de Grazia,
Victoria, Irresistible Empire : America's Advance Through
Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005
From the very
first page: refers to the political level (Wilson) to interpret driving forces
which worked in the level of economy. Wilson as the first world’s leader to
recognize that mass consumption can be used as a political leverage. A-ha.
So, her
agenda: to explore how consumer culture (in its American incarnation) “was
converted into great power.” (4) and then: “American hegemony was built on
European territory.” (ibidem.)
“America’s
Market Empire reinforced its overweening confidence in its own parvenu identity
as a “new material civilization,” cast disrepute on the Old World’s claim to
rule by virtue of its imperial civilizing mission, heritage of art, and
bourgeois revolutionary values, and unceasingly retooled the machinery of its
own consumer oriented capitalism to engineer similar consumer revolutions
elsewhere.” (5) It’s curious that even
now, America has a complex of a junior brother in regard to Europe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris
“Five features
mark the uniqueness of the Market Empire’s rule,” (6) not four and not six?
“a
dictatorship obsessed with deploying its centralized plans to catch up with the
Western standard of living,” 11. – this is how she treats her entire material,
through assumptions and not through taking her material on her own terms. A
dictatorship … from 1945 to the late 1980s – does she really know her subject
at all?
I wonder why
she regards it as ‘americanization’ of Europe rather than realization of a
common project of modernity? “The glass broke not because a stone hit it, but
when a stone hit it because it was breakable.
“Thereafter
one could put to rest the old tropes that counterposed Europe’s lofty high
culture to America’s vulgar material civilization, the Old World’s dissipating
militarism to the New World’s constructive peaceableness, quality to quantity,
solidarity to sociability, and refined taste to cheap convenience.” (11) This
makes no sense to me whatsoever: as soon as one starts discuss his/her research
project in such broad terms, it is nothing more than a work with stereotypes.
When she
starts discussing that the idea of Europe was reinforced by America’s
encroachment, this is so HUGE a teleological picture. “Again and again, the
American encroachments showed that if Europe was to resist, it needed to be
united.” (14)
“And as Europe
moved toward unification— as its militarism dissolved into material well-being
and its cultural pride was sacrificed on the altar of consumer progress— it
came to demonstrate as no other place in the world the confidence Wilson placed
in the pacifying powers of allying salesmanship to statecraft.” (14) – how can
one take this book seriously after this phrase?????
Chapter 1
Compares
Duluth and Dresden. What sense of doing this? “Duluth become world-famous
through the novels of Sinclair Lewis.” (19) – a-ha, world-famous.
“Many
Americans of average culture shared his views.” (20) – she is careless with her
own language. “When European culture had been split and Germany crushed by
World War I, the torch of civilization had been passed to the United States.”
(21) – is she serious? Does she write a scholarly work or an apology for
America? Was there, anyway, “one” American culture? “One” European culture?
Anyway, the
chapter is one the Rotary Club. Where’s the promised link to materialism?
And what are
her sources to use when she discusses things related to “entire Europe” and “entire
America”? And how did a very tiny part of European/American capitalists play
any important role in mutual definition of cross-Atlantic relations?
Chapter 4 Big-Brand
Goods. How Marketing Outmaneuvered the Marketplace starts, from the very
beginning, with an artificial categorizing, a comparison between “Americans”
and “Europeans”: “These American neophytes may have been disoriented. But for
scores of thousands of people from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia the Great
Fair of Leipzig was a well-known event.” (185) Every time de Graza writes in
these terms, she loses nuances for the benefit of bigger entities (Americans,
Europeans, ‘old bourgeois consumption’, ‘Americanization’, etc.). Indeed, could
European fairs be a dividing line between ‘American’ and ‘European’ cultures,
given that there was no single European culture (not in an essentialized form,
as de Graza claims throughout the entire book).
It is strange
that she associates certain forms of production with continents. Metonymy, when
she speaks that there were two distinct traditions in production and marketing:
“American” and “European” (e.g., p. 198).
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Morris Cowley, 1919–1926 (UK).
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Chevrolet Series 490 (1915–1922)
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Volvo ÖV 4, 1926–1929 (Sweden)
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Chrysler Imperial (1926–1933)
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Europe vs America: Do these material objects
indeed prove de Grazia’s claim about different “characters” of products in the
Old and New Worlds?
