Challenging Americanism: The Public Debate about the “American Way of Life” in Cold-War and Post-Cold-War Greece

Summary

In 1947, during the Greek civil war, the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, and later on of the Marshall Plan, put Greece under the American sphere of influence. The Greek Left, despite its military defeat and its oppression by the post-civil-war regime, managed to maintain a significant political and moral status. In this highly controversial public sphere, the concept of Americanism was a crucial political and ideological issue. The Cold War confrontation of ideologies had a decisive influence in the evaluation of the so-called American way of life. The Greek Right emphasized the superiority of the American socio-economic model compared to the socialist one. In the context of this discourse, Americanism was presented as a guarantee for prosperity and the US was a symbol for liberal democracy. The Greek Left, on the other hand, contested the pro-American propaganda by pointing out moral decline, cultural inferiority, lack of humanism and inequality as the main features of American society. Furthermore, both the Left and the Right oft en rejected America as an expression of modernism in the name of the Greek traditional way of life. The end of the Cold War decisively influenced this debate. The Right distanced itself from its Cold War ideological commitments and drew closer to the Left in its criticism of the American system. In this context, America as a symbol for democracy and capitalism was widely challenged. Along with this, negative reactions towards globalization, which is currently perceived as Americanization, are expressed through an anti-American discourse.