 .  .

- *

Shame on US?
Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the
Cold War – A Critical Review

In Jamie Uys’s comic film The Gods Must Be Crazy, a pilot flying across the
Kalahari desert of Botswana drops an empty Coke bottle into the midst of a
tribe of natives. The befuddled aboriginals immediately interpret the object as
a gift from the gods. Yet the bottle irreparably corrupts the traditions and social
mores of their world. In the end, the natives send one member of the tribe to
cast the wicked thing over the edge of the earth, a distance they believe is some
twenty days’ walk away. The Gods Must Be Crazy offered a conspicuous sample
of American consumer imperialism and the victimization of the Third World.
Premiering in , the film struck a vital chord in the middle of what has come
to be known as “The Grand Debate”: are Americans cultural imperialists? Do
they attempt to conquer and corrupt the rest of the world by flooding it with
consumer products made in the United States of America?
In this essay I wish to examine the debate on American cultural transfer
abroad since  and identify three successive phases of thought that emerged
after World War II. First, the “cold warriors” lamented the absence of an
aggressive cultural foreign policy among U.S. officials. Their successors, the
“critics of cultural imperialism” identified the export of American culture as
thinly veiled global economic exploitation. Finally, a group of countercritics

* I am grateful to Melvyn Leffler, Joseph Kett, Emily Rosenberg, Akira Iriye, Michael Sherry,
Heiko Hecht, Lisa Szefel, Marshall Shaw, Gery Souza, Larry Arend, Erica Benson, Kevin
Mactavish, and the members of Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s research colloquium, as well as Andreas
Suter and his ad hoc study group in the Graduiertenkolleg Gruppen, Schichten und Eliten at the
Universität Bielefeld in /, whose criticism of this essay I cherished although I did not
always take their advice to heart. Also, I bow to the efforts of Diplomatic History for publishing an
increasing number of essays on controversial subjects and for opening a unique discussion forum
for scholars from different fields.
. Vincent Canby, “Is ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’ Only a Comedy?” New York Times,  October
.
. The term “culture” in this essay follows for the most part Akira Iriye’s definition of culture
as a shared system of beliefs, artifacts, ideology, customs, and a way of life. Akira Iriye, “Culture
and Power: International Relations and Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History  (Spring ):
–; idem, “Culture,” Journal of American History  (June ): –; idem, Power and Culture:
The Japanese-American War, – (Cambridge, MA, ), viif.

D H, Vol. , No.  (Summer ). ©  The Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishers,  Main Street,
Malden, MA, , USA and  Cowley Road, Oxford, OX JF, UK.


 :                 

then defied the concept of cultural imperialism. Today, a rather heterogeneous

group of scholars argue that local resistance either modified or completely
stymied imports as part of a global process. These three trends, I believe, mirror
a general intellectual trend far beyond the realm of the history of international
relations. The debate, which started as a political issue, has turned into an
increasingly academic dispute over culture as an instrument of power that
either “worked” or “did not work.” This essay investigates how and why the
debate changed over the years, and what all of this may mean to us today.

      , –: “   ”

Historically, Americans have found their distinctiveness primarily in their
political system rather than their poets, artists, and novelists. They have viewed
their popular culture as a source of private entertainment rather than as an
instrument of foreign policy. They have never seriously contemplated estab-
lishing a department of culture in the federal government. Paradoxically, then,
a nation whose cultural transfers later became so controversial started out with
little interest in the organized export of its culture. While European nations –
above all France – had begun to make the export of their own culture a matter
of diplomacy in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government hesitated to
develop any coherent foreign cultural policy. Even when the State Department
established the Division for Cultural Relations in , many U.S. officials
continued to criticize the use of culture as a diplomatic tool. Their reluctance
reflected a consensus that culture belonged to the realm of creativity, public
taste, and free enterprise. How and why should one win diplomatic chess games

. Nonetheless, in the early twentieth century, U.S. culture and technologies were widely
admired and modeled. Already around the turn of the century, foreign contemporaries were struck
by the appeal of American technologies, popular culture, and goods. After World War I, exchange
programs and the far-reaching spread of American consumer products, movies, and literature
created an international American cultural climate. The motion picture and the radio linked
Europe and America together in ways hitherto unimaginable. The American car, the American
woman, and American mass production formed the core of intensive debates at conferences, public
lectures, in literature, and in newspapers. As Mary Nolan notes, America’s present contributed
tremendously to Weimar Germans’ vision of their own industrial, social, and cultural future. Akira
Iriye, The Globalizing of America, – (New York, ), –; Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity:
American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, ), –, –, –.
. Maurice Brueziere, L’alliance française: Histoire d’une institution [The French alliance: History
of an institution] (Paris,).
. J. M. Mitchell, International Cultural Relations (London, ), –. The meager initiative to
“export” America came mostly from private business operations, missionaries, and by chance.
Early attempts to transform American cultural features, such as language programs, into Latin
America or the Caribbean had not proven successful. J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings
of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, – (Washington, ), f, , , ; Hans Schmidt, The United States
Occupation of Haiti, – (New Brunswick, ), , , ; Bruce J. Calder, The Impact of
Intervention: The Dominican Republic during the U.S. Occupation of – (Austin, ), ff, ;
Robert D. Johnson, “The Transformation of Pan-Americanism,” in On Cultural Grounds: Essays in
International History, ed. Robert D. Johnson (Chicago, ), –.
. Frank Ninkovich, “The Currents of Cultural Diplomacy: Art and the State Department,
–,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ): , .
 Shame on US? : 

with paintings, shows, and musicals? Besides, cultural programs were expensive
and there were no voters abroad to justify such expenses.
After World War II, the situation was reversed. American diplomats started
imagining that the United States needed to sell the American way of life abroad.
Public figures as well as policymakers exhorted the authorities to exert more
influence through culture around the world. “[W]e would be decadent people,”
Arthur W. Macmahon, a consultant of the Department of State, marveled in
July , “if we did not wish others to know about American standards and
American techniques . . . that demonstrably have contributed to human happi-
ness.” Consequently, in the years following VE-Day, the U.S. government
created a number of proselytizing organizations and programs, such as the
United States Information Agency and the Fulbright exchange program, that
aspired to export American culture, including literature, music, and art, abroad.
The “Campaign of Truth” designed in  to form a psychological counterat-
tack against Soviet propaganda, targeted explicitly public opinion leaders and
other “multipliers” with books, brochures, exhibitions, and lectures.
Why did policymakers grow so interested in the American way of life? Why
did they suddenly seek to impart it to others? First, on the ideological level,
American culture was dizzily democratic; anything was allowed. It was also
essentially resistant to autocracies on the left or the right, as reflected in the
postwar consensus on liberalism manifest in the writings of intellectuals like
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Boorstin, and Louis Hartz. In line with this
rationale, U.S. policymakers and scholars believed that the promotion abroad
of an enterprise-based culture would spread more democracy around the world
and contain fascism, communism, and other unpalatable foreign ideologies.

. Arthur W. Macmahon, Memorandum on the Postwar International Information Program of the

United States (New York, ), ; Henry R. Luce, The American Century (New York, ), ;
Benjamin Floyd Pittenger, Indoctrination for American Democracy (New York, ).
. Howland H. Sargant, “Information and Cultural Representation Overseas,” in The Repre-
sentation of the United States Abroad, ed. Vincent M. Barnett, Jr. (New York, ), f; Hansjörg
Gehring, Amerikanische Literaturpolitik in Deutschland –. Ein Aspekt des Re-Education-Programms
[American literary policy in Germany, –: One aspect of the reeducation program]
(Stuttgart, ), , ; Gary E. Kraske, Missionaries of the Book: The American Library Profession and
the Origins of United States Cultural Diplomacy (Westport, ), –; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the
Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, – (New York, ), –.
. Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (Gloucester,
MA, ).
. A series of books published by the Department of State in the s covering the cultural
relations programs of the U.S. Department of State in China, Latin America, and Germany still
reflected this attitude of the s, mostly because the authors themselves were all at some point
involved in the very programs they described. For example, Henry Kellermann’s  study of the
Education Exchange Program between the United States and Germany concluded that at the end
of their stint in the United States, exchangees were distinctly “more democratic and more
pro-American.” Henry J. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The
Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany, – (Washington, ), ,
, ff. See also Wilma Fairbank, America’s Cultural Experiment in China, – (Washington,
); and Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy.
 :                 

Second, Communist regimes, notably in the German Democratic Republic

(GDR), made Bildung (knowledge, education) and Kultur (high culture) central
points of their own propaganda. Since the GDR government, too, claimed to
be a democratic one, it attacked American culture as a manifestation of a
corrupt democracy. Communist officials realized that Europeans identified
strongly with their high culture. Public opinion polls taken between  and
 revealed that Germans feared the adaptation of democratic values at the
expense of their cultural heritage: Communists listened to Tchaikovsky, demo-
cratically inclined audiences, in contrast, numbed their minds with jazz.
Third, in the s, many Americans felt a deep apprehension over what they
perceived as their worsening reputation in a world of new nations, new cultures,
and new weapons. Shortly after the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik,
Franz M. Joseph, an international lawyer and chairman of the American
European Foundation, and Raymond Aron edited a collection of essays titled
As Others See Us, in which twenty representatives from nations throughout the
world described their countries’ impression of U.S. society. Frenchmen, Ray-
mond Aron wrote, detested America’s “big industry, mass production, the
lowering of standards in favor of the masses,” as well as race problems,
superficiality, industrial barbarism, and “the intellectual fodder offered to the
American masses, from scandal magazines to digests of books.” For most
observers around the world, the bottom line ran, “Americans had done remark-
able things in production and they had technical ‘know-how,’ but America itself
was . . . [a] giant with the head of a lout.”
Scholarly and journalistic analyses of U.S. cultural transfer abroad in the late
s and s reflected the belief that American information and exchange
efforts represented a timid reaction to bold Soviet propaganda. “America is the
greatest advertising country in the world,” the journalist Peter Grothe com-
plained in . “Yet when it comes to the most important advertising campaign
of all – that of advertising ourselves and the democratic way of life – we run a
poor second to the Communists.” Grothe blamed U.S. policymakers for not
having made the most of cultural relations programs after World War II because
of the stinginess and ignorance of the president, Congress, and the American

