In 1991, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa promised to make Japan a ‘lifestyle superpower’ (seikatsu taikoku). The state’s direct interest in leisure had a long history. As early as 1912, the Japanese government turned itself into the travel agency for foreign visitors, drawing in precious foreign currencies. The railways department was a main promoter of domestic tourism in the inter-war years. The embrace of leisure in the 1970s was far tighter. If Japan was to catch up with the West, officials reasoned, the Japanese people needed to be taught more active, Western leisure. An introspective tea ceremony was no longer good enough. Unlike in the West, the Japanese state turned the right to recreation into a function of government. Leisure was not a private affair. In 1972, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) set up a Leisure Development Industrial Office. Governing leisure reached its climax with the 1986 resort law, which released subsidies and low-interest loans for marine resorts and golf courses.80
Nowhere did governments try harder to direct the leisure of their subjects than in socialist countries. Nowhere did they fail so badly. The gulf between utopia and reality was most pronounced in the Soviet Union. ‘Free time’, Brezhnev reminded Russians as late as 1972, did not mean time free from responsibility towards society. Socialism effectively gave earlier bourgeois ideals of ‘rational recreation’ a second lease of life. ‘Houses of culture’ sought to mould appropriate Soviet tastes and activities. By the 1930s, there were over 100,000 of these in the USSR. Forty years later, many stood empty. A survey of eight Russian towns in the early 1980s found that no more than 5 per cent of hobbies were collectively organized. In Smolensk, barely one in fifteen adults regularly went to a house of culture. Some tried to survive by mixing socialist education with disco music; the Leningrad house of culture even offered breakdancing courses. Few youths were taken in. In Voronezh in 1982, they simply danced in front of the slide projector, blocking the educational part of the evening. The flight from organized socialist culture was well under way years before perestroika. In Hungary, a spot-check in 1967 found that barely any house of culture bothered to celebrate the official Women’s Day. In most, people were watching a movie and drinking beer. Others were closed altogether. Poles boycotted theirs in the 1970s.81
Instead of blossoming into schools of socialist living, houses of cultures withered into refuges for stamp collectors and small children with nowhere else to go. In the ideologically charged years of the Cold War, it was tempting to see this as the triumph of commercial over collective leisure. But the flight was not all down to the disco or other products of the capitalist ‘culture industry’. In 1977, youths in Eisenach, East Germany, spent more of their free time in the garden or on housework than sitting in front of the television. What it was really about was a retreat into privacy. An official inquiry by the Institute of Youth Research found that even the most loyal pupils and young workers barely devoted two hours per month to the socialist youth movement (Freie Deutsche Jugend). The vast majority just wanted to relax, listen to music or hang out with friends.82 Ironically, the socialist drive for collective culture accomplished the very opposite of what it had set out to do: it made people value leisure as something private.
Today, the state plays a crucial role in cultural consumption and private taste on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. Theatre, opera, museums and libraries – few of these manage without support from the state. In Germany, each spectator in a public theatre is subsidized by €87.83 How much time would audiences spend with Schiller or Brecht if they had to cough up the full price? In the United States, admittedly, direct funding for the arts is smaller, but this does not mean the state can be ignored altogether. A good deal of private and corporate sponsorship relies on tax relief, which is an indirect form of state support. In Portugal, the private Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation contributes an impressive 40 per cent to spending on culture, but this is an extreme case. Virtually everywhere in Europe, the state is the main benefactor of cultural life. That states continue to subsidize their citizens’ taste for art, music, literature and drama deserves emphasis, because it runs counter to what we might expect in an age of cultural relativism, where all tastes are said to be equal, and neo-liberalism, where markets and private choice supposedly rule. Those who like to listen to Shakespeare or Verdi have their own welfare state. So do artists, most notably in Sweden, where 16 per cent of the total cultural budget goes directly to them. In the 1980s and ’90s, states everywhere started knocking at the door of corporations to get them to invest more in culture. What has ultimately happened in these neo-liberal decades, however, is not the withdrawal of the state but a handover of funds from government to more or less autonomous arts councils and foundations.