There are also
many other factual counterexamples to de Grazia’s thesis that American
marketing was of a principally different character than “European” marketing.
British tobacco companies, such as the British American Company and the Rothman
International, used the same system of branding which de Grazia attributes to distinctly
“American” marketing. For example, the cigarette brand “Lucky Strike” which
belonged to the former was launched in 1926 and became the most popular brand
in the US in the 1930s (an example of a successful operation of a European
company in the American market). Siemens was another example of a “European”
company which, since its revival in 1919, used a system of branding and
marketing not unlike the one that de Graza attributes to America. Another
example: in the 1930s, Swedish Match controlled no less than 62 percent of
world market of matches.[1]
German-produced Leica became the most recognized brand of photo cameras in the
interwar period (curiously, de Grazia mentions Kodak multiple times, but never
mentions its main competitor even in the American market.[2]
Nestle (1866), Cadbury (1900), L'Oréal (1909)
There were also
multiple examples of industries where this system of mass production and
marketing failed to work at all: e.g., as in the case of the market of alcohol:
European producers had full hegemony in their home market and a significant
share of the American one (in wines, in particular). The question is then not
only in examples which de Graza chooses, but also with those that she passes in
silence in order to make her narrative more convincing by amassing data that
actually fits her framework of ‘Americanization’.
What is
undeniable is that US companies were, perhaps, faster to grasp these new
methods which gave them an advantage in penetrating into the European market.
But this was obviously a general tendency … Europe, as the America’s
significant Other, mattered for national pride, etc., hence the publicity that
American businessmen and media created… De Grazia seems to be caught into the
trap of national pride when she discusses this on their terms. The question is
whether the expansion of American companies to Europe was a national affair and
hence we can indeed speak of ‘Americanization’ of Europe, or whether it was an
internal logic of the development of capitalism; American companies were
prominent in it, but they were not its cause (as de Grazie argues), but
representations of it.
So, the
seeming problem with her account in The
Irresistible Empire is that the factual basis in her field is so vast and
enormous that it cannot establish the limits of her – only the way she
problematizes …
Chapter 5
about advertising – the same problem.
The link –
advertisements of Jaguar in the 1930s: http://www.jaguarmemories.co.uk/bro-ssads.php.
Her bias is so
strong, that she even has to work seriously through assumptions such as (244–245)
that European advertising was not “backward,” but simply “different.” It is
obvious that such assumption were exactly the product of national imagination
and pride and ‘modernizing’ discourse, but de Grazia takes it seriously.
Chapter 6 on
American movies as a medium of cultural influence in Europe is more convincing –
partly because here de Grazia deals with a thoroughly researched phenomenon[3]
that shaped, among other things, the political agenda in post-war Europe
(France in particular).
But even here,
she operates her examples so much voluntarily! Her conclusion to the sixth
chapter sounds like a funeral bell for European cinematography (she speaks of
the German one, but within her entire framework, in which she all the time
mixes national and European, it works… ): “For the forseeable future, to create
a successful national cinema meant finding a niche within the Hollywood system.”
(335) Yet France and Italy are two notable examples where national
cinematography was able to challenge, on home markets, the dominance of
Holliwood; BBC serials is another one: whereas British cinematography
presumably ceded…
So, once
again: she takes a complex phenomenon, identifies a trend within it which is
shaped not by empirical material, but by the dominant discourse around this
phenomenon, and turns everything into so a simplified picture that its epistemological
value is really low. Had she taken instead of the Germany cinematography the French
or Italian postwar cinematography – the resulting picture would have been VERY
different. Or shift the focus from cinema to television.
Chapter 7
raises an interesting problem, that of the relationship between what de Grazia
calls the American model of consumer culture and European political traditions.
. “This
promised all the abundance that a revved-up capitalist war economy could
deliver. But its price was to suppress the cornucopias of populist tradition,
cut back on necessaries, and inculcate the discipline to satisfy wants in an
orderly sequence.” (338) “Driving the stunningly rapid change in consumption
standards that Europeans would experience starting in the early 1950s was the
conflict between the European vision of the social citizen and the American
notion of the sovereign consumer.” (342) “Contended for by left and right, they
turned uneasily between state and market, and between the security promised by
the European welfare state and the freedoms promised by American consumer
culture.” (343)
“European
principles of social citizenship conceived of people as requiring a certain
minimum to belong to society. This was a “right” as opposed to a “legitimate
aspiration” or “claim.”” (344) – it makes sense, but tell me, on the basis of
what sources she makes all these claims about an alleged “European” political culture?
