Culture and propaganda
The beginning of the space age coincided with an accelerated propaganda war between the United States and the Soviet Union. From the Soviet perspective, in fact, one of the chief causes of the Hungarian uprising and other unrest in Eastern Europe had been Western propaganda.
Indeed, through such mediums as Radio Free Europe, the Americans had waged an active psychological warfare effort inside the Iron Curtain. The major goal had been straightforward: to encourage dissent towards communism and the tendency towards nationalism in order to incite the East European countries to move towards acts of independence similar to that of Tito’s Yugoslavia.However, the Soviet crackdown on Hungary indicated the dangers of openly challenging Moscow’s supremacy. Thus, in the second half of the 1950s the cultural Cold War began to take a different form. Rather than stressing the negative, both sides now focused on the positive elements and achievements of their respective systems. While the Soviets bragged about their most recent technological achievements such as Sputnik, and ‘sold’ the socialist model to the newly independent countries as an antidote to imperialism, the Americans targeted Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union through a campaign of cultural
infiltration. In effect, the American government sponsored the export ofAmerican mass culture to the Eastern bloc hoping that it would, however gradually, help to erode the prevailing totalitarian conformity and the stranglehold of the communist parties.
The early breakthroughs in this programme included a 1958 Soviet-American Cultural Agreement and a six-week American National Exhibition in Moscow in the summer of 1959. The exhibition is best known as the stage for the so-called ‘kitchen debate’ between Khrushchev and the American vice-president, Richard Nixon, in July 1959. While visiting the exhibition the two leaders sipped PepsiCola and Nixon bragged about the latest products of the American consumer society.
Among these were a number of kitchen gadgets that made household work much easier in the United States. While Khrushchev appeared unimpressed, the display of American consumer products clearly illustrated to the large crowds of Soviet citizens who visited the exhibition (which ran for six weeks) the material attractions of Western capitalism. In the long term, as films, exchange programmes, music, clothes and other products of the American consumer society gradually filtered into the Soviet bloc, the National Exhibition can be seen as one of the opening shots in an American effort to undermine confidence in the socialist system through peaceful means. In essence, Americans were no longer focusing on anti-Soviet diatribes but on selling the positive benefits of the ‘American way of life’. While impossible to measure, such a long-term ‘cultural offensive’ could not have been inconsequential in gradually fostering dissent towards authoritarian conformity.The American campaign to win ‘the hearts and minds’ of East Europeans was matched by efforts to persuade West Europeans that they were an integral part of the same shared system of democratic values as the United States. Indeed, the United States made a strenuous effort to ‘educate’ West Europeans not only about the ‘evils’ of communism but about the ‘community of interests’ and ‘cultural heritage’ that was at the root of the transatlantic bond. The cultural campaigns in Western Europe began with the ‘re-education’ of West Germans and Austrians during the 1940s. However, with the launching of the Marshall Plan a genuine government-sponsored effort, supported by numerous private initiatives, sold America as the example for the Europeans to follow. By helping Hollywood to reclaim its markets in post-war Europe, by defending American notions of free trade, by flooding Europe with American consumer products, by funding various exchange programmes (such as the Fulbright scholarly exchanges), and even by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sponsorship of such organizations of European intellectuals as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (founded in June 1950, the same month as the Korean War broke out), the United States made a consistent effort to influence the European view of America and the debates about Europe’s role in the Cold War.
One of the reasons for this effort was the fact that West European communists were not the only ones criticizing NATO and American policy. Indeed, while various communist-inspired ‘peace conferences’ failed to make much impact on West European public opinion in the 1950s, a persistent neutralist sentiment, strong particularly in France, remained a constant scourge of American efforts to gain unwavering European support for its policies. Indeed, the failure of the American efforts to unify political opinion in Europe played a role in enabling such independent-minded leaders as Charles de Gaulle to break ranks, if only in a limited way, with the United States in the 1960s.
In the end, much as in the Soviet bloc, American cultural programmes were relatively unsuccessful when they were geared towards explicit advocacy of specific policies. However, the spread ofAmerican popular culture and consumer products was so pervasive that it is hard to escape the conclusion that alongside the existing political, economic and military agreements, the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Western Europe was further strengthened by the relative ‘Americanization’ of the old continent. Even as European intellectuals at times criticized the influx of consumer products from across the Atlantic, the general public found little to fault in enhanced access to American-style fast food, clothes, music or films. While some of its policies may have invited resentment, the general lifestyle of the United States was certainly something that most West Europeans were ready to emulate. Moreover, the fact that an increasing number of East Germans were willing to risk their lives in order to benefit from such consumerism and personal freedoms created the last major European crisis of the first Cold War.