These are general observations. Pinning down the specific role of individual states is more difficult. In Europe – supposedly moulded by a shared culture – no two countries agree on what they mean when they support ‘culture’. Behind such problems of definition lurk fundamental differences about national tastes and policy priorities. Denmark, for example, includes sport and libraries in its support for culture; Hungary also includes religious activities. Germany focuses on the performing arts; Italy on heritage. In some countries, TV viewers pay a licence fee. In others, the state picks up the bill. In the Netherlands, public cultural expenditure grew by one third in the early 2000s, but that was in part because the licence fee was abolished. Support for culture in many countries is spread between different ministries and local and central authorities. In Italy, the European Parliament found in 2006, data was ‘still not regularly collected’.84
All this makes comparison difficult. What is clear is the considerable and ongoing diversity. Public support for cultural consumption amounts to 0.2 per cent of GDP in Ireland but 1.9 per cent in Estonia; in Belgium, Austria and the Scandinavian countries it is just under 1 per cent; in Germany and Portugal only 0.4 per cent. Just because culture is cheap, or there is more of it, does not mean that people automatically consume more of it. Still, it is noteworthy that more people attend theatre, music and dance performances where government spending is most generous: the Scandinavian countries and Estonia. Attendances are also above average in Germany, where government spends fairly little, but what it does spend it gives mainly to the performing arts.85
Sociologists have stressed the influence of class and education on taste. Equally important may be how states favour certain tastes and practices over others. It is, probably, no coincidence that people today rarely go to a theatre or concert hall in Italy – the home of bel canto – where the performing arts have to live off the few crumbs left over by ‘heritage’. It could be argued that societies simply opt for a different mix of private and public consumption. Households in Britain and Germany spend above average on culture, while their governments are rather stingy by European standards. More widespread, however, is a symbiosis: individuals spend more on culture where governments do so, too. Danes, Finns and Austrians commit almost twice the share of their household budget to culture as do the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese.86 Here may be as good an illustration of the influence of public for private consumption as any: where states value cultural activities, so do their citizens, at least in democratic societies.
TOO MANY CHOICES
Since the middle of the twentieth century, then, the rise in private consumption has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in public consumption. Ever greater choice in the marketplace arrived alongside more schools, hospitals and social benefits funded by the state. By the end of the century a big question emerged: how should public services respond to the profusion of private choice? Why should a patient in a public hospital be treated differently from someone paying for any other service? Were they not all consumers?
Welfare reform preoccupied many affluent countries, but the zeal was greatest in the United Kingdom in the years around 2000. Tony Blair made the ‘consumerization’ of public services the mantra of his New Labour government. ‘Open and competitive markets�
�, a government white paper stressed, were ‘the best guarantee of a good deal for consumers’.87 And not only at the cash register. ‘I believe,’ Blair said, ‘people do want choice, in public services as in other services.’88 New Labour, in this view, was merely responding to a social transformation. Britain had changed beyond recognition since the early days of the welfare state. Affluence had created a society of consumers who expected to be treated as individuals. The state needed to change accordingly. The middle classes already worked the system, jumping queues or opting out altogether. Giving the poor the power to choose between providers would give them the same power. And it would put pressure on public hospitals and schools to raise their game. Some on the Left were appalled. Choice in public services, they said, would favour the winner over the rest. It would reinforce a selfish individualism at the expense of fairness and solidarity. The more consumer, according to this view, the less citizen.89
These opposing positions made good political sense at the time. For the Blair government, ‘consumerizing’ public services, to use official language, was a way to fix an image problem. New Labour had opened the taps of public spending. Queues for hospital treatment were getting shorter, and there were more nurses and doctors. Statistics showed heart disease was killing fewer. Yet poll after poll showed Britons to be deeply pessimistic, even cynical, about the government’s record. Public services had a bad reputation – they attracted over a million complaints a year – and few trusted the government to fix them.90 The government took a leaf out of the basic handbook of customer service: choice would improve the customer experience and finally give New Labour the credit they deserved. Being ‘consumer-focused’ also addressed a legitimacy deficit. Party membership was falling, and so was turnout at elections. What was the authority of a government if 40 per cent of voters stayed at home? One answer was that parties, too, needed to respond to affluence by reaching out to citizens as consumers; as so often, this was a rather insular British view, which ignored the fact that Germany, Spain and other affluent countries enjoyed high turnouts at elections. There were, similarly, good reasons the Left was so alarmed about choice. Blair’s reforms built on the Citizens’ Charters introduced by the Conservatives in 1991: the ‘third way’ seemed a slippery slope to neo-liberalism.
From a historical perspective, however, these two portrayals of the consumer are equally unhelpful. They involve two basic misunderstandings. One is about sequence. The consumer was not the child of post-war affluence but had already reached maturity by then. The second is about consumers’ DNA. Choice was only one strand. Social justice and democratic rights were just as important. It was these together that had catapulted consumers to the centre of public life around 1900. In Britain, the consumer who had defended the freedom to buy cheap goods in 1906 had been equally concerned with bread for the poor and democratic accountability. In early-twentieth-century America, progressives fought monopolies and fraud, not only because they harmed individuals (‘consumer detriment’) but because they corroded public life. In Paris, Vienna and Berlin, meanwhile, shoppers’ leagues felt their choices ought to be used to improve the welfare of workers and salespeople. The idea that citizen and consumer were opposites, let alone mutually exclusive, would have baffled these earlier generations just as much as the idea that choice was all about individual satisfaction.91
It is, similarly, unwise to see governments’ embrace of the consumer as a sudden response to the inescapable demands of affluence. States’ responsiveness to consumers has a longer history. The apotheosis came on a cold Thursday in March 1962 in Washington DC, when President Kennedy gave an address to Congress on protecting the consumer interest. Kennedy laid down four basic rights: the right to safety, to be informed, to choose and to be heard. These four points have become the global cornerstone of consumer protection, remembered every 15 March (World Consumer Rights Day). They are now so often recited that they barely attract attention. It is therefore worth listening to the speech as a whole to recapture its larger spirit. ‘Consumers,’ Kennedy began, ‘include us all.’ They were the largest group in the economy. Yet they were the one group ‘whose views are often not heard’. Americans were better off than ever before. At the same time, they were exposed to an avalanche of new, complex products and subject to ‘increasingly impersonal’ marketing – 90 per cent of prescription drugs, he noted, had been unknown twenty years earlier. Advertisers were using ‘highly developed arts of persuasion’. To assess the value, safety and quality of a product, the ‘housewife is called upon to be an amateur electrician, mechanic, chemist, toxicologist, dietitian and mathematician’. Even then, vital information was hidden from her. Kennedy’s call for consumer rights, however, was about more than fixing market imperfections. Government, he stressed, also had to ‘meet its responsibility to consumers’. ‘Nearly all’ its programmes were of ‘direct or inherent importance to consumers’, from medical care and mass transit to parks and power.
