by Tony Judt
To be sure, the US government and various private agencies—notably the Ford Foundation—were doing their best to overcome the gulf separating Europe from America: the 1950s and early 1960s were the great age of overseas cultural investment,from America Houses to Fulbright Scholars. In some places—notably the Federal Republic of Germany—the consequences were profound: between 1948 and 1955, 12,000 Germans were brought to America for extended stays of one month or more. A whole generation of West Germans grew up in the military, economic and cultural shadow of the United States; Ludwig Erhard once described himself as ‘an American invention.’
But it is important to emphasize that this sort of American influence and example depended curiously little on direct American economic involvement. America in 1950 had three fifths of the capital stock of the West and about the same share of output, but very little of the proceeds flowed across the Atlantic. Post-1945 investment came above all from the US government. In 1956, US private investment in Europe amounted to just $4.15 billion. It then began to rise sharply, taking off in the 1960s (notably in Britain) and reaching $24.52 billion in 1970—by which time it had provoked a flurry of anxious publications warning of the rise of American economic power, notably J-J Servan-Schreiber’s 1967 essay, Le Défi Américain (The American Challenge).
The American economic presence in Europe was felt less in direct economic investment or leverage than in the consumer revolution that was affecting America and Europe alike. Europeans were now gaining access to the unprecedented range of products with which American consumers were familiar: phones, white goods, televisions, cameras, cleaning products, packaged foods, cheap colorful clothing, cars and their accessories, etc. This was prosperity and consumption as a way of life—the ‘American way of life’. For young people the appeal of ‘America’ was its aggressive contemporaneity. As an abstraction, it stood for the opposite of the past; it was large, open, prosperous—and youthful.
One aspect of ‘Americanization’, already noted, was popular music—though even this was not in itself a new pattern: ‘ragtime’ was first performed in Vienna in 1903 and American dance bands and jazz groups were widely circulating before and after World War Two. Nor was it a uniquely one-way process: most modern popular music was a hybridization of imported and local genres. ‘American’ music in Britain was subtly different from ‘American’ music in France or Germany. French taste in particular was influenced by black performing artists who made their way to Paris to escape prejudice at home—one reason why the idea of ‘America’ in French culture was markedly infused with the image of racism.
By the 1950s, the impact of American example on a European audience came overwhelmingly through the medium of film. European audiences had near-unrestricted access to anything Hollywood could export: by the later 1950s, the US was marketing about 500 films a year, to Europe’s collective output of about 450. American films suffered the disadvantage of language, of course (though in many places, notably Italy, they were simply dubbed en masse into the local tongue). And partly for this reason audiences above a certain age continued to prefer the domestic product. But their children felt otherwise. Younger audiences increasingly appreciated American feature films—often made by European directors who had fled Hitler or Stalin.
Contemporary critics worried that the smug conformism of American popular culture, combined with the manifest or subliminal political messages conveyed in films aimed at mass audiences, would corrupt or tranquilize the sensibilities of European youth. If anything, the effect seems rather to have been the opposite. Young European audiences filtered out the propaganda content of mainstream American movies—envying the ‘good life’ as depicted on screen, much as their parents had done twenty years before, but laughing out loud at the bathos and naiveté of American romance and domestic routine. Meanwhile, however, they paid very close attention to the often-subversive style of the performers.
The music that was played in American films would re-surface on radio, in cafés, bars and dance halls. The body language of rebellious American youth—as seen on film—became a fashion statement for their European contemporaries. Young Europeans began to dress ‘American’—when ‘genuine Levi’ jeans first appeared on sale in Paris, at the Marché aux Puces in May 1963, demand far outran supply. The American youth uniform of jeans and tee-shirts carried very little connotation of class (at least until both were appropriated by expensive high-end fashion designers, and even then the distinction that emerged was not of social rank but material resources); indeed, worn by middle class and working class alike, jeans were a revealing inversion of the traditional ‘trickle down’ development of dress style, having trickled up from a genuine item of work clothing. They were also distinctively young: like many other form-fitting fashions imitated from the films of the late 1950s, they did not flatter the older figure.
Within a very short time, jeans—like motorbikes, Coca-Cola, big hair (male and female) and pop stars—had spawned locally adapted variations across western Europe (both the films and the products they flaunted were unavailable further east). This was part of a broader pattern. Stock American film themes—science-fiction, detective stories, Westerns—were domesticated in stylized European versions. Millions of West Germans learned about cowboys from paperback novels written by local authors who had never been to America; by 1960 German-language ‘Western’ novels were selling at the rate of ninety-one million a year in the Federal Republic alone. The second most popular European cartoon character after the Belgian boy-detective Tintin was another Belgian product: Lucky Luke, a hapless and appealing cowpoke featured weekly in French- and Dutch-language comics. America, real or imagined, was becoming the natural setting for light entertainment of all genres.
