America And The Intellectual Cold Wars In Europe

In 1958, Shepard Stone, then directing the Ford Foundation's International Affairs program, suggested that his staff "measure" America's cultural impact in Europe. He wanted to determine whether efforts to improve opinions of American culture were yielding good returns. Taking Stone's career as a point of departure and frequent return, Volker Berghahn examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideas and ideologies, corporate America, and Washington policymakers at a peculiar juncture of U.S. history. He also looks across the Atlantic, at the Western European intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen with whom these Americans were in frequent contact. While shattered materially and psychologically by World War II, educated Europeans did not shed their opinions about the inferiority, vulgarity, and commercialism of American culture. American elites--particularly the East Coast establishment--deeply resented this condescension. They believed that the United States had two culture wars to win: one against the Soviet Bloc as part of the larger struggle against communism and the other against deeply rooted negative views of America as a civilization. To triumph, they spent large sums of money on overt and covert activities, from tours of American orchestras to the often secret funding of European publications and intellectual congresses by the CIA. At the center of these activities were the Ford Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Washington's agents of cultural diplomacy. This was a world of Ivy League academics and East Coast intellectuals, of American philanthropic organizations and their backers in big business, of U.S. government agencies and their counterparts across the Atlantic. This book uses Shepard Stone as a window to this world in which the European-American relationship was hammered out in cultural terms--an arena where many of the twentieth century's major intellectual trends and conflicts unfolded.

Although the Cold War is over, the writing of its history has only just begun. This book presents an analysis of the origins of the Cold War in the decade after the Second World War, discussing the development of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers and the reactions of the Western European states to the growing Soviet-American rivalry. Drawing on recently opened archives from the former Soviet Union as well as on existing research largely unavailable in English, distinguished authorities from each of the countries discussed provide new insight into the Cold War and into the Europe that has been molded by it. The book begins with an overview of United States Cold War policy after the war and a pioneering post-communist examination of Russian involvement. The next chapters focus on the other two members of the wartime alliance, Britain and France, for which the Cold War was interwoven with concerns such as the maintenance of empire and the continued fear of Germany. The book then examines the vanquished countries of World War II, Italy and Germany, who--particularly in the case of divided Germany--were struggling to recover their international status and come to terms with their past. The last part of the book considers how the small states--Benelux and Scandinavia--forged new groupings in the search for security, even though conflicts of national interest still persisted between them. The authors not only show the impact of superpower policies on each country but also reveal the many ways in which West European states were active participants in Cold War politics, trying to draw the Americans into Europe and shaping the blocs that emerged. The book sheds light on the European Community (in many ways a response to uneasiness about Germany) and on NATO, whose purpose was once described as keeping "the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."

How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence in the first half of the twentieth century, and then, after 1945 in the west and after 1989 in the east, create successful civilian societies? In this book, Volker Berghahn explains the rise and fall of the men of violence whose wars and civil wars twice devastated large areas of the European continent and Russia--until, after World War II, Europe adopted a liberal capitalist model of society that had first emerged in the United States, and the beginnings of which the Europeans had experienced in the mid-1920s. Berghahn begins by looking at how the violence perpetrated in Europe's colonial empires boomeranged into Europe, contributing to the millions of casualties on the battlefields of World War I. Next he considers the civil wars of the 1920s and the renewed rise of militarism and violence in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929. The second wave of even more massive violence crested in total war from 1939 to 1945 that killed more civilians than soldiers, and this time included the industrialized murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children in the Holocaust. However, as Berghahn concludes, the alternative vision of organizing a modern industrial society on a civilian basis--in which people peacefully consume mass-produced goods rather than being 'consumed' by mass-produced weapons--had never disappeared. With the United States emerging as the hegemonic power of the West, it was this model that finally prevailed in Western Europe after 1945 and after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe as well.

A new interpretation of the Cold War from the perspective of the smaller and middle powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The articles that comprise this collection constitute an evaluation of overt and covert influences on political and cultural activity in Western European democracies during the earliest period of the Cold War.

Vividly written and based on up-to-date scholarship, this title provides an interpretive overview of the international history of the Cold War.

"In 1950, nearly 300 of Europe's leading artists, philosophers and writers formed an international society intended to end the Cold War. The European Society of Culture was composed of many of Western Europe's best-known intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Julien Benda, Albert Camus, Benedetto Croce, Andre Gide, J. B. Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Henri Matisse, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Albert Schweitzer, among many others; over the next twenty years it would also include many luminaries from the East, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georg Lukacs. Pioneering the earliest political discussions between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe that would serve as a model for the activities of the better-known CCF in its efforts to end communism, the ESC went on to create an informal but powerful, 1,600 member-strong cultural and political network across the world in pursuit of dialogue between the Marxist East and the liberal West, and in pursuit of peace and shared cultural values. Here, in this first, comprehensive history of the SEC's early years, Nancy Jachec demonstrates the influence its members had not only on preventing the isolation of Europe's eastern states, but on enabling the flow of people, publications and ideas from the West into the East, thus playing a vital role in introducing the ideals of human rights and cultural rights in the East in the run-up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. She also shows the profound impact that the SEC had on the development of post-colonial theory through the exchanges it organised between European and African intellectuals, directly shaping the expectations statesmen like Leopold Sedar Senghor, revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and institutions such as Unesco would have of culture in newly emerging countries."--Bloomsbury Publishing.