Kennedy gave his speech at the height of affluence, but it was indebted to a progressive tradition that reached back to the bleak 1930s and the unequal 1890s. The fight against monopoly, hazardous drugs and dangerous foods, the call for ‘truth in lending’ and ‘truth in packaging’ – these battles had been waged by earlier activists and muckrakers. In addition to strengthening existing regulations, however, Kennedy assigned government new responsibilities. These included low-cost housing for ‘moderate income families’, safer transport and a cheap and adequate supply of natural gas. Choice was about more than letting individuals shop freely in the marketplace. Consumer rights would raise the standard of living for all. They were part of a democratic philosophy which recognized, in Kennedy’s concluding words, that ‘we share an obligation to protect the common interest.’92
Europeans with memories of war and hunger would have marvelled at Kennedy’s reference to the 6,000 separate food items on display in an American supermarket. Still, in consumer policy, the wind was almost everywhere blowing in a similar social liberal direction. Rich and poor were promised choice, but also a guarantee they were not being ripped off. The emerging consensus was for a mix of competitive markets and consumer protection. Where countries differed was how they struck the balance between the two and who did the protecting. Britain leant towards the market and trusted information to do the job. Government looked on from the sidelines as the Consumers’ Association kept an eye on three of Kennedy’s principles (choice, safety and information). Which?, the watchdog’s house magazine, started comparative testing in 1957. Ten years later, it had over half a million subscribers. A government-sponsored National Consumer Council was not set up until 1975. In countries with a statist tradition, by contrast, product testing was more likely to be housed within the state. In Denmark, the government’s Home Economic Council tested products and handled consumer complaints. Sweden in 1957 set up a National Consumer Council (Statens konsumentråd), and a National Institute for Consumer Issues (Statens institut för konsumentfrågor), alongside a cartel board. In Scandinavian countries, the state recognized consumers not simply out of charity but because it made it possible to co-opt them for rational planning. The state wanted to guide consumers as much as protect them. They had to be taught to make the most of the limited resources available so as to increase the nation’s productivity.
France tried to have the best of both worlds, an active state and a vibrant associational culture. In addition to two general bodies (the testing organization UFCQue Choisir and CLCV/Consommation, logement et cadre de vie), there were by the 1980s seven women’s and family consumer groups, six associations inspired by syndicalist ideas of common ownership and a number of tenant and other specialist groups. It was a crowded marketplace with plenty of voices speaking on behalf of the consumer. It was in the 1970s and ’80s that the state entered the fray in earnest. Consumers, Giscard d’Estaing, the republican economic minister, said in 1972 were treated as ‘silent extras’ rather than as the main characters they were. Four years later, now Pre
sident, he created a Secretary of State for Consumption and appointed Christiane Scrivener, a Harvard Business School graduate, inevitably christened ‘Madame Consommation’ by the press. Not to be outdone, the socialists, under François Mitterrand, set up an entire ministry of consumption in 1981. The following year, a law gave consumer representatives seats on councils in nationalized enterprises.93
Progress at the global level proved more difficult. In theory, consumers were the quintessential citizens of the world, the recipients of goods from near and far. The renaissance of globalization since the 1960s might have been expected to catapult them to the centre stage of global politics. The first few steps were encouraging. In 1960 at The Hague, seventeen national associations came together to form the International Organization of Consumer Unions, the forerunner of Consumers International. In the 1970s and ’80s, consumer movements took off in India, Singapore and Malaysia. The IOCU now had a global constituency and turned to the United Nations to protect consumers everywhere. Yet as the movement spread, ideological divides began to open up between North and South. In part, this reflected a gulf in material conditions. Protecting consumers in affluent America meant one thing, doing so in developing Malaysia something quite different. Here it was first and foremost about access to food and shelter, clean water, education and other basic goods. Choice was for the rich. Anwar Fazal, the IOCU’s Asian regional president, went so far as to drop choice off the list of consumer rights altogether.94
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