. D. G. White, U.S. Military Government in Germany: Radio Reorientation (Karlsruhe, ), –.
For an extensive analysis of Soviet cultural policy in occupied Germany see David Pike, The Politics
of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, – (Stanford, ).
. .Although recent studies by Laura Belmonte, Walter Hixson, Reinhold Wagnleiter, and
others have argued that foreign audiences around the world increasingly identified American
consumer goods and the United States with liberty and freedom of choice, American intellectuals
in the s and early s focused their concerns on negative reactions to American life abroad.
Belmonte, “Defending a Way of Life: American Propaganda and the Cold War, –” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Virginia, ); Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Wagnleitner, Coca-Colanization and
the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel
Hill, ).
. Franz M. Joseph and Raymond Aron, eds., As Others See Us: The United States through Foreign
Eyes (Princeton, ), , , –, , –; William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly
American (New York, ), –.
 Shame on US? : 

public. And sociologists like Princeton University’s W. Phillips Davison, called

for more effective programs with clear values, detailed purposes, and a rigorous
selection and training of personnel. They urged policymakers to use books,
movies, and information programs as tools to familiarize people the world over
with American history, politics, and entertainment. The world, in short,
needed more American culture, and it was the government’s job to provide it.
The participants in this debate, it should be added, remained vague in their
definition of American “culture.” A look at the programs of the United States
Information Agency designed in  to convince people abroad that U.S. goals
were in harmony with their hopes for freedom, progress, and peace, under-
scores this uncertainty. As Laura Belmonte and Walter Hixson have shown,
USIA’s programs focused on artifacts that were regarded as typical for Ameri-
can culture and society, including consumer products, high living standards,
and the advantages of a free market economy. Throughout the s, however,
the agency suffered from internal and external quarrels over the content of its
agenda and its mission. At the World’s Fair of , for example, disputes over
how to address the United States’s “Achilles’ heel” of race relations almost
stalemated the organization of the exhibit.
Until the early s, the U.S. debate over the transfer of American culture
abroad remained primarily a political one, led by politicians, writers, and
journalists who regarded their developing cultural programs abroad as worthy
weapons to eliminate totalitarianism in the world. They did not question
whether foreign recipients would welcome such endeavors. Only in the late
s, did the concern over the implications of American culture bounced back
to Europe stimulate a scholarly debate that would dominate academia for the
next thirty years.

. Peter Grothe, To Win the Minds of Men: The Story of the Communist Propaganda in East Germany
(Palo Alto, ), –, quote on ; Thomas C. Sorensen, The Word War: The Story of American
Propaganda (New York, ).
. At a  symposium, American academics extensively discussed the question of informa-
tion policy abroad in the Cold War, what special responsibilities the American information
industry should assume, and how this could better serve the cause of world security and peace.
John Boardman Whitton, ed., Propaganda and the Cold War: A Princeton University Symposium
(Washington, ). See also Robert E. Elder, The Foreign Leader Program: Operations in the United
States (Westport, ); Herbert Passin, China’s Cultural Diplomacy (New York, ); W. Phillips
Davison, International Political Communication (New York, ); and idem, Mass Communication and
Conflict Resolution: The Role of the Information Media in the Advancement of International Understanding
(New York, ).
. Belmonte, “Defending a Way of Life”; Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Thomas Klöckner, Public
Diplomacy. Auswärtige Informations- und Kulturpolitik der USA. Strukturanalyse der Organsiation und
Strategien der United States Information Agency und des United States Information Service [Foreign
information and cultural policy: A structural analysis of the organzation and the strategies of the
United States Information Agency and the United States Information Service] (Baden-Baden,
), –; Sorensen, The Word War, ; Michael L. Krenn, “‘Unfinished Business’: Segregation
and U.S. Diplomacy at the  World’s Fair,” Diplomatic History  (Fall ): –.
 :                 

    , –:

“     ”
In the s, scholars dramatically revised their assessment of U.S. culture
abroad. As Paul Hollander observed, this decade witnessed the surge of an
anti-American feeling within the United States that encompassed “an aversion
to American culture in particular and its influence abroad . . . a rejection of
American foreign policy and a firm belief in the malignity of American
influence and presence anywhere in the world.” A nascent leftist movement
identified capitalism as representative of a host of things describing twentieth-
century society, such as consumerism, modernity, organization, and the conflict
between society and the individual. Their findings would blaze the trail for
the study of U.S. “cultural imperialism.”
The theme itself was not entirely new. European conservatives long feared the
menace of American mass culture. In the s, British writer D. H. Lawrence
willfully condemned U.S. materialism, false moralism, and lack of historical
consciousness. German conservatives such as Adolf Halfeld, author of Amerika und
der Amerikanismus, rejected U.S. civilization due to its soulless culture. Americans,
the argument went, held little esteem for high culture; their essential identity and
values, such as productivity, efficiency, and rationality, contradicted the most
fundamental characteristics of Kultur, including quality work, contemplation, and
the creative use of leisure. To many observers, American civilization was not just
different but constituted a subversive threat to European culture.
Interestingly, in the s and s European leftists also started worrying about
American influences, such as McCarthyism and consumerism. Horror-stricken at
the term “mass,” the Frankfurt School regarded the United States as a mass society
with a mass culture that annihilated liberty, democracy, and individualism. Ameri-
cans, sociologist Herbert Marcuse stated, represented a prime example of how
human existence in advanced industrial societies remained passive, acquiescent,
and unaware of its own alienation. Marcuse subsequently drew the image of the
One-Dimensional Man, an individual who was unable to think dialectically and
question his society, who had subordinated himself to the control of technology
and the principles of efficiency, productivity, and conformity.

. Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, – (New York, ),
–, , .
. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, ), –; Adolf Halfeld,
Amerika und der Amerikanismus. Kritische Betrachtungen eines Deutschen und Europäers [America and
Americanism: Critical observations of a German and a European] (Jena, ); Nolan, Visions of
Modernity, , –; Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural
Relations with Europe, – (Ithaca, ), ff, –, ff; Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die
Moderne. Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europäischen Vergleich
[Traveling into modernity: The middle classes’ discourse on America before World War One. A
European comparison] (Berlin, ), –.
. Herbert Marcuse, Der eindimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Indus-
triegesellschaft [One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society]
(Neuwied, ), ; Nolan, Visions of Modernity, ; Adolf Augustus Berle and Gardiner C. Means,
The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York, ).
 Shame on US? : 

The Frankfurt School was particularly concerned about the decline of

Kultur. Intellectual leaders such as Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, and Leo
Lowenthal developed a Marxist theory that generally stressed the subliminal
totalitarianism of the media. Fostered by the media, American capitalism had
become an economically and culturally repressive force. High culture ceased
to function as a foreign, opposing, and transcendental sphere contrasting with
reality. Instead, in the struggle between East and West Kultur (that is, the
individual philosopher, the preservation of theory, art and high culture) dete-
riorated to a propaganda tool and, thus, to a consumer good. By materializing
high culture, man had perverted its identity and function.
The Frankfurt School had a profound impact on American thinkers. Disil-
lusionment originating from the Vietnam War and domestic urban and student
revolts mesmerized a culturally influential segment of Americans who came to
despise the free market economy as well as the federal government. U.S.
professions of democracy seemed empty and hypocritical in the age of napalm
bombs and the Watts Riots. The Frankfurt School provided “new” American
leftists with a psychological dimension the “Old Left” had never had, and
created an active relation between scholarly investigation and social protest.
Journalists and scholars such as David Riessman, C. Wright Mills, Vance
Packard, and William H. Whyte investigated the issue of mass media in the
s and s. They agreed that the United States was a dominant example
and global promoter of capitalism. Criticism of U.S. involvement in the Third
World, notably Vietnam, therefore automatically involved a critique of U.S.
capitalism per se. Capitalism was evil because it undermined wholeness, true
individuality, the sense of community, social bonds, self-realization, and
authentic values.
This perception of U.S. capitalism deeply affected the study of U.S. foreign
relations. Dissatisfied with the realist approach of scholars such as Hans
Morgenthau and others, a new generation of “revisionists” shifted the study of
the international system to the impact of domestic ideas as well as economic
and social forces on U.S. diplomacy. As American society grew more affluent,
critics turned their attention away from the American working class to the
“people of color,” the Third World where they found that U.S. capitalism, in

. For an excellent debate over mass media and their impact see Daniel J. Czitrom, Media
and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, ), –; and Marcuse, Der
eindimensionale Mensch, , –.
. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, ); Vance O.
Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, ); idem, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class
Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers that Affect You, Your Community, Your Future (New York,
); idem, The Waste Makers (New York, ); David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character (New Haven, ); William H.Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New
York, ); Paul Lazarsfeld, “Mass Culture Today,” in Culture For the Millions? ed. Norman Jacobs
(Princeton, ), ix–xxv; Joseph M. Siracusa, New Left Diplomatic Histories and Historians: The
American Revisionists (Port Washington, ), ; Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture
in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, ), –.
 :                 

search of new markets, profits, raw materials, and cheap labor, acted as a
victimizer, brutalizer, and exploiter. American diplomacy had to be inter-
preted as part of the U.S. capitalist political economy, argued New Left
historians such as William Appleman Williams, a former naval officer and
graduate of Annapolis, because the survival of the domestic economy depended
on ever-expanding markets. By stressing the economic motivations of U.S.
diplomacy, Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and others turned the investigation of the
East-West conflict into a struggle between capitalism and socialism, a struggle
they blamed on U.S. policymakers whose actions were blinded by their quest
for open markets that the Soviet Union did not even want.
This new historiography of U.S. economic and political imperialism formed
the cradle for the study of cultural imperialism. Although the catchword
“cultural imperialism” popped up before, it is only in the s that this critique
came to be known as a coherent argument. The  edition of The Harper
Dictionary of Modern Thought defines “cultural imperialism” as “the use of
political and economic power to exalt and spread the values and habits of a
foreign culture at the expense of a native culture.” What unites critics of
cultural imperialism is their portrayal of Western culture as an expansive,
predatory force, and their association with structuralism, which interprets ideas
as part of an underlying structure of discourse embedded in a culture. In sharp
contrast to the debate on American cultural transfer in the s, they admon-
ished the U.S. government and the business community for exporting U.S.
culture abroad.
The critics of cultural imperialism followed Williams’s interpretation of U.S.
“informal” imperialism: “When an advanced industrial nation plays, or tries to
play, a controlling and one-sided role in the development of a weaker economy,
then the policy of the more powerful country can with accuracy and candor
only be described as imperial.” The affix “cultural” serves as a description for
the “way of life” of a community set apart from the economic and political
spheres of life of another community. It refers to American capitalism, not only
in terms of exports and consumer goods but also in terms of a mindset aligned

