David W. Ellwood. The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century.

Abstract

This wide-ranging volume describes how in the long twentieth century “American symbols and stories, images, products, and people acquired a form of power that sooner or later penetrated every debate on the Old World's prospects” (p. 1). The book's main concern is with a form of “soft power” that has operated to influence economy and culture. Direct American interventions in war and occupation, and in international policy on trade, labor, and industry, are well described. However, these only provide background for how America has worked in Western Europe both as a pervasive cultural force by means of its consumer products and media (film in particular) and as a vast source of myth and symbols. The concentration is on Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. The chronology is determined by three general periods of war: 1898–1941, 1941–1960, and 1989–2009 (post-Cold War). During times of direct American interventions, but also, as David W. Ellwood argues, during times of American isolation, the United States figured in European discourses on the future, and in debates over capitalism, technology, and consumerism. Even before the Spanish-American War era that begins the book, European culture was saturated with clichés and stereotypes about the U.S. After 1898, as Western Europeans began to question their own creation of modernity, “America itself became a metaphor” for modernity and a touchstone for its contestation (p. 32). Utopian visions of America pervaded those discussions of social and economic policy seen as socially progressive or growth oriented. Dystopian views served anti-modernism. Friedrich Nietzsche decried the American obsession with products, and historian Fritz Stern critiqued U.S. mechanization and materialism. On the positive side, Antonio Gramsci saw in Fordism a model for a fairer share for workers and Leon Trotsky predicted the future triumph of Americanized Bolshevism. Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger also associated American capitalism and Bolshevism, but decried their common feature of decadent standardization and collectivization. Adolf Hitler's emphasis on spirit, culture, and national consciousness appeared to some as the perfect antidote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his America, while H. G. Wells, Léon Blum, and David Lloyd George all saw the New Deal as a model for social justice.