The American impact on young Europeans contributed directly to what was already being widely bemoaned as the ‘generation gap’. Their elders observed and regretted the propensity of young Europeans everywhere to pepper their conversations with real or imagined Americanisms. One study estimated that such ‘Americanisms’ increased fourteen-fold in the Austrian and German press over the course of the sixties; in 1964 the French critic René Etiemble published Parlez-vous Franglais?, an entertaining (and, as some might now say, prophetic) account of the damage being done to the French language by anglophone pollution.
Anti-Americanism—the principled distrust and dislike of American civilization and all its manifestations—was typically confined to cultural elites whose influence made it appear more widespread than it was. Cultural conservatives like André Siegfried in France—whose 1954 Tableau des États-Unis reprised all the resentments and some of the anti-semitism of inter-war polemics—agreed with cultural radicals like Jean-Paul Sartre (or Britain’s Harold Pinter in later decades): America was a land of hysterical puritans, given over to technology, standardization and conformism, bereft of originality of thought. Such cultural insecurities had more to do with the pace of change in Europe itself than with the challenge or threat posed by America. Just as European teenagers identified the future with an America they hardly knew, so their parents blamed America for the loss of a Europe that had never really been, a continent secure in its identity, its authority and its values, and impervious to the sirens of modernity and mass society.
These sentiments were not yet widely encountered in Germany or Austria, or even Italy, where many older people still regarded Americans as liberators. Conversely, anti-Americanism was more frequently espoused in England and France, the two former colonial powers directly displaced by the rise of the United States. As Maurice Duverger informed the readers of the French weekly L’Express in March 1964, Communism was no longer a threat: ‘There is only one immediate danger for Europe, and that is the American civilization’—‘a civilization of bathtubs and frigidaires’, as the poet Louis Aragon had dismissed it thirteen years before. But notwithstanding the haughty disdain of Parisian intellectuals, a civilization of bathtubs and frigidaires—and indoor plumbing and central heating and television a
nd cars—was what most Europeans now wanted. And they wanted these commodities not because they were American but because they represented comfort and a degree of ease. For the first time in history, ease and comfort were now within the reach of most people in Europe.
POSTSCRIPT:
A Tale of Two Economies
‘Germany is a land teeming with children. It is a terrifying thought that, in
long range terms, the Germans may have won the war after all’.
Saul Padover, 1945
‘Of course, if we succeeded in losing two world wars, wrote off all our
debts—instead of having nearly £30 million in debts—got rid of all our
foreign obligations, and kept no force overseas, then we might be as rich as
the Germans’.
Harold Macmillan
‘The prosperity and strength of the British economy which [UK
Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A.] Butler celebrated in several speeches in
1953 and 1954 was but the last wash of prosperity breaking on British
shores from the wake of the German economy as it surged ahead, pulling
its attendant European flotilla with it. In retrospect, 1954 looks like the last
grand summer of illusion for the United Kingdom’.
Alan Milward
A striking feature of the history of post-war western Europe was the contrast between the economic performance of West Germany and Great Britain. For the second time in one generation, Germany was the defeated power—its cities shattered, its currency destroyed, its male workforce dead or in prison camps, its transportation and service infrastructure pulverized. Britain was the only European state to emerge unambiguously victorious from World War Two. Bomb damage and human losses aside, the fabric of the country—roads, railways, shipyards, factories and mines—had survived the war intact. Yet by the early 1960s, the Federal Republic was the booming, prosperous powerhouse of Europe, while Great Britain was an under-performing laggard, its growth rate far behind that of the rest of Western Europe.136 Already by 1958 the West German economy was larger than that of Britain. In the eyes of many observers the UK was well on its way to becoming the sick man of Europe.
The sources of this ironic reversal of fate are instructive. The background to the German economic ‘miracle’ of the fifties was the recovery of the thirties. The investments of the Nazis—in communications, armaments and vehicle manufacture, optics, chemical and light engineering industries and non-ferrous metals—were undertaken for an economy geared to war; but their pay-off came twenty years later. The social market economy of Ludwig Erhard had its roots in the policies of Albert Speer—indeed, many of the young managers and planners who went on to high position in post-war West German business and government got their start under Hitler; they brought to the committees, planning authorities and firms of the Federal Republic policies and practices favored by Nazi bureaucrats.
The essential infrastructure of German business survived the war undamaged. Manufacturing firms, banks, insurance companies, distributors were all back in business by the early ’50s, supplying a voracious foreign market with their products and services. Even the increasingly high-valued Deutschmark did not impede German progress. It made imported raw materials cheap, without restricting foreign demand for German products—these were typically high-value and technically advanced, and they sold on quality, not price. In any case, during the first post-war decades there was little competition: if Swedish or French or Dutch firms wanted a certain sort of engineering product or tool, they had little option but to buy it from Germany, and at the asking price.