. Hollander, Anti-Americanism, –; Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Patterson, eds.,
Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York, ); Howard Zinn, “The Politics of
History in the Era of the Cold War: Repression and Resistance,” in The Cold War and the University:
Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al. (New York, ), –.
. Siracusa, New Left Diplomatic Histories, –, –; William Appleman Williams, The
Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, ); Hollander, Anti-Americanism, ; John Paul Diggins,
Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York, ), –. To be sure, the core of the revisionist
argument, capitalism’s thirst for foreign markets, dates back to turn-of-the-century British
sociologist John Atkinson Hobson and his widely read book, Imperialism: A Study (London, ).
. Allan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass, eds., The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (New
York, ), , quoted in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad,
Robert F. Arnove (Bloomington, ), .
. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, ; idem, The Great Evasion: An Essay on the
Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue about
America’s Future (Chicago, ), –.
 Shame on US? : 

with the preconception that the United States could only exist if it remained
geographically, ideologically, and culturally a continuously expansive power.
Cultural imperialism does not form a single, static “school” or a set of criteria.
Similar to the New Left historians, most of the critics of U.S. cultural imperi-
alism probably would have denied that they all belonged to one school. The
specific meaning of the term cultural imperialism is generated out of its various
discourses, its use. Based on John Tomlinson’s insightful critique, we may
identify four different discourses of cultural imperialism focused on the media,
national domination, the global dominance of capitalism, and the critique of
modernity.
Media imperialism is the oldest and by far most widely debated trend because
it relates most obviously to current political issues. In the late s and early
s, the United Nations, notably UNESCO, began a fierce debate over a new
global communication order that centered very much on the industrialized
West. Third World countries feared a cultural invasion by American television
through the new INTELSAT system. The debate eventually led to the proc-
lamation of a “Right to Communication” in , which inspired the United
States to leave UNESCO. In the lingo of media imperialism, the media are
the essence but also the villain of modern American culture; they create a kind
of giant Radio Shack with no exit. Either one culture dominates another by
exporting its media, or scholars detect the spread of a media-dominated culture
the world over. The imperialists in this scenario are primarily media czars who
conspire with secret services and governments in order to control foreign
minds.
The study of media imperialism originated in Latin America among stu-
dents of communication research. In the s and s, Latin American
economists attempted to analyze their countries’ economic relations to Europe
and the United States by developing a theory of dependency. In a capitalist
“world-system,” so the theory went, industrially developed “core” countries
dominated “peripheral” undeveloped countries in their quest for human and
natural sources. Communication scholars in Chile who, during the time of the
Allende election in  began to criticize U.S. involvement in Latin American

. Siracusa, New Left Diplomatic Histories, , ; John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical
Introduction (Baltimore, ), .
. To be sure, the reason for U.S. withdrawal was more complex than just the right to
communication which, however, served as a catalyst. Other reasons included the fact that the
United States was paying  percent of the budget of UNESCO and could not exert the influence
it desired. Moreover, the allegations of corruption and cronyism against the then Director-
General M’Bow furthered American, British, and Singapore concerns. Eventually, all left at the
same time.
. For an excellent account of the concept’s origins mong communication researchers see
Emily G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, “From Cultural Imperialists to Takeover Victims?
Questions on Hollywood’s Buyouts from the Critical Tradition,” Communication Research , no. 
(December ): –; William H. Meyer, “Global News Flows: Dependency and Neoimperi-
alism,” Comparative Political Studies , no.  (October ): –.
. Robert A. Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies
(Cambridge, MA, ), –, , –.
 :                 

affairs, appropriated the concept. One of the most dramatic and path breaking
accounts came from Armand Mattelart, professor of mass communications and
ideology at the University of Chile, and Ariel Dorfman, a literary critic and
novelist. The two authors believed that in an effort to protect U.S. economic
interests in Chile, the CIA financed and fostered an arsenal of psychological
warfare devices to conquer the minds of the Chilean people. In Para leer al pato
Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), Dorfman and Mattelart excoriated Hol-
lywood’s distorted version of reality and cautioned Latin Americans against
U.S. manipulation. The threat of Walt Disney, they believed, consisted of the
manner in which the United States “forces us Latin Americans to see ourselves
as they see us.” The authors vociferated that the Chilean people would liberate
their own culture and kick out the Disney duck: “Feathers plucked and
well-roasted . . . Donald, Go Home!” Written shortly before the Chilean
revolution, this pamphlet struck a sensitive chord among readers far beyond
the borders of Chile; it went through more than fifteen editions and was
translated into several languages.
In the United States, scholars quickly picked up the concept of media
imperialism. Richard Nixon’s effort to cover up the Watergate scandal fostered
suspicions of a conspiracy between the government and the media and abuses
of executive power. In a number of studies, the communication scientist
Herbert Schiller identified a strong link between the domestic business, mili-
tary, and governmental power structure on the one hand and the “mind
managers” (that is, leaders of U.S. communications) on the other, who had
conspired to manipulate minds at home and abroad. His books, which bear such
telling titles as Mass Communication and American Empire and Culture Inc., stand
among the most prominent sources for the analysis of U.S. cultural imperialism.
As he had it, nineteenth-century Anglo-American geopolitical imperialism had
been replaced in the twentieth century by an aggressive industrial-electronics
complex “working to extend the American socio-economic system spatially
and ideologically” across the globe. “What does it matter,” he asked in , “if
a national movement has struggled for years to achieve liberation if that
condition . . . is undercut by values and aspirations derived from the apparently
vanquished dominator?”
A second group of critics interpreted cultural imperialism as the domination
of one country by another. Their discourse grew out of UNESCO’s increasing
concern with the protection of national cultures, as well as the rising interest
in the study of nationalism in the s and s as represented by Benedict
Anderson and others. In this context, “culture” reflects a natural and static

. Armand Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman, Para leer al pato Donald (La Habana, ) (translated
edition: How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in Disney Comic [New York, ], , ).
. Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (New York, ), ; idem,
The Mind Managers (Boston, ); idem, Communication and Cultural Domination (White Plains, ),
, –; idem, Information and the Crisis Economy (New York, ), , –; idem, Culture Inc.: The
Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York, ).
 Shame on US? : 

heritage of traditions that are akin to a certain country. It also serves as a tool
of social control as important as controlling material resources. Hence, cultural
imperialism connotes the sublime efforts of a country to undercut another
country’s cultural heritage by imposing its own.
Frank Ninkovich’s analysis of the State Department’s efforts to establish an
art program between  and , for example, showed that during the war
policymakers sought to utilize artifacts of American culture in order to foster
“a sense of common values among nations of varied traditions,” just as free trade
would have a liberalizing effect by contributing to their economic well-being.
In his  study The Diplomacy of Ideas, Ninkovich argued that by promoting
and imposing American values and ideas abroad, the U.S. government tried to
nationalize international politics in its quest for “one world.” American culture
served as the language everyone presumably understood and appreciated.
Why, scholars asked, did U.S. policymakers have so little respect for other
cultures? In American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, political scientist
Samuel Huntington accused the United States of enforcing its values self-
righteously on other countries. The accepted verity that American democratic
principles were “universally and totally applicable at all times and in all
places” reflected the United States’s cultural ignorance as well as its geo-
political aspirations.
For a third group of scholars, cultural imperialism came to be a synonym
for the expansion and sometimes global dominance of U.S. consumer capitalism. Scholars
like Ralph Willet attributed imperialist motivations to the U.S. business com-
munity and the government. Others, such as Emily Rosenberg, claimed that in
the twentieth century U.S. foreign policymakers had consciously begun to
“spread” American culture, information, and the concept of a free and open
economy in order to expand the national market abroad. Here, culture deline-
ates capitalism in its most materialist form: it embodies goods and ideas
associated with such goods, both of which foster homogenization. Culture thus
becomes a tool to integrate different societies into one international economic
system. For example, Edward Berman denounced U.S. medical and health

. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, –; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communites: Reflections
on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, ); Arnove, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperial-
ism, –.
. Ninkovich, “The Currents of Cultural Diplomacy,” .
. Confusing culture with intellectualism, American cultural ambassadors had regarded
culture not as a unique facet of each country but as the last hurdle the United States had to jump
over in order to achieve global and universal understanding and containment. “What passed for
universalism,” Ninkovich concluded cynically, “was only a projection of America’s self-images
and a distorted one at that.” Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural
Relations, – (New York, ), , , f, ff, –.
. Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA, ),
–.
. Ralph Willet, The Americanization of Germany, – (London, ), f, ; Walter
LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, – (Ithaca, ); Emily S.
Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, – (New
York, ); Paul Gurevich, Dialogue of Culture or Cultural Expansion? (Moscow, ).
 :                 

education programs sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in pre-

China. They were a “Trojan horse,” guided “in their conception and develop-
ment by imperialist objectives.” These programs “were more concerned with
building an elite professional stratum to carry out cultural and technological transformation
than with meeting the health needs of each country.” They served primarily as a
gateway for American access to markets and raw materials.
Rising anti-American protests, peace groups, and mass demonstrations
against the American presence, along with the opening of the records of the
U.S. occupation in Germany, drew scholars’ attention increasingly to Western
Europe. Here, critics of cultural imperialism agreed, American products ex-
erted an influence that went far beyond consumer manipulation. U.S. goods
dominated not only foreign markets but foreign minds as well. The appeal of
U.S. films, Victoria de Grazia argued in the Journal of Modern History, grew
overpowering after World War II because U.S. presence became tangible, highly
visible, and permanent. Mass culture, movies, and commercialism seemingly
threatened European sovereignty, traditions, and social order based on print
culture. Mass culture also blurred social distinctions, overrode nation-state
boundaries, and spread the tendency of the capitalist market place. The cultural
market, de Grazia concluded, had “sensitized entire populations to the ‘civili-
zation’ of the dominant state within the international system, subjecting it to a
new universe of discourse, imprinting it with what William Appleman Williams
in Empire as a Way of Life characterized as the ‘imperial confusion of an
economically defined way of life with a culturally defined standard of living.’” 
Evidently, these scholars did not present a unanimous portrayal of the
relationship between the U.S. government and the business community. Some
critics assumed a conspiratorial connection between the two. Others would
point to a shared worldview in order to explain parallel courses and actions. In
general, it is difficult to separate the U.S. government from overseas trade. One
could argue, for example, that treaties and institutions like Bretton Woods and
the World Trade Organization did spread out the reciprocity policies of the
United States that, in turn, generated U.S. access to foreign markets.
The most enduring criticism of U.S. cultural imperialism originated among
those scholars who turned the debate into a critique of modernity. The repre-
sentatives of this group, such as Jürgen Habermas, Marshall Berman, and others,
were among the most obvious followers of the Frankfurt School that had