Becomes truly
pathetic when she writes: “The great predicament facing the Market Empire as
its great former enemy, European merchant civilization, capitulated, and as it
geared up militarily and ideologically to fight the Cold War against its new
enemy, Soviet collectivism, was whether a mighty power could be sustained on
the basis of the humdrum principles of material betterment.” (350)
Keeps on
switching between American vs. Soviet model of consumerism, American imposition
of the common European market and opening of protected borders, etc.
“By the
mid-1960s western Europe’s occupational profile was acquiring some traits
common to the United States as, everywhere if very unevenly, peasants became
scarcer, the number of capitalists and independent professionals declined, and
the proportion of salaried executives, white-collar employees, and factory workers
rose.” (360) – I really like this one (peasants became scarcer and the
proportion of factory workers rose) as she discusses, among other nations,
Britain and Germany, where these trends preceded analogous in the US by a
century and half a century, respectively.
On p. 374–375 –
when she starts to discuss European affairs in the context of her argument, it
is a mechanistic use of these events in her framework. If one takes an account of
events of 1968 in Europe, one will hardly find
And her
framework (traded rights for goods) doesn’t really work. No consistency in
argument, no coherence, lots of empirical evidence which has a very distant
relationship to the subject under question, etc.
Chapter 8: the
rise of supermarkets in Europe
Speaks about
the ‘turn-of-the-century’ invention of supermarkets in Europe, taking Italy as
an example.
It’s curious
that she herself describes how European businesses modernized themselves in
terms of introduction of supermarkets (388-9)
European supermarket
chains: Auchan (France): 1961, Carrefour (France): 1963
Edeka
(Germany): 1898.
“For
Europeans, the supermarket offered a new model of industrial beauty: the
shadow-free luminosity of neon lights, the constant temperatures of
air-conditioned spaces, the vast glass-and-steel refrigeration units, the rows
of brightly colored cans and packages, the mounds of fresh produce graded in
string sacks or cellophane-wrapped containers. The most astonishing change of
all was that the product sold itself: the seller had gone completely incognito;
the merchandise on display was the star.” (384) So, when it comes to the
supermarket as spectacle, this is very much the same as Parisian Arcades (see Walter
Benjamin’s Paris, the Capital of the
Nineteenth Century). More
interesting is her description of new socio-economic networks which appeared
with the emergence of supermarkets (385)
Even then,
this chapter is a detailed account of the history of supermarkets in northern
Italy, so by the end of the chapter de Grazia shows how the very presence of
supermarkets, even in a rather restricted form, still changed the very
relationship between consumers and retailers and, thus, brought social change
to the Italian landscape. The question is, nevertheless, to what degree it was “Americanization,”
if in other states than Italy the same processes were driven by local brands? It
is an insightful account, but her accentuation of the ‘American’ character of
this change seems far-fetched in comparison to another explanation that she
refers to alternatively throughout the chapter: that it was driven by ‘big
capital’.
Chapter 9 – “A
Model Mrs. Consumer” – how social roles (those related to gender, in particular)
were shaped by new practices of consumption. I can’t take really seriously a
text which argues that “Marriage itself, a contract, signed, sealed, and
sanctified by settling down in a well-equipped household, marked the death of
passion. Europeans had learned to live with this disillusionment by means of
little subterfuges and with a refined sense of sin and forgiveness. Americans
sought transparent solutions.” (431) – how can one speak for ALL Europeans and
ALL Americans? Or even in case of a dominant pattern? What becomes the norm
here? While middleclass American families?
In Conclusion
she again builds a teleological picture: until the 1990s, it was the domination
of the Market Empire (pathetically capitalized); now it’s certain
Europeanization of American economy. Weren’t these two tendencies simultaneous?
Volkswagen didn’t come to the American market in the 1990s, as didn’t Dutch Phillips
or German Siemens. Also, everything ends up with the same excursions into the
political history as imposed upon ‘material’ developments.
[3] Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey,
Steven Ricci, and British Film Institute. Hollywood
and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity, 1945-95. BFI Publishing,
1998.
Hey buddy, thank you so much for this summaries.
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