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Mass Culture and World Culture: On “Americanisation” and the Politics of Cultural Protectionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Gregory Claeys
Gregory Claeys*
Affiliation:
University of Hannover, West Germany
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The debate over the influence of American culture upon Europe and the rest of the world is hardly new. Discussions about the cultural effects of video recorders, satellite broadcasting, cable television and their likely content are only the latest episode in a long-running drama in which the young and aggressive culture of America bludgeons the elderly culture of old Europe (or correspondingly overruns and wipes out the quaint but ill-armed ethnic cultures of the less-developed world, dragging the natives from coconuts to Coca-Cola in a generation of identity crisis). But though there has been much written about some aspects of this issue, and most non-Americans who have come into contact with American culture have some awareness of its dimensions, there is also much which remains unclear, and ill- or misunderstood. In this essay two aspects of this large and complex problem will be examined. Firstly, the problem of how the “Americanisation of world culture” has been understood until now will be outlined, by looking at its background in the mass culture critique of the 19th and 20th centuries, with some current notions of what American culture is, and some accounts of how it has been internationalized. My aim in this first section is in particular to try to isolate “American culture” from commercial and industrial culture more generally, for a conflation of these phenomena is widespread and very misleading. Secondly, a normative argument will be outlined from the premises that a “superculture” is indeed developing and that, though it is less threatening than many suspect, it requires a vital measure of resistance if many valuable elements of human experience are not to be relegated to anthropology museums. The central value which will be defended here, however, is not “Europeanism” or “Americanism”, but rather the central liberal virtue of diversity, of which cultural expression is an extremely important form. My attempt to develop a politics of cultural protectionism, then, represents a wish to surpass simplistic rejections of American culture and to come to terms with the confrontation of culture with industrial society itself. This involves going beyond the traditional discussion of culture in one country, however, and trying to extend the mass culture debate to the international arena, where the present debate on this problem is far more complex but often less sophisticated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 34 , Issue 136 , December 1986 , pp. 70 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 This paper was first presented to the conference on European-American Relations and New Technology at the Sonnenberg International Institute, St. Andreasberg, July 1986. Thanks to all participants of the conference and especially to Ms. Ursula Truman for research assistance.

2 On the classical roots of the distinction see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses. Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 53-81.

3 A useful account of the 18th-century British debate is Leo Lowenthal and Marjorie Fisk, "The Debate over Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England", in Mirra Komarovsky, ed. Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, New York, Free Press, 1957, pp. 33-112.

4 See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Henry Reeve, Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 328-61.

5 The change is particularly evident in the essay, "Civilization" (1836) (see The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 18, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 19-47.

6 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 19-22. For a useful review of the British side of this debate see Leslie Johnson, The Culture Critics. From Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. The current state of cultural studies in Britain in particular is examined in David Punter, ed., Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies, London, Longmans, 1986.

7 On radicalism and culture see in particular Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963.

8 Oscar Handlin, "Comments on Mass Culture and Popular Culture", Daedalus, 89 (1960), 328-9.

9 See Ernest van den Haag, "A Dissent from the Consensual Society", Daedalus, 89 (1960), 315-24, for a discussion of these points. A good review of the modern American cultural debate is Christopher Brookeman, American Culture and Society since the 1930s, London, Macmillan, 1984.

10 D.W. Brogan, "The Problem of High Culture and Mass Culture", Diogenes, 5 (1954), 8.

11 On regional cultures see Anne Rowe, "Regionalism and Popular Culture", in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Handbook of American Popular Culture, vol. 3, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 413-27.

12 On American ethnic culture generally see Faye Vowell, "Minorities in Popular Culture", in ibid., pp. 205-29.

13 Useful here are Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness. American Culture at the Breaking Point (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), pp. 109-34, and more generally, Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden. American Culture in the Sixties, New York, Basic Books, 1977.

14 Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture. An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, New York, Basic Books, 1974, pp. 69-81.

15 Raymond Bauer and Alice Bauer, "America", "Mass Society", and "Mass Media", Journal of Social Issues, 16 (1960), 34-5; L.J. Martin and A.G. Chaudhuri, eds., Comparative Mass Media Systems, London, Longmans, 1983, p. 140; H. Gans, Popular Culture and Mass Culture, p. 21. A useful overview of the age of television in Robert Alley's "Television", in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Handbook of American Popular Culture, vol. 1 (1978), pp. 323-53.

16 "Culture from America?", Time, 15 May 1950, 16, 20. On the German case see Wolfgang Kreute and Joachim Oltmann, "Coca Cola statt Apfelmost. Kalter Krieg und Amerikanisierung westdeutscher Lebensweise", English-American Studies, 6 (1984), 22-35. A good early postwar account is Albert Norman, Our German Policy: Propaganda and Culture, New York, Vantage Press, 1951.

17 "Does Europe Welcome American Leadership?", Saturday Review of Literature, 13 January 1951, 15.

18 "Europe's Americanization is Skin-Deep", New York Times Magazine, 6 April 1958, 17, 19.

19 For evidence of this, see "Europe Goes American—on the Surface", New York Times Magazine, 18 October 1959, 15.

20 See "New Chapter in ‘Americanization' of Europe", US News and World Report, 7 August 1961, 62-4.

21 "The Image of America", Fortune, August 1958, 63.

22 "Culture from America?", Time, 23 January 1950, 18.

23 For example, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "The Mythology of Anti-Americanism", Commonweal, 15 January 1954, 374.