. E. Richard Brown, “Rockefeller Medicine in China: Professionalism and Imperialism,” in

Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism, –, particularly , , , (emphasis in
original); Andrew Metcalfe, “Living in a Clinic: The Power of Public Health Promotions,”
Australian Journal of Anthropology  (): –.
. Victoria de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European
Cinemas, –,” Journal of Modern History  (March ): –, quote –; William
Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present
Predicament, along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (New York, ), .
 Shame on US? : 

originally triggered the investigation of cultural imperialism. Based on the

earlier writings of Marcuse and others, they portrayed cultural imperialism as
the imposition of modernity. They investigated how the principal agents of
modernity, that is, social and economic institutions of the West such as the
media, bureaucracy, and science, transmitted the “lived culture” of capitalism
on non-Western cultures. These scholars conceded that members of a recipient
society had choices but that their choices were conditioned by the values of a
global capitalist modernity. Culture and modernity became a global fate.
To Habermas and others, “modernity” denotes the “main cultural direction
of global development.” Culture in this sense encompasses capitalism but also
mass culture, urbanism, and a “technical-scientific-rationalist dominant ideol-
ogy,” nation-states and a certain one-dimensional self-consciousness. The
dominance of these features characterizes Western “imperialism.”
The critics of modernity were the first to direct their critique not against a
set of agents but against the actual process. They broadened the analysis from
“American” to “Western” cultural imperialism that spared no field, no people,
and no culture. Even the concept of Western mathematics, Alan Bishop
charged, burdened with rationalism, universalism, and technological progress,
served as a formidable “secret weapon” of cultural imperialism. This ap-
proach, while still insisting on the terminology of “imperialism,” served as a
precursor to later trends in the debate over cultural transfer because it managed
to shift emphasis from the question of agency to the process of cultural
imposition. Much of the critique of modernity consequently remains en vogue
after most critics of cultural imperialism have lost influence, as we will see
below.
“Cultural imperialism” has proved to be an enormously popular and durable
concept. It has introduced culture as a variable into the study of foreign
relations and thereby significantly enriched the field. It has created the foun-
dation upon which a new generation of historians (whom we will discuss in the
next section) have built their research strategies and arguments. It has perme-
ated many academic disciplines, including musicology, sports, sociology, and
political science.
One may wonder why cultural imperialism has represented such an endur-
ing concept. As Paul Hollander has argued, in the s and s, supporters

. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of the Communicative Action (Boston, ); Marshall Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, ).
. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, –.
. Ibid., .
. Alan J. Bishop, “Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism,” Race
and Class  (October-December ): –.
. See, for example, Allen Guttman, “Sports Diffusion: A Response to Maguire and the
americanization Commentaries,” Sociology of Sport Journal  (June ): –; and Barrie Houli-
han, “Homogenization, Americanization, and Creolization of Sport: Varieties of Globalization,”
ibid.  (December ): –.
 :                 

and descendants of the New Left often settled in university towns. In the
aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate they focused their research on criticism
of the United States, ranging from the decline of faith in American political
institutions to the decline of national self-esteem. In this sense, the debate,
once started in the streets, became increasingly academic and “enclosed” before
bouncing a few years ago back into the public discourse. Today, politicians the
world over lament the manipulative influx of U.S. movie reels. European
representatives, for example, while not politically anti-American, are con-
cerned about their cultural distinctiveness and fear that they have already lost
much of their audience to American products. Under the headline “The
Higher the Satellite, the Lower the Culture,” the former French Minister of
Culture Jacques Lang vehemently condemned U.S. cultural imperialism in a
 interview. Tiny nations, remote people, and unknown tribes find their
way into the headlines of international journals through their vocal protest
against Western cultural imperialism. From Iceland to Latin America, Central
Africa to the Philippines, local spokesmen reportedly deplore the demise of
their cultures with the rising influence of Anglo-American television and
culture. The rumor that an African Tuareg tribe recently postponed its
century-old camel caravan in order to watch an episode of Dallas inspired
German journalist Jürgen Krönig to wonder if one should instigate a global

. Hollander, Anti-Americanism, , .

. See, for example, “Uncle Sam Is Pop Culture to the World,” U.S. News & World Report 
(August ): ; Gerald Utting, “More Friend than Foe?” World Press Review  (June ): –;
J. Richard Munro, “Good-bye to Hollywood,” Vital Speeches of the Day  ( June) ): –;
John O’Sullivan, “Home Thoughts from Abroad (European Campaign against U.S. Cultural
Imperialism),” National Review  ( January ): ; Christian Tenbrock, “Kühl kalkulierte
Kinderwelt” [Coolly calculated kids’ world], Die Zeit,  September ; Dieter E. Zimmer, “Sonst
stirbt die deutsche Sprache” [Otherwise the German language will die], ibid.,  June ; Kraft
Wetzel, “Mogule gegen Buchhalter” [Moguls versus accountants], ibid.,  August ; Christian
W. Thomsen, ed., Cultural Transfer or Electronic Imperialism? The Impact of American Television Programs
on European Television (Heidelberg, ); and George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An
Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Newbury Park, CA, ), f.
. In the summer of , his successor passed the so-called loi Toubon (Toubon law) that
forbade the use of foreign vocabulary in advertising, scholarship, and television in order to defend
the “language of liberty” against a debased “commercial English.” Violators supposedly faced fines
of up to $, or six months in jail. The law was later dismissed. Jack Lang, “The Higher the
Satellite, the Lower the Culture,” New Perspectives Quarterly  (Fall ): –; Joachim Fritz-Van-
nahme, “Von Racine zur Rockmusik” [From Racine to rock music], Die Zeit,  April ; “Dix
ans de culture avec Jack Lang” [Ten years of culture with Jack Lang], Ecoute (January ): .
. Brad Leithauser, “A Nonesuch People,” The Atlantic  ( September ): –; George
Klay Keih, Jr., “The Roots of Western Influence in Africa: An Analysis of the Conditioning
Process,” Social Science Journal  (): –; Pat Aufderheide, “Journals: Sharp Edges,” Film
Comment  (March ): –; Meg Greenfield, “An Asian Notebook,” Newsweek  ( February
): –; James Petras, “Culture Imperialism in the Late th Century,” Journal of Contemporary
Asia  (): –; E. San Juan, Jr., “Die Behinderung der ‘boondocks’: US Kulturimperialismus
auf den Phillippinen” [The discrimination of the ‘boondocks’: U.S. cultural imperialism in the
Philippines], Peripherie  (): –; Fredy Gsteiger, “Mariannes Sprachpolizei” [Marianne’s
language police], Die Zeit,  July ; “Books and Arts in France: The American Connection,”
Economist,  November , –.
 Shame on US? : 

Rupert-Murdoch-Watch in order to monitor the activities of the Australian-

American media tycoon.

-    : “  ”

Criticisms of cultural imperialism never passed unchallenged. But only in
the late s did scholars begin to see it as a discourse that should be criticized.
This countercritique, the origins of which I will discuss shortly, consisted of
several major arguments.
A number of scholars have argued that the cultural imperialists “have shown
remarkable provincialism, forgetting the existence of empires before that of the
United States.” Since the Renaissance, European powers have fostered a
variety of cultural exchange programs, though they did not always hope to
spread their empire by exporting their culture. The British in India and the
Middle East, the Germans in Africa, and the French in Indochina all imposed
their own culture abroad as a powerful tool to strengthen trade, commerce, and
political influence and recruit intellectual elites for their own purposes
abroad. As Lewis Pyenson has shown, between  and , “technological
imperialism” in which state officials utilized scientific learning to form an
international network of communication and prestige abroad skillfully com-
plemented German expansion in China, Argentina, and the South Pacific.

. Jürgen Krönig, “Die globale Hirnwäsche” [The global brainwashing], Die Zeit,  February
.
. Already in , the media scholar Jeremy Tunstall stated that lingual diversity often
accounts for the internal rivalry of many competing local cultures; while, for example, ruling elites
often pose as the most active consumers of imported media, rural dwellers with little income
represent the primary consumers of traditional culture. Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American:
Anglo-American Media in the World (New York, ), –, .
. Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore, ), –. For a
discussion of “global culture” see Theory, Culture and Society  (June ).
. Gunnar Sorelius and Michael Srigley, eds., Cultural Exchange between European Nations during
the Renaissance (Uppsala, ); Kurt Düwell, Deutschlands auswärtige Kulturpolitik –. Grun-
dlinien und Dokumente [Germany’s foreign cultural policy, –: Basic structures and docu-
ments] (Cologne, ); Kurt Düwell and Werner Link, eds., Deutsche auswärtige Kulturpolitik seit 
[German foreign cultural policy since ] (Cologne, ); Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als
Kulturmission. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik und Bildungsbürgertum in Deutschland am Vorabend des Ersten
Weltkrieges [World policy as a cultural mission: Foreign cultural policy and the middle class in
Germany on the eve of World War I] (Paderborn, ).
. Edward Graham Norris, Die Umerziehung des Afrikaners: Togo – [The reeducation of
the African: Togo, –] (Munich, ); Donald Malcolm Reid, “Cultural Imperialism and
Nationalism: The Struggle to Define and Control the Heritage of Arab Art in Egypt,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies  (February ): –; Ian C. Campbell, “European-Polynesian
Encounters: A Critique of the Pearson Thesis,” Journal of Pacific History  (December ): –;
Lawrence James, “‘The White Man’s Burden’? Imperial Wars in the ’s,” History Today 
(August ): –; Brian Stoddart, “Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the
British Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History  (October ): –; John M.
MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, England, ).
. Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, –
(New York, ); Daniel Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the
Nineteenth Century (New York, ); Jürgen Kloosterhuis, Friedliche Imperialisten. Deutsche
 :                 

