Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth‐Century Europe by Victoria de Grazia

Abstract

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe Victoria de Grazia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. One of most visible and contentious ingredients of globalization today is worldwide spread of American-style mass consumer culture. Enthusiasts of economy cite broadening consumer choice and access to world markets as essential to promoting democracy, but as Victoria de Grazia states in her exhaustively researched and complex book, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, globalizing consumer habits have established only most tenuous foundation for a peaceful, egalitarian society (3). One of problems, de Grazia points out, is that while American origin of twentieth-century consumer culture has clearly played a role in US global hegemony, diverse mechanisms of spreading American-style consumer culture around world, enumerated in book as the sum of myriads of marketing strategies, second-order decisions of government, and mundane choices about getting and spending (4), have sometimes been difficult to connect to each other and did not always directly or obviously augment American power. However, de Grazia points out that power of this is no less pervasive because of its elusiveness. In Western Europe, she argues, vocal criticisms of incursions of American consumer culture obscure an underlying adherence to Market Empire values and methods. Thus, today, a squarely European company like Ikea is as ubiquitous a symbol of consumerism as Coca Cola. The origins of Market Empire, de Grazia contends, is not in capitalist international development efforts of last several decades. It is not even entirely in post-World War II efforts to secure markets and curtail spread of Communism though such policies as Marshall Plan. Instead, de Grazia turns bulk of her attention (three-fourths of book) to period between World Wars, and to piecemeal, halting inroads Market Empire took in Western Europe toward replacing bourgeois, class stratified, imperialist practices of buying and selling with what de Grazia identifies as American ideals of consumer choice, democracy of goods, and a standard of living determined not by class or political ideology, but by technological innovation and consumer desires. This pre-1945 section of book is an impressive feat of international and multilingual research consisting of a series of case studies based upon archival materials in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France, and United States. In each case, triumph of Market Empire is partial at best. The first chapter, for example, is an illuminating account of spread of Rotary clubs in Western Europe after World War I. American Rotarians hoped that mission of clubs (providing a collegial, noncompetitive, and nonpolitical venue for urban businessmen and professionals to socialize, and plan service projects) would prove a blueprint for promoting peace in Europe. …