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The American impact on Western Europe:
Americanization and Westernization in transatlantic perspective

Since the end of the Cold War, intellectuals and academics everywhere in Western Europe are discussing the question as to what influence the United States has had on the post-war development of the European Community. In this connection, it is not so much a matter of problems of American hegemony in the military or economic area as of influences on socio-political and cultural development. How -- as the key question is formulated -- has the model of a society characterized by mass consumption and mass culture which the Americans openly offered after 1945 been received and assimilated by Western Europeans? How has not only the transfer of material goods, but also of ideas and "dreams" of a better life and of "prosperity for all" (Ludwig Erhard), been projected across the Atlantic? And finally: how did the contacts between American and European intellectual elites in organizations, parties, churches, and the media make themselves felt, those who in the fifties formed networks and made a deliberate effort to influence the processes which formed public opinion? Did these result in the sixties in efforts to reform concepts of political and social organization?

These questions constitute the background for the papers in this conference volume which are concerned with the relationship between Germany and the United States, but which at the same time also have a comparison of countries within Europe in mind. Thanks to the research of political scientists and economists, we have become quite well informed about the connections between the Federal Republic, the West European partner countries in the Atlantic alliance, and the United States with respect of political-military and social exchanges; in regard to cultural and social exchanges, however, despite a few important pioneer studies such as that of Werner Link on American and German business men and labor unions, we are still very much at the beginning. This has been, to begin with, the source of a variety of hypotheses which explain this dimension of the transatlantic relationship. In the wake of debates which were already being conducted in the Weimar Republic, a number of historians and scholars who study cultural matters have interpreted the German-American relationship after 1945 as part of a process of Americanization carried out by the one hegemonic power of the West -- as part of a process in which the cultural models and norms of styles of behavior of a mass consumption society were exported from the United States to Europe. This view was opposed primarily by the contemporary historian at Tübingen, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, whose thesis, based on an intellectual history appraoch, was that the connection between the U.S. and Germany during the period of the Cold War also encompassed a "Westernization" of the Federal Republic. Its characteristic feature, he believed, lay in the amalgamation of European and Atlantic values having to do with the structure of social and political affairs, a subject which had marked the cultural exchange between the Old and the New World since the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the combining of ideas about the political and social order of the German national tradition with those of Atlantic or American origin. Influences of this kind had made themselves felt during the fifties, at first in international networks of groups of intellectuals and organizational elites, and then, from the end of that decade through the middle of the sixties, continued to have an effect on the development of West German politics and society. The historical profile of a community with a liberal-consensual structural and social policy from the middle of the seventies on was explained by Doering-Manteuffel as the effect of the transfer of ideas and the application of new patterns of social structure, too.

A third perspective was presented by a research group which was formed around the Hamburg historians Arnold Sywottek and Axel Schildt. They viewed the developments during the fifties as part of a process of modernization which was affecting all the industrial societies of the West. What arose in post-war Germany as cultural and social forms and practices, therefore, was part of a long-term development which had already begun in Germany in the nineteenth century and which was not interrupted, even by the Third Reich. The criticism of the Americanization thesis as it was put forward in particular by the Tübingen cultural historian, Kaspar Maase, was based on the statistically demonstrable fact that, at least in the fifties, a mass consumption society lay a long distance in the future. The living standard was very low, the economy was still characterized by widespread scarcities, so that it is only possible to speak of an American stamp on society at all from the middle of the fifties on, beginning slowly for the most part among young urban workers.

In view of these debates, the first goal of the papers of this conference was to help in the clarification and in the more precise formulation of concepts, with the help of which the relationship between Germany and the United States could best be described and explained.

The debates and research projects about Americanization, Westernization, or modernization have had a very stimulating effect on a younger generation of scholars. If, until almost ten years ago, it was primarily a question of the development of the interpretive syntheses mentioned above, at this time numerous scholars -- graduate students and younger faculty -- were trying to test the existing hypotheses against the empirical data. In the meantime, these research projects have reached a stage where the first results are available and can be profitably discussed. As has been increasingly customary in research in culture since the eighties, it is a feature of these efforts that the horizon of their inquiry and the context of their research has lain in an interdisciplinary direction. Historians work together with sociologists of industry, political historians and political economists with legal scholars, historians of art and architecture with media scholars, and anthropologists with historians of ideas and political scientists. The papers of this conference reflect the whole variety of these approaches and disciplines.

Following the paper of the well-known Americanist from Amsterdam, Rob Kroes, the first and last sections are devoted to the presentation of the overarching hypotheses on the subject of Americanization and Westernization.

The second section brings younger Americans -- a political scientist and an historian -- together with a German historian. They have worked on German-American industrial relations, and examine in particular the interpretive capacity of the two approaches of "modernization" and "Westernization."

Constitutional and legal questions are in the center of the third section. Here three historians who are political scientists or legal scholars present their research on the transformation of legal concepts, constitutional categories, and political understanding in the Federal Republic during the fifties and sixties. Their inquiry goes to the question of the extent and direction of American influences on elements of this process of transformation.

The question of changes in political culture is being discussed in the fourth section by three scholars who, as historians and theologians, have been concerned with the German-Jewish relationship and with the American view of guilt, with the formation of an international network of West European, American, and German intellectuals of the left in opposition to Stalinism in Western Europe, and finally with the conditions and the intellectual influences which, in an important segment of West German Protestantism, have contributed to a rejection of the paradigm of an internally focused national German state in favor of a Germany with a Western-liberal orientation.

The role of the arts, the media, and the resulting mass culture in the formation of a Western-"American" profile of the society of the Federal Republic are the subject of the fifth section. The main question in the foreground here goes to the transforming American influence on developments in the Federal Republic. The real topic, however, is the question of the refraction of American intellectual and conceptional models, the unique manner of their blending, and the emergence of a West German hybrid formed from the German national tradition and the massively promoted palette of American modes of thinking about these subjects.

More recent research on the history of architecture and city planning is presented in the sixth section. Central here are the planning debates in German architecture periodicals and the influences of American style of living on Western Europe.

The last section is devoted solely to the significance of regional history for an understanding of German-American relations.