French and British proconsuls in postwar Germany made at least as much of

an effort to display their culture as their American counterparts in the U.S.
zone. A  study by UNESCO revealed that over half of the eighty-one
states queried, including all the larger ones, had official cultural relations
programs. Some of the European Community’s activities today rest on col-
lective cultural diplomacy, that is, the use of culture as a tool of foreign policy.
This includes the creation of organizations promoting languages and the
exchange of cultural information, and sometimes leads to an unofficial compe-
tition over which country spends most for its cultural diplomacy. Argentina,
Mexico, Egypt, and India traditionally export their media to adjacent countries.
Sweden poses as a media imperialist in Scandinavia while Italy, in , was the
second largest exporter of feature films in the world.
Recent studies on U.S. policies in Asia and Europe have also shown that U.S.
officials were often ready to sacrifice economic (and ideological) objectives for
the pursuit of geopolitical interests. Melvyn Leffler, among others, has argued
that during the Cold War American policymakers were less obsessed with an
urge to help (or patronize) foreign countries than with the belief that a favorable
balance of power and a healthy world political economy would guarantee a free
political economy in the United States.
Similarly, case studies on the efforts of various private groups, such as
philanthropic foundations, the American Library Profession, and the press
corps, demonstrate that not policymakers or businessmen but non-governmen-
tal U.S. organizations were often the most active (and voluntary) promoters of
American culture and values abroad. Congress and the State Department often

Auslandsvereine und auswärtige Kulturpolitik – [Peaceful imperialists: German foreign associa-
tions and foreign cultural policy, –] (New York, ).
. Corine Defrance, La politique culturelle de la France sur la rive gauche du Rhin: – [French
cultural policy left of the Rhine, –] (Strasbourg, ); Gabriele Clemens, Britische
Kulturpolitik in Deutschland (–). Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater [British cultural policy in
Germany, –: Literature, film, music, and theater] (Stuttgart, ).
. Philip H. Coombs, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy: Educational and Cultural Affairs (New
York, ), .
. For cultural diplomacy within Europe see Anthony Haigh, Cultural Diplomacy in Europe
(Strasbourg, ); “Diplomacy and Culture: Putting a Price on Shakespeare,” Economist,  July
, –; Chris Hedges, “BBC’s Worldwide Cultural Lifeline,” New York Times,  May ;
Cultural Life in the Federal Republic of Germany (Bonn, ); Patrick J. Boylan, “Europe without
Frontiers,” Museums Journal  (July ): ; Antonio Perotti, The Case for Intercultural Education
(Strasbourg, ); Pascal Fontaine, A Citizen’s Europe (Luxembourg, ); Commission of the
European Communities, Tourism Unit, Eurotourism: Culture and Countryside:  Projects Cofinanced
by the European Commission in  (Luxembourg, ); and European Economic Community,
Staffan Zetterholm, National Cultures and European Integration: Exploratory Essays on Cultural Diversity
and Common Policies (Oxford, England, ).
. Tunstall, The Media Are American, .
. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Doctrine, and the Cold
War (Stanford, ), –, passim; idem, “Negotiating from Strength: Acheson, the Russians, and
American Power,” in Dean Acheson and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. by Douglas Brinkley
(New York, ), –.
 Shame on US? : 

required pressure to pursue an active policy of cultural diplomacy, or were

omitted from the process altogether.
Among scholars of communication research, the Hollywood buyouts by
foreign corporations have raised the question of whether Americans have
changed “from cultural imperialists to takeover victims.” Yet some of these
buyouts have proven to be disastrous for the Japanese. More importantly, the
fact that American consumers show a rising preference for Asian cooking and
Japanese automobiles does not necessarily reveal an encroaching “Asianiza-
tion.” Rather, it reflects Americans’ growing preference for low-fat food and
reliable, inexpensive cars.
The strongest onslaught against the critics of cultural imperialism came
from John Tomlinson, Frederick Buell, and others, who criticize authors such
as Schiller for using a rhetoric that replicates what it wishes to oppose: “it
repeats the gendering of imperialist rhetoric by continuing to style the First
World as male and aggressive and the Third as female and submissive.” In doing
so, Schiller had adapted an imperial perspective that regarded Third World
cultures as fragile and helpless and served Western interests of modernity.
Employing a theory that suffered from an inaccurate language of domination,
colonialism, coercion, and imposition, the critics of cultural imperialism turned
out to be the worst cultural imperialists.
Cultural imperialism, Tomlinson claims, is simply the spread of modernity,
a process of cultural loss and not of cultural expansion. There had never been
a group of conspirators who attempted to spread any particular culture. Instead,
global technological and economic progress (and integration) lessened the
importance of national culture. It is therefore misleading to place the blame
for a worldwide development on any one culture. The notion of imperialism

. Arnove, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism; Kraske, Missionaries of the Book; Margaret
Blanchard, Exporting the First Amendment: The Press-Government Crusade of – (New York, ),
, , ff, , ; Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der Westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie.
Der amerikanische Beitrag – [The roots of West German postwar democracy: The American
contribution, –] (Opladen, ).
. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, “From Cultural Imperialists to Takeover
Victims?” Communication Research  (December ): –; Daniel Harris, “Make My Rainy
Day,” Nation  ( June ): –; Bernard Weinraub, “Dole Lashes Out at Hollywood for
Undermining Social Values,” New York Times,  June ; Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society,
ff; Hans Habe, “Europäisches Hollywood” [European Hollywood], Neue Zeitung,  November
, Feuilleton. For one thing, much of Hollywood’s fame was founded by European émigrés.
And how do we categorize the continuous criticism of Hollywood movies on the part of many
U.S. conservatives such as William Buckley in the s, Barry Goldwater in the s, Richard
Nixon in the early s, and Robert Dole in the s – if these movies presumably represent one
of America’s key instruments for cultural manipulation abroad?
. Ito Youichi, “Mass Communication Theories from a Japanese Perspective,” Media Culture
and Society  (October ): –.
. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, , –, , –, ff; Tunstall, The Media Are American,
; Buell, National Culture, –, .
 :                 

(that is, purposeful cultural conquest) must be dropped; instead, all countries
are victims of a global cultural change.
What happened? Why did it take scholars more than twenty years to revise
the concept of cultural imperialism? The reasons for this can be found both in
contemporary global affairs and within the academic community. Besides the
change of the global political landscape and the aging of the New Left the
emergence of poststructuralism had a profound impact on the modification of
cultural imperialism as a theoretical concept because it offered intellectuals a
path out of the dead-end Marxist analysis of economic suppression and
domination. Shortly after the end of the Cold War, in , Richard Rorty, then
professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, advised his fellow
“Western leftists” to stop “radical criticism of existing institutions” and be
“reformist rather than radical.” Urging his colleagues to find an “idea” that
would “irradiate the imagination of the intellectual left,” Rorty has hence called
for an open-ended, multivoiced cultural discourse. Among other things,
poststructuralists insist that suppression may develop much more subliminally
than hitherto acknowledged: the suppressor may not even be conscious of his
actions and the oppressed may not be able to identify his own lot. By projecting
a distinct agency to Third World audiences, individuals (unlike large faceless
nations) could be singled out for portrayals of reaction, resistance, and nego-
tiation. In the United States, cultural history, as developed during the past
decade, seeks a way out of the fetters of structuralism by stressing its own
subjective stand. It gives a voice and a history to formerly “ahistorical”
societies including “primitive” people.
Poststructuralism has gained widespread attention among scholars of his-
tory and cultural studies. A new generation of scholars, whom for lack of a
better name we will call the “post-cultural imperialists” of the late s and
s, has paid closer attention to both global and local aspects of the “Grand
Debate.” Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have become increasingly

. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, ; Tunstall, The Media Are American, , –; Buell,
National Culture, , .
. Richard Rorty, “The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism,” Yale Review  (): –;
Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, –; Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History
of Culture,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, ), –; Robert Buzzanco,
“What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of American Foreign Relations,
Diplomatic History  (Fall ): –.
. Note that German social historians, too, have (re)discovered “Kulturgeschichte” as a
cure-all against the curse of structuralism, although in a different fashion. Based on Pierre
Bourdieu’s notion of the Habitus, social historians increasingly rely on the notion of “culture” as
an entity of human “capital,” thereby replacing economics with culture. See, for example, the
essays in Wolfgang Hardtwig and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, eds., Kulturgeschichte Heute [Cultural history
today] (Goettingen, ).
. Pardoxically, this extension of the history to formerly non-historical people, designed to
end the times of paradigms, reveals a new paradigm in the understanding of cultural history: the
principal refusal to tell one story and to offer one frame of reference. Thomas Mergel, “Kultur-
geschichte – die neue ‘große Erzählung’?” [Cultural history – The new “great Narrative”?] in
Hardtwig and Wehler, eds., Kulturgeschichte Heute, .
 Shame on US? : 

fascinated with the peculiarity of individual cultures in the context of a

non-bipolar world. Under the influence of resurfacing nationalism the world
over, one group has studied the periphery in greater detail, producing analyses
of individual communities that came in contact with American (or Western)
culture after World War II. Inspired by a vision of the global village, another
group of scholars has taken the opposite approach, broadening the concept of
a unilateral imperialism into a concept of global modernization.
The first group has investigated individual case studies, weighing resistance
against acceptance. Borrowed from both psychology and literary criticism,
response theory investigates the preconceptions influencing the reactions of
human beings exposed to an external impression such as a text, a sound, or a
visual perception. It shifts the center of research from the intention of cultural
transfer to, for example, the audience of TV programs like Dynasty.
Spurred by the public debate abroad over U.S. cultural imperialism, in the
past decade response theory has affected virtually all studies of cultural transfer
in the realm of history, sociology, and cultural studies. Jongsuk Chay’s Culture
and International Relations, along with the works of many other authors, analyzes
particular aspects, such as literature, music, religion, or TV programs, in order
to calibrate the effects of U.S. culture abroad. Their findings differ regarding
the breadth of impact made by American culture but they agree that native
people never passively accepted U.S. consumer goods. Reinhold Wagnleiter, for
example, finds that Austrian youth translated the original meanings of jeans,
Coke, and rock ‘n’ roll into something fitting their own needs: those goods
promised not only comfort but freedom as well.
Some scholars have indeed detected a considerable appeal of Western
culture to non-Western countries, but they question the manipulative intention
on the part of U.S. policymakers and businessmen. A number of Third World
nations, as Douglas A. Boyd demonstrated recently in the Journal of Broadcasting
& Electronic Media, habitually hijack American programs and feature films such
as Poltergeist and Rambo from satellites, much to the chagrin of U.S. filmmakers.
This led Boyd to conclude that “one must question some of the original