24 "Dream and Nightmare", Commonweal, 10 September 1954, 610.

25 See Edward McCreary, The Americanization of Europe, New York, Doubleday, 1964, pp. 252-64, H. Stuart Hughes, "Mass Culture and Social Criticism", Daedalus, 89 (1960), 392.

26 "Europe's Americanization is ‘Skin-Deep'", 19; "How the World Views America", US News and World Report, 15 July 1985, 30. The German case is detailed in Jeremy Tunstall, The Media are American. Anglo-American Media in the World, London, Constable, 1977, pp. 156-60.

27 "How the World Views America", Newsweek, 11 July 1983, 9.

28 Jack Valenti, "And the Winner is… American Movies, Television and Videos", Public Opinion, 9 (1986), 13; C. Bigsby, "Europe, America and the Cultural Debate", in Bigsby, ed., Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, London, Elek Books, 1975, pp. 4, 26.

29 See the discussion in Kenneth Boulding, "The Emerging Superculture", in K. Baier and N. Rescher, eds., Values and the Future, London, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 336-50.

30 The world news distribution system is detailed in Warren Agee, Phillip Ault, Edwin Emory, eds., Introduction to Mass Communication, 7th ed, New York, Harper and Row, 1982, pp. 412-16. An excellent introduction to the whole subject is Jeremy Tunstall, The Media are American.

31 On the view others get of the US via television see Don Browne, "The American Image as Presented Abroad by U.S. Television", Journalism Quarterly, 45 (1968), 307-18. The development of the medium globally is detailed in Timothy Green, The Universal Eye. World Television in the Seventies, London, Bodley Head, 1972. A useful regional study is Allan Wells, Picture-Tube Imperialism? The Impact of U.S. Television on Latin America, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1972.

32 Warren Agee, Phillip Ault, Edwin Emory, eds., Introduction to Mass Communications, pp. 416-37. For a national study of two magazines see Isaiah Litvak and Christopher Maule, Cultural Sovereignty. The Time and Reader's Digest Case in Canada, New York, Praeger, 1974. See also James Wood, Of Lasting Interest. The Story of Reader's Digest, New York, Doubleday, 1958.

33 Ibid., pp. 428-31. See also "The International Dimension", Many Voices, One World, Paris, UNESCO, 1980, pp. 34-43. K. Ramphal, "In the Third World", L.J. Martin and A.G. Chaudhury, eds., Comparative Mass Media Systems, pp. 147-63.

34 Stephen Spender, "Americanization", Partisan Review, 39 (1972), 160.

35 Edward Shils, "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture", Sewanee Review, 62 (1957), 604.

36 Raymond Bauer and Alice Bauer, "America, ‘Mass Society' and Mass Media", 39-47.

37 See generally Brian Taylor, "Culture; Whence, Whither, and Why?", in A. Alcock, B. Taylor, J. Welton, eds., The Future of Cultural Minorities, New York, St. Martins, 1979, pp. 9-29.

38 On this case see R.R. Mehrotra, "Dimensions of a Language Policy - The Case for English", in Satish Saberwal, ed., Towards a Cultural Policy, New Delhi, Vikas, 1975, pp. 112-25.

39 See especially F.Y. St. Leger, "The Mass Media and Minority Cultures", in A. Alcock, B. Taylor, J. Welton, eds., The Future of Cultural Minorities, pp. 63-8 1. On the problem of the "authenticity" of local cultures see Jeremy Tunstall, The Media are American, pp. 57-9.

40 J.S. Mill, On Liberty, London, Dent, 1948, pp. 114-31.

41 On one segment of the rise of cultural pluralism see F.H. Mathews, "The Revolt against Americanism: Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Relativism as an Ideology of Liberation", Canadian Review of American Studies, 1 (1970), 4-31.

42 See Kevin Fong, "Cultural Pluralism", Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 13 (1968), 133-73, on the legal defence of the idea. A good review of the question of ethnic pluralism is George De Vos, "Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation", in G. De Vos and L. Romanucci-Ross, eds., Ethnic Identity. Cultural Continuities and Change, Palo Alto, Mayfield, 1975, pp. 5-41.

43 For recent work on this question see especially Marshall McLuhan, "The Implications of Cultural Uniformity", in Bigsby, ed., Superculture, pp. 43-57.

44 A useful introduction to this problem is David Bidney, "The Philosophical Presuppositions of Cultural Relativism and Cultural Absolutism", in Leo Ward, ed., Ethics and the Social Sciences, New York, University of Notre Dame Press, 1959, pp. 51-76.

45 K. Boulding, "The Emerging Superculture", p. 347.

46 A good introduction to the problem is Crawford Young, The Problem of Cultural Pluralism, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.

47 Still helpful here is Wilbur Schramm, Mass Media and National Development, Paris, UNESCO, 1964. See also World Communications: A 200-Country Survey of Press, Radio, Television and Film, Paris, UNESCO, 1975.

48 See the useful comments on this strategy in Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, pp. 125-30.

49 A review of UNESCO's activities in this field is in Robert Knight, "UNESCO's International Communications Activities", in H-D Fischer and J. Merrill, eds., International Communications, New York, Hastings House, 1970.

50 For this proposal see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Notes on a National Cultural Policy", Daedalus, 89 (1960), 394-400.

51 See F.Y. St. Leger, "The Mass Media and Minority Cultures", pp. 68-74.

52 These objections are summarised in Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, pp. 136-42.