconsciously—already predigested and prefiltered by the autostereotypical views of their American producers. They are therefore not only reflected through a camera obscura Americana but also touch upon already-existing cognitive maps of each recipient.¹¹

In 1987, fully 79 percent of all film and television exports worldwide originated in the United States; in 1991, European TV productions accounted for just 20,000 hours out of a total 125,000 hours of air time of all European TV stations. The European-produced contributions will decline even more dramatically with the proliferation of television channels that will provide a projected 300,000 hours air time already by 1995. Because of the lack of local production alone, most of these slots will be filled by American movies and shows.¹² Perhaps we should also consider that about three-quarters of all computer programs in the world store information in the English language. Yet, this explosive increase of signs emanating from the United States does not necessarily facilitate a better understanding per se. As long as we do not improve methods and means to decipher these signs intelligently, the ever-increasing quantity of audiovisual bits of information will only further strengthen already-existing opinions, indifference, passivity, and dependence. Undoubtedly, the communication possibilities between Europe and America have been dramatically improved—from the caravels of Columbus to a network of satellites. It would be much too optimistic, though, to expect the disappearance of our stereotypes, just because technology seems to be offering apparent solutions in overcoming distances in space and time. Our problem does not become any easier when realizing that the understanding and misunderstanding, the production and reproduction of such clichés, occurs not only on a horizontal scale of synchronicity but also on the vertical scale of asynchronicity.

The European images of America seem to have been produced by a time machine, one that transforms and transports European dreams and myths of the past and the future. Whether the questions are ones of science, politics, religion, culture, economics, political and military influence, or technical developments, the European discourse has always interpreted America either as a part of Europe’s illusionary past, namely, in the sense of a paradisiacal, precivilization second chance (catchword: the new Adam), or as anticipatory dreams of America as Europe’s future, which, more often than not, turn into nightmares.¹³

The Myth of the West: From the Ideology of a Colonizing Mission to the Practice of Conquest and Exploitation

Particularly important in this context is the myth of “the West,” a myth that existed long before the discoveries of Columbus and his contemporaries. “The West,” an ambiguous conception of both space and time, had fascinated African, Asian, and European people since antiquity. Long before Columbus set sail, “the West” had already become a fundamentally fixed image. These anticipations of America range from Egyptian mythology to Homer and Pindar, Plato and Aristotle, Virgilius, Plinius and Plutarch, the early fathers, and the legendary travels of the Irish St. Brendan; from the Greek science fiction of Atlantis to the medieval legend of the Golden Epoch. Long before the lost continent of Atlantis seemed to have been rediscovered by crossing the Atlantic ocean, long before the missing hemisphere America was incorporated into the European view of the world (America as Europe, Inc.?), Europeans were engrossed by the unknown, mysterious, and therefore extremely attractive, exotic, and already-preconceived terra incognita.

The Pillars of Hercules, accepted as the truly insurmountable western border, did not prevent the New World from casting its shadow, in myths, to exist as magical reality. By no means was this mythical West limited to Elysium, the blissful empire of the dead. It also included Eden, the Island of the Enchanting Women, El Dorado, Ultima Thule, Arcadia, eternal life, total happiness, the millennium, and unmeasurable wealth. Greek and Roman commentators, early fathers, and the ancestors of English colonialism, among them Sir Walter Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt, all agreed that the center of the empire was continually shifting from east to west.¹⁴

All that was needed was the actual discovery of this imaginary continent by Europeans, and the idea of “the West” finally could be Christianized in missionary crusades. The secularization of these ideas, then, required just one more dialectical turn: the combination of the Christian mission with the continual westward movement of the New Empire. Herein we can already see the contours of the (un)official ideological basis of the United States—Manifest Destiny, or the providential determination and mission for spreading the empire of freedom. Apologists of this Manifest Destiny, like Edward Everett, clearly discerned the continuity of these ideas and the New World’s takeover of the Old World’s supposed mission: “There are no more continents to be reached; Atlantis hath risen from the ocean.”¹⁵

Already in the primary reasoning behind Columbus’s m...