. Bill Ashcroft, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London,
); Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader
(New York, ).
. Martin W. Sampson III, “Cultural Influences on Foreign Policy,” in New Directions in the
Study of Foreign Policy, ed., Charles F. Hermann, Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and James N. Rosenau
(Boston, ), –; Jongsuk Chay, ed., Culture and International Relations (New York, );
Reinhold Wagnleitner, “The Irony of American Culture Abroad: Austria and the Cold War,” in
Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago, ), –;
Wagnleitner, Coca-Colanization and the Cold War, .
. Christine Mangala Frost, for example, has shown that since the s, inhabitants of India
welcomed Shakespeare plays in their own theaters but changed the performance according to
their own taste and conceptions. Colonial Indians, Frost explained, “were anxious to preserve
their cultural identity and yet aware that Westernization was not only inevitable but necessary if
India was to emerge from a moribund, feudal world.” Christine Mangala Frost, “ Rupees for
Shakespeare: A Consideration of Imperial Theatre in India,” Modern Drama  (): –.
 :                 

media/cultural imperialism [sic] assumptions, at least with regard to the

impetus for supplying Western, specifically U.S., television material.” U.S.
video producers, meanwhile, are calling for international laws to curtail the
sale of unauthorized film copies abroad. Pirated films and the values they
encompass were not being imposed on other cultures by “U.S. cultural impe-
rialists.”
Other studies investigating the effects of cultural imperialism stress the
distinction between foreign people and foreign governments. While audiences
may appreciate U.S. movies, their governments often do not, thereby invoking
a specter of imperialism that the masses do not fear. Victoria de Grazia’s analysis
of the competition between fascist and consumerist cultural models in Mus-
solini’s Italy, for example, shows that even state-generated programs to nation-
alize women’s dress code failed in the face of the U.S.-influenced fashion
industry. Meanwhile, James Ettema and Charles Whitney and others suggest
in their studies on the media that audiences make very conscious choices
concerning what they listen to, read, and watch. The investigation of under-
ground movements in China and Eastern Europe in  showed that in more
than one case, Western television programs encouraged viewers to revolt
against their own governments. In former Czechoslovakia, alternative music
bands such as “Velvet Underground,” with their encouragement of “cool
rebellion,” likewise influenced the local culture of resistance against the Com-
munist government.
William H. Meyer’s empirical analysis of Western media in the Third World
even disputes that any relationship between the media and global Western-
ization exists. Meyer tested data for twenty-four developing countries in order
to represent sufficiently the diversity of the Third World. He discovered that
in the sector of education, as the amount of imports increased the number of

. According to Boyd’s sources, in ,  percent of the Argentina market,  percent of the
Singapore market,  percent of the Brazilian and the Jordan market, and  percent of the Egyptian
market consisted of pirated tapes. Douglas A. Boyd, “Third World Pirating of U.S. Films and
Television Programs from Satellites,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media  (Spring ):
–.
. Ronald V. Bettig, “Extending the Law of Intellectual Property: Hollywood’s International
Anti-Videocassette Piracy Campaign,” Journal of Communication Inquiry  (Summer ): –.
. Victoria de Grazia, “Nationalizing Women: The Competition between Fascist Commer-
cial Cultural Models in Mussolini’s Italy,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective, ed. de Grazia (Berkeley, ), –. See also Hans-Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene
Bewußtsein. Über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit – [The divided consciousness: German
culture and the reality of Life], d ed. (Munich, ); Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich:
Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung [America in the Third Reich: Ideology, propaganda, and
public opinion] (Stuttgart, ).
. James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, eds., Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the
Audience (Thousand Oaks, CA, ); James Lull, World Families Watch Television (Beverly Hills,
); idem, Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research On Television’s Audiences (London, );
Munro, “Goodbye to Hollywood”; O’Sullivan, “Home Thoughts from Abroad.”
. James Lull, China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance (London, ); Will Hermes,
“Imperialism: Just Part of the Mix?” Utne Reader  (November/December ): –.
 Shame on US? : 

Third World students willing or able to attend Western universities decreased.

In the same vein, Meyer detected that, as media imports and freedom of the
press rose, imports of luxury consumer goods dropped.
Another group of scholars found that foreign audiences did not passively
accept the fruits of Western cultural imperialism but, in some instances,
displayed a high level of active and passive resistance to American products
and culture. Scholars of Islamic societies have consistently emphasized the
stark opposition of orthodox Muslims to Western influences. Individual
studies in drama, cinematography, cultural studies, and literature among local
groups in Latin America, Asia, and Africa reveal that in spite of the influence
of Western goods, during the past two decades locals have begun to resist
Western culture.
The United States, it seems, elicits an ambiguous image of love and hate
abroad. In Europe, this became particularly clear in the s when students
castigated America’s involvement in the Vietnam War while simultaneously
worshipping U.S. rock music. The independence associated with rock and
jeans not only embraced individual freedom but also the freedom to resist U.S.
foreign policy.
In some cases, a closer analysis of the motivations behind local resistance
reveals that particular local perceptions and conditions informed it more than
an outright condemnation of American culture. Take, for example, the case of
France. A paper recently completed at the Universität Bielefeld shows that the
current debate in France over U.S. invasion of French culture is, first, a debate
led by very specific interest groups (such as restaurant owners who protest
against the changing eating habits of their customers) but not among the
broader public. Second, individual politicians often employ the discourse of
American cultural imperialism in order to distract public attention from severe
internal problems, such as juvenile delinquency, unemployment, immigration,
bombing attacks, right-wing extremism, and nuclear tests, all of which demar-
cate a mounting political crisis.

. William H. Meyer, Transnational Media and Third World Development: The Structure and Impact
of Imperialism (New York, ); David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds., Hollywood in Europe:
Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam, ), –.
. Bassam Tibi, “Culture and Knowledge: The Politics of Islamization of Knowledge as a
Postmodern Project? The Fundamentalist Claim to De-Westernization,” Theory, Culture & Society
 (): –.
. George Klay Kieh, Jr., “The Roots of Western Influence in Africa: An Analysis of the
Conditioning Process,” Social Science Journal  (): –; Rakesh Solomon, “Culture, Imperial-
ism, and Nationalist Resistance: Performance in Colonial India,” Theatre Journal  (October ):
–; Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Bloomington, ).
. For an incisive collection of essays dealing with this love-hate-relationship see Rob Kroes,
ed., Within the U.S. Orbit: Small National Cultures vis-à-vis the United States (Amsterdam, ).
. Claudia Kluckhuhn, “Die Reaktion Frankreichs auf die Amerikanisierung im Rahmen
der Debatte um kulturelle Identität der er Jahre” [France’s reaction to Americanization in
the context of the debate on cultural identity in the s], unpublished paper, Universität
Bielefeld, .
 :                 

Historical analyses have found the origins of this discourse long before .
Under the intriguing title Seducing the French, Richard Kuisel investigated
economic missions, foreign investment, and U.S. consumer products in postwar
France. He emphasized that French opposition to U.S. culture “was (and is)
about both America and France,” because it exacerbated French anxieties and
sense of self-identity. The French underwent a process of Americanization but
they also managed to defend their “Frenchness.” They found some American
consumer products appealing but continued to cherish and idealize French
national identity, including the notion of a superior Gallic high culture. Two
other recent books on postwar France, Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies and
Etienne Balibar’s Les frontières de la démocratie, argue that “the economic and
cultural Americanization of France could not have been felt as a metaphorical
colonization if it did not intervene on the persistent base of France’s own
constitutive identity as colonizer.” In other words, the post-colonial French
were trapped in a perception of dominators and victims, in which they thought
they had descended from the former to the latter. The origins of French
resistance to U.S. culture, then, lay in the interplay between their self-image as
a culturally peculiar people and their own colonial experience as cultural
imperialists.
Moreover, in the case of the Federal Republic the average German citizen
traditionally tended (and tends) to adhere to a narrower image of culture than
his or her American counterpart. German Kultur traditionally stressed high
culture and was closely linked to the enhancement of Bildung (knowledge,
education), ethnically bound, deeply rooted in German history, and – in the
case of the arts, music, and performance – dependent on state funding.
Postwar West Germans did not necessarily view the invasion of American
popular culture as “cultural imperialism” because to them, American culture
was incompatible with Kultur. Adoption of cultural artifacts, that is, does not
necessarily encompass cultural and political adaptation.
If resistance and cultural identity do indeed play such a powerful role in the
perception of American culture abroad, if U.S. officials were indeed uncertain

. Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, ), xi, xii;
Irwin M. Wall, L’in fluence américaine sur la politique française, – [The American influence on
French policy, –] (Paris, ).
. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cam-
bridge, MA, ); Etienne Balibar, Les frontières de la démocratie [The borders of democracy] (Paris,
), translation of Balibar’s quote in Ross, p. . See also Henri Astier, “France and anti-Ameri-
canism – Part Two,” Contemporary Review  (June ): –; “Books and Arts in France.”
. The concept only changed in the s when intellectuals and cultural politicians began
to turn their attention to mass and alternative culture. See, for example, Wolfgang Kaschuba,
Volkskultur zwischen feudaler und bürgerlicher Gesellschaft. Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs und seiner gesell-
schaftlichen Wirklichkeit [Popular culture between feudal and middle class society: The history of a
concept and its social reality] (Frankfurt a.M., ); Kaschuba, Lebenswelt und Kultur der unterbür-
gerlichen Schichten im . und . Jahrhundert [Life and culture of the lower classes in the nineteenth
and twentieth century] (Munich, ).
. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplo-
macy in Postwar Germany, – (Baton Rouge, ), –, –, –, .
 Shame on US? : 

about the scope and nature of cultural exports, and if we compare their actions
to the effort of cultural diplomats in other countries, then the model of a
unilateral attempt to force consumer products and ideas on foreign nations does
not hold. Perhaps, Will Hermes recently concluded in Utne Reader, “American
pop culture isn’t conquering the world.” Perhaps American cultural imperial-
ism is “just part of the mix.”
In line with the poststructuralist approach, scholars from a variety of
disciplines have suggested that the term “cultural imperialism” should be
replaced with one that avoids the simplistic active-passive dominator-victim
dualism. Musicologists and anthropologists, for example, have offered a variety
of consensual patterns for our understanding of worldwide music interaction
that can easily be transferred into other fields as well. Among those are “artistic
sharing” and “transculturation.”
One of the concepts recently developed, for example, is “cultural transmis-
sion.” The term originates from the vocabulary of psychology, where it de-
scribes the interaction between cultural and genetic influences on human
behavior. For historians, one of the most important books recently published
is a collection of essays titled Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass
Culture in Europe, edited by Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and Doeko F. J.
Bosscher. The volume addresses such diverse issues as rock music in Italy and
the reception of Disneyland in Europe, demonstrating ways in which different
social groups accepted, altered, or rejected American culture. Richard Pells’s
essay, for example, suggests that after  Western Europeans consciously
sifted through American culture and ideas, selecting items, such as movies and
food, that they liked and saw fit for their own country while rejecting others,
such as theater or fashion. Pells replaces the term cultural imperialism with a