German business costs were kept down by sustained investment in new and efficient production methods—and by a compliant workforce. The Federal Republic benefited from a virtually inexhaustible supply of cheap labor—skilled young engineers fleeing East Germany, semi-skilled machine minders and assembly workers from the Balkans, unskilled laborers from Turkey, Italy and elsewhere. All of these were grateful for stable hard-currency wages in return for steady employment, and—like an un-protesting older generation of German workers inherited from the Thirties—they were not disposed to make trouble.
The results can be illustrated with reference to a single industry. By the 1960s German car manufacturers had successfully established a reputation for engineering quality and manufacturing reliability, such that companies like Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart and BMW in Munich could sell increasingly expensive cars to a near-captive market, first at home and increasingly overseas. The Bonn government unashamedly supported such ‘national champions’, just as the Nazis had done before it, nurturing them in early years with favorable loans and encouraging the banking-business nexus that provided German companies with ready cash for investment.
In the case of Volkswagen, the groundwork had already been laid by 1945. Like so much of post-war West German industry, Volkswagen benefited from all the advantages of a free-market economy—notably growing demand for its products—without suffering any of the drawbacks of competition or the costs of research, development and tooling. The company had been given inexhaustible resources before 1939. Nazism, war and military occupation had all done well by it—the Allied Military Government looked kindly on Volkswagen precisely because its productive capacity had been built up before the war and could be put to work without further ado. There was no serious domestic competition for the VW Beetle when demand for mass-produced small family cars took off, and even at a fixed and low price the cars turned a profit—thanks to the Nazis, the company had no old debt to pay off.
In Britain, too, there was a ‘national champion’—the British Motor Corporation (BMC), a conglomerate of various formerly independent car manufacturers like Morris or Austin, and itself later merged with Leyland Motors to produce British Leyland (BL). As late as 1980, BL was selling its products as emblematically British: ‘Drive the flag—buy an Austin Morris’. And like the German manufacturers, British carmakers laid increasing emphasis on the overseas market. But there the similarities ended.
After the war, successive British governments urged BMC especially (they had less influence over US-owned Ford, or General Motors’ subsidiaries in the UK) to sell every car they could overseas—as part of the desperate search for foreign currency earnings to offset the country’s huge war debts (the official government export target at the end of the 1940s was 75 percent of all UK car production). The company duly and deliberately neglected quality control in favor of rapid output. The resulting shoddy quality of British cars mattered little at first. British firms had a captive market: demand both at home and in Europe exceeded available supply. And continental European manufacturers could not compete on volume: in 1949 the UK produced more passenger cars than the rest of Europe combined. But once the reputation for low quality and poor service was established, it proved impossible to shake. European buyers abandoned British cars in droves as soon as better home-produced alternatives became available
When they did decide to update their fleets and modernize their production lines, British car firms had no affiliated banks to turn to for investment cash and loans, in the German manner. Nor (unlike FIAT in Italy or Renault in France) could they count on the state to make up the shortfall. Yet under heavy political pressure from London, they built plants and distribution centers in uneconomic parts of the country—to conform to official regional policies and to appease local politicians and unions. Even after this economically irrational strategy was abandoned and some consolidization undertaken, British automobile firms remained hopelessly atomized: in 1968 British Leyland consisted of sixty different plants.
Governments actively encouraged the inefficiency of British producers. After the war, the authorities distributed scarce supplies of steel to manufacturers on the basis of their pre-war market share, thus freezing a major sector of the economy in the mould of the past and decisively penalizing new, and potentially more efficient producers. The guarantee of supplies, the artificially high de
mand for anything they could make, and political pressure to behave in economically inefficient ways all combined to lead British firms down into bankruptcy. By 1970 European and Japanese producers were taking over their markets and beating them on quality and price. The oil crisis of the early 1970s, entry into the EEC and the end of the UK’s last protected markets in the dominions and colonies finally destroyed the independent British car industry. In 1975 British Leyland, the country’s only independent mass automobile maker, collapsed and had to be bailed out via nationalization. A few years later its profitable parts would be bought up for a song . . . by BMW.
The decline and eventual disappearance of an autonomous British automobile sector can stand for British economic experience at large. The British economy did not initially do so very badly: in 1951 Britain was still the major manufacturing center of Europe, producing twice as much as France and Germany combined. It provided full employment and it did grow, albeit more slowly than everywhere else. It suffered, however, from two crippling disadvantages, one a product of historical misfortune, the other self-imposed.