. ”Mix” refers to a mixture of mutual cultural influences around the world. Hermes, “Just
Part of the Mix?”
. Krister Malm, “Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media,” Ethnomusicology  (Fall
): –; Amanda Swarr, “Kenyan Women: Struggling for Autonomy through Basketry,” Off
Our Backs  (August ): –. For an earlier, German conceptual offer, see Urs Bitterli, Die
“Wilden” und die “Zivilisierten”. Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen
Begegnung [The “savages” and the “civilized”: Basic structures of an intellectual and cultural history
of the European-extra European encounter] (Munich, ); Mike Bal and Inge Boer, The Point of
Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (New York, ); Verner Bickler, Parampil Puthen, and John
Philip, Cultural Relationships in the Global Community: Problems and Prospects (New York, ); Paul
Duncum, “Approaches to Cultural Analysis,” Journal of American Culture  (Summer ): –;
Morris Freilich, ed., The Relevance of Culture (New York, ); Iriye, “Culture”; Melford E. Spiro,
Culture and Human Nature, ed. Benjamin Kilborne and Lewis L. Langness (Chicago, ); Anders
Stephanson, “Commentary: Considerations on Culture and Theory,” Diplomatic History  (Winter
): –; Anthony R. Welch and Peter Freebody, Knowledge, Culture, and Power: International
Perspectives on Literacy as Policy and Practice (Pittsburgh, ); William Zimmermann and Harold
Karan Jacobson, Behavior, Culture, and Conflict in World Politics (Ann Arbor, ).
. See, for example, Marcus W. Feldman and Lev A. Zhivotovsky, “Gene-Culture Coevolu-
tion: Toward a General Theory of Vertical Transmission,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America  ( December ): –; Harvee Whitehouse,
“Memorable Religions: Transmission, Codification and Change in Divergent Melanesian Con-
texts,” Man  (December ): –.
 :                 

fluid cross-cultural process of mutual fertilization, reinforced by mass commu-

nication, cultural exchange, and international economic and political coopera-
tion. This admixture, he argues, led to the emergence of a global Western
culture. Whatever resistance may be left on the European side resembles more
a family quarrel than a national hostility. Pells concludes that “the issue, then,
is not so much the absorption of one culture by another, but how to make sense
of diverse and conflicting impulses inherent in contemporary Western culture
as a whole.” Europeans simply were and are “Not Like Us.”
Inspired by the notion of a “global village” another group of scholars
developed a theory of “globalization.” Globalization refers both to the com-
pression of the world and to the growing perception of the earth as an organic
whole. Although many speak of globalization as simply an economic phenome-
non, it is multidisciplinary in its causes and its effects. The rather vague term
includes many characteristics of modernization, such as the spread of Western
capitalism, technology, and scientific rationality.
Again, the theme itself is not really new. It dates back at least to turn-of-the-
century German sociologists, such as Max Weber, who offered various concep-
tual frameworks of universalism beyond political borders. In “Soziologie des
Raumes” (The Sociology of Space, ), the philosopher/sociologist Georg
Simmel (–) asserted that a border is not a geographical fact with
sociological consequences but a sociological fact that then takes a geographical
(and political) shape.
In the late s, sociologists like Anthony Giddens, today director of the
London School of Economics, came to believe that socioeconomic relations
everywhere were undergoing a dramatic change, similar in scope to the indus-
trial revolution. They concluded that cultures and societies could no longer be
analyzed in the framework of the nation-state because, first, any society is in a

. Richard Pells, “American Culture Abroad: The European Experience since ,” in
Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, ed. Rob Kroes, Robert W.
Rydell, and Doeko F. J. Bosscher (Amsterdam, ), –, quote f. See also Pells, Not Like Us:
How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York,
); Carol Gluck, “The Power of Culture,” in The Occupation of Japan: Arts and Culture, ed. Thomas
W. Burkman, (Norfolk, VA, ), –; Sibylle Brändlei, “‘Cultural Transmissions, Cultural
Receptions’: Der Konsum und seine Bedeutungen in der Schweiz der er und er Jahre im
Spiegel US-amerikanischer Einflüsse” [“‘Cultural Transmissions, Cultural Receptions’: Consum-
erism and its meaning in Switzerland in the s and s as reflected by U.S. images”] (Ph.D.
diss., Universität Basel, ).
. Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Geschichte als Historische Kulturwissenschaft” [History as histori-
cal cultural studies], in Hardtwig and Wehler, eds., Kulturgeschichte Heute , –; Nikolai Genov,
“Internationalization of Sociology: The Unfinished Agenda,” Current Sociology  (Spring ): –;
Frank Lechner, “Parsons’ Action Theory and the Common Culture Thesis,” Theory, Culture and
Society  (): –.
. Georg Simmel, “Soziologie des Raumes” [Sociology of space] (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 
(Frankfurt a.M., ), –; idem, Philosophie des Geldes [The philosophy of money] (), ibid.,
vol.  (Frankfurt/Main; ), ff. For a recent analysis of the cultural limits of expansionism see
Jürgen Osterhammel, “Kulturelle Grenzen in der Expansion Europas” [The cultural limits of the
European expansion], Saeculum  (): –.
 Shame on US? : 

constant exchange with other societies; second, most countries consist of a

multitude of cultures; and third, cultures do not necessarily align with the
borders of a nation-state. One of the most prominent advocates of a global
theory, sociologist Roland Robertson, recently proposed that a new concept
replace the prevalent social scientific system of “mapping” the globe into three
different worlds developed after the end of colonialism in the s. The current
discourse of “mapping,” Robertson stated, melds geography with “political,
economic, cultural and other forms of placements of nations on the global-
international map.” In lieu of a three-world view, he proposed that we begin to
see the world as a more organic interconnected single network.
In line with this development, much of the cultural imperialism argument
has moved away from its anti-American line to a more global level, with no one
identifiable enemy. Scholars have replaced the concept of U.S. cultural domi-
nation with the study of Western cultural influence, but they disagree over the
relationship between manipulation and globalization. Some, such as Orlando
Patterson, claim that the modern process of worldwide cultural interaction
could be interpreted as a surreptitious U.S. push for global uniformity. For others,
like Peter Beyer, globalization comes “quite as much at the ‘expense’ of” Western
as of non-Western cultures since both are entrenched in a dramatic change.
Scholars such as Karen Fog have used the global approach in order to explain
the tension between local and supranational cultural and political develop-
ments. Some of these analyses paint a despairingly bleak picture of the future
cultural world order. Samuel Huntington, for example, invokes the specter of
a “clash of civilizations,” a World War III, where Western and Eastern societies
battle not because of political and ideological reasons but out of cultural conflicts.
In the future, Huntington argues, people will define themselves by their faith, food,
and local traditions rather than by ideas and national political systems.

. John Tomlinson, “A Phenomenology of Globalization? Giddens on Global Modernity,”

European Journal of Communication  (June ): –; Barry Smart, “Sociology, Globalisation and
Postmodernity: Comments on the ‘Sociology for One World’ Thesis,” International Sociology  (June
): –; Roland Axtmann, “Society, Globalization and the Comparative Method,” History of
the Human Sciences  (May ): –.
. Roland Robertson, “Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Con-
cept,” Theory, Culture & Society  (June ): –, esp. –; Anthony D. Smith, “Towards a Global
Culture?” ibid., –.
. Patterson also stresses the vitality of local cultures and their impact on U.S. culture.
Orlando Patterson, “Ecumenical America: Global Culture and the American Cosmos,” World
Policy Journal  (Summer ): –; and David Rieff, “A Global Culture?” ibid.  (Winter
–): –.
. Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London, ), –.
. Buell, National Culture; Karen Fog Olwig, Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change
in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis (Philadelphia, ); James Lull, Media, Communication,
Culture: A Global Approach (New York, ).
. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs  (Summer ):
–. For a critique of Huntington’s thesis see “Comments,” ibid. (September/October ): –;
Peter Steinfels, “Speculating on Wars of the Future: Instead of Ideologies, Combatants May be
Cultures,” New York Times,  April ; Josef Joffe, “A Clash Between Civilizations – or Within
Them?” World Press Review  (February ): –; Chandra Muzaffar, “The West’s Hidden
 :                 

A more optimistic outlook characterizes Charles Bright and Michael Geyer’s

 interpretation of the shift from Westernization to globalization as the
fusion of tradition and modernity: “This is not Spengler’s Decline of the West,
but the beginning of a global reordering in which the West seeks its place in a
world order it must now share with radically different societies. It is the
beginning of a truly global politics.” John Urry and Scott Lash even speculate
that the globalization of economic, political, and social relationships indicates
the “end of organized capitalism.” In a completely interconnected global
economy, no one country will be able to dominate the market. Frederick Buell
states in his recent book National Culture and the New Global System that for almost
every academic discipline the “world of hybrid cultural production” is becom-
ing the norm.
Even major critics of U.S. cultural imperialism have aligned their earlier
reproaches along these lines. Already in , Armand Mattelart warned of the
overly broad and often inappropriate usage of the notion of “cultural imperi-
alism.” He emphasized that the term did not imply an external conspiracy but
could only be effected by a combination of international and native (elite)
forces, such as in Chile.
Herbert Schiller, conversely, later reframed his argument in terms of world-
systems theory. In a  article he portrayed an expansive, transnational
corporate authority that has replaced an autonomous United States in influenc-
ing all economic and cultural activity. And Schiller’s followers, who applied
his ideas to case studies such as foreign domination in Ireland, Kenya, and
Western youth culture, concede that people abroad actively resisted the import
of U.S. communication technology and culture.

Agenda,” ibid., –; and Huntington’s response, “If Not Civilizations, What?” Foreign Affairs 
(November/December ): –.
. Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “For a Unified History of the World in the Twentieth
Century,” Radical History Review  (Fall ): –. Quoted also in Buell, National Culture, ; and
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, ).
. John Urry and Scott Lash, The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge, England, ).
. Buell, National Culture, –.
. Arturo Torrecilla, “Cultural Imperialism, Mass Media and Class Struggle: An Interview
with Armand Mattelart,” Insurgent Sociologist  (Spring ): –; Mattelart and Peter Jehle,
“Neue Horizonte der Kommunikation: Die Rückkehr zur Kultur” [New horizons of communica-
tion: The return to culture], Argument  (September–October ): –.
. Herbert Schiller, “Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era,” Critical Studies in Mass-Communication
 (March ): –.
. “There are strong forces working for cultural autonomy” among local Irish, Maolsheach-
lainn O Caollai concludes in a collection of essays honoring Schiller. “The language and cultural
movements are of great potential strength.” Maolsheachlainn O Caollai, “Cultural Domination
in Europe: The Case of Ireland,” in Communication and Domination: Essays to Honor Herbert I. Schiller,
ed. Jörg Becker, Göran Hedebro, and Leena Paldán (Norwood, ), –, esp. ; Ngugiwa
Thiong’o, “Kenyan Culture: The National Struggle for Survival,” ibid., –; Yuji Takahashi,
“The Resistance of the Asian Masses and Their Culture,” Perspective of New Music  (Summer
): –.
 Shame on US? : 

Equally noteworthy is the case of the famous scholar of colonial literature,

Edward Said, who analyzed the image of orientalism in Western society. In his
first book, published in , he argued that the West culturally dominated the
Orient by creating an artificial cultural vision of the latter “as its contrasting
image, idea, personality, experience.” In his recent study, Culture and Imperi-
alism (), Said modified his earlier thesis about cultural domination. Studying
the classic novels of the nineteenth and twentieth century, he detailed how
Western authors and audiences developed a literary perspective on imperial
geography distinguishing between “us” (the West) and “them” (the Third
World). This perspective, Said claimed, provided an identity to both the Third
World and the West. Each side benefited from a mutually dependent relation-
ship: the West used the Third World to reinforce its own progressive identity,
while the countries of the Third World needed Western capital investments.
Said’s argument dismissed a totalitarian or completely determinist model and
allowed for a more fluid system of global interactions.
In summary, the discourse about American cultural transfer has shifted
markedly over the course of the past half century. Originally begun as an almost
“public” debate among politicians, journalists, and scholars, the discussion
focused on the political advantage of cultural diplomacy and actually called for
more information on the United States and cultural artifacts abroad. In the s
and s, the topic became integrated in the nascent discussion over U.S.
imperialism, emphasizing the economic and psychological implications of
culture; there was too much American culture abroad, scholars implied. Turn-
ing increasingly academic, the debate represented a typical case of what
observers have commented on as “the widening gap between the political talk
of gown and the political practices of town.” But under the impact of public
resistance against U.S. cultural imperialism and the influence of poststructu-
ralsm in the late s, leading scholars in the field revised their findings or
changed their approach. Today, many scholars no longer interpret the spread
of American and Western culture as “imperialism” but as a continuous process
of negotiation among ethnic, regional, and national groups.
Both globalists and localists have offered an approach that may grow into a
fascinating theory of fluid cultural interaction. But one may wonder to what an
extent concepts like “resistance theory” or “globalization” are really more
neutral and objective than “cultural imperialism.” Don’t these terms carry their
own ideological baggage? Given the internal cultural discrepancies within and
among Europe, the United States, and Canada, which values, beliefs, mores,

. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, ), , , passim.

. ”Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other,” Said concluded,
“but even at their worst they are neither monolithic nor deterministic.” Edward W. Said, Culture
and Imperialism (New York, ), xxiv.
. Berndt Ostendorf, “‘Cultural Studies’: Post-Political Theory in a Post-Fordist Public
Sphere,” Amerikastudien/American Studies  (): –.
 :                 

and traditions does “Western culture” encompass? Furthermore, many schol-

ars perceive the major cultural conflict not between the United States and the
rest of the world but between the Western/northern and the Eastern/southern
hemisphere. What passes as a new theory is often in reality the old-fashioned
bipolar world reincarnate: Muslim fundamentalism has simply replaced com-
munism as the foremost challenger of Western culture and politics.
If the notion of a unified Western cultural camp appears questionable, then
the nature and meaning of a global culture remains even more elusive. What,
exactly, is “globalization”? How do we know that globalization has arrived?
What are the implications of a global culture, who are its agents, and where do
we search for its origins? Who and what is being globalized? Does worldwide
economic and technological progress necessarily cause a change in people’s
cultural consciousness? Does globalization simply mean that people buy more
foreign goods, work for international companies, watch more American movies,
read fewer books, and listen more to modern soundtracks than to opera music?
Where does the debate on American cultural transfer abroad stand now?
Four points merit attention. First, the revolution in cyberspace is one of many
phenomena pointing to both globalization and multiculturalism that suggest
that Americans may no longer be able to agree on the substance of their culture,
or rather agree enough to export the idea of U.S culture. Carried to the
extreme, this discord echoes the original conviction that Americans have no
culture apt to export.
Yet simultaneously, and this is my second point, the U.S. public has started
once again to worry over the image of American culture abroad, thus reinvent-
ing the discussion of the s. In a gesture to Franz Joseph and Raymond Aron’s
 publication, in June  the New York Times published a special issue titled
“How the World Sees Us.” International intellectuals grudgingly admitted the
prevalence of American power and culture but underlined their respective
countries’ dissension. “American movies have achieved the impossible,” said
playwright Edvard Radzinsky. “Russians are so sick of them that they have
started watching films from the days of Socialist Realism.” American observers

. Note that Europeans currently debate the geographical parameters of European culture
as well as the question of which countries belong to Europe. Dan Diner, “Die Wiederkehr der
Orientalischen Frage” [The return to the Oriental question], Die Zeit,  September ; Michael
Lüders, “Der Fundamentalismus ist nicht der Islam” [Fundamentalism does not equal Islam],
ibid.,  September .
. Adda B. Bozeman, “Time Warp in American Politics,” Society  (July-August ): –.
. For a tentative approach see Elliot R. Morss, “The New Global Players: How They
Compete and Collaborate,” World Development  (January ): –.
. Pierre Guerlain, “Shooting Oneself in the Foot? Multiculturalists, Diversity and the
Scapegoat Mechanism,” in Americanisation and the Transformation of World Cultures: Melting Pot or
Cultural Chernobyl? ed. Phil Melling and Jon Roper (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter, ), –.
Americans are not the only ones to be hit by these seemingly paradoxical trends. For the analysis
of similar trends in Europe see Alain Finkielkraut, La defaite de la pensée [The defeat of the mind]
(Paris, ).
 Shame on US? : 

concurred. “Some of America’s cultural exports are so awful that you begin to
suspect that we’re using the rest of the world as a vast toxic waste dump,” editor
Michiko Kakutani commented cynically.
Third, the focus of the debate is shifting. Until recently, the discussion
centered on the nation-state save for a few significant exceptions. After the
breakup of the bipolar world system, however, more attention has been paid to
the individual entrepreneur. In other words, the debate has moved from a
nation-centered critique to an analysis of the impact of private business. This
change of argument has not only obscured if not obliterated national bounda-
ries; it has also moved the object under investigation from politics to capitalism
in ways very different from the s and s.
Finally, in the United States the entire debate hitherto has focused almost
exclusively on the post- if not the post- period. With a few exceptions,
most participants agree that the transfer of American culture had no history
before the formal establishment of a program and then an agency that was in
charge of projecting American culture abroad. Yet bureaucratic formations
follow rather than pave the way for a political trend or need. In the future,
students will increasingly look to the pre-World War I period and the nine-
teenth century for early signs, influences, and explanations of American culture
abroad and vice versa. Such research might focus on actors, such as the exodus
and exchange of private groups, including businessmen and artists, as well as
ideas and products, as transmitted, for example, by scientists and poets.
These four points, the fracturing cultural consensus within the United
States, the revitalized worry on the part of many Americans regarding their
image abroad, the global shift of the cultural debate from politics to capitalism,
and the lack of research for the decades before World Wars I and II, may serve
as inspirations for future research in the field of American culture abroad. We
may wish to tackle the question what does it mean that the Botswanan natives
first worshipped a Coke bottle dropped from the sky as a gift from God then
decided to throw it over the edge of the world. What is the legacy of that bottle?
And if this debate continues to be as lively, as international, and as interdisci-
plinary as it has been up to now, we can all look forward to an academic exchange

. Edvard Radzinsky, “Lowbrow Go Home (Fleeting),” New York Times Magazine,  June ,
; Michiko Kakutani, “Culture Zone (Taking Out the Trash),” ibid., .
. For some notable exceptions see Frank Trommler, “Inventing the Enemy: German-
American Cultural Relations, –,” in Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United
States in the Era of World War I, –, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schröder (Oxford, ), –; Reiner
Pommerin, Der Kaiser und Amerika: Die USA in der Politik der Reichsleitung – [The emperor and
America: The United States in the policies of the imperial government, –] (Cologne, ),
–; Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “Die politische Funktionalisierung der Kultur: Der deutsch-
amerikanische Professorenaustausch –” [The political use of culture: The German-
American academic exchange, –] in Zwei Wege in die Moder ne: Aspekte der
deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen – [Two paths into modernity: Aspects of German-Ameri-
can relations, –], ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Jürgen Heideking (Trier, ), –;
Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne; and Patricia Neils, ed., United States Attitudes and Policies toward China:
The Impact of American Missionaries (Armonk, NY, ).
 :                 

that will prove meaningful not only for our respective research interests but for
our own identities, fears, and expectations as well.