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The American Spirit in Europe Revisited?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2008

HELGE DANIELSEN
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Extract

In 1949, the Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht opened his book The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (from which the title for this review article is borrowed) with the following lines:

America in this book means the United States of America. The subject of the book, however, is not America. It is rather Europe. The plan of the book is to present a comprehensive view of the effect of American activities, struggles and efforts upon European life and progress.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 117 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Halvdan Koht, The American Spirit in Europe. A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (Publications of the American Institute, University of Oslo, in co-operation with the Department of American Civilization, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), v. The establishment of the American Institute in Oslo, its co-operation with the University of Pennsylvania, and the role of the Institute's first director, Sigmund Skard, is in itself an interesting case of transatlantic influences, not to be pursued further in this context. Halvdan Koht, professor of history at the University of Oslo and former foreign minister of Norway, was the only Norwegian historian to write on the United States before the Second World War, but was mainly a specialist in Norwegian history. Koht was also Sigmund Skard's father-in-law.

2 Ibid.

3 One of the main examples van Elteren gives of what he sees as a problematic ‘pick-and-choose’ perspective is the one present in Richard, Pells, Not Like Us. How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997)Google Scholar, described by van Elteren as seeing the cultural exchanges involved ‘as closer to negotiation among equals than to transmission or transformation according to some American model or exemplar’ (p. 116).

4 The literature referred to by van Elteren on this point is Benedict, Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso and New Left Books, 1983)Google Scholar, and Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Terence, Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Similar opinions are also to be found in the works by researchers who do not share the more or less ‘constructivist’ interpretation of nationalism present in these publications; cf. for instance Anthony Smith, D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar.

5 A few of them seem to be inspired by thoughts on Americanisation as a form of creolisation or hybridisation as those represented for example in Rob, Kroes, If You've Seen One, You've Seen the Mall, Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana, IL, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Kroes in turn is inspired by the Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannertz; ibid., 162 ff.

6 See de Grazia, 13 ff. The main point here is obviously that ‘the Market Empire much preferred to have as its main interlocutor not the national state, but a generic entity called Europe’ – because to manufacturers and marketers ‘foreign states were also nuisances to the degree that they passed tariffs, quotas, and other protectionist barriers to trade’.

7 This applies for instance to the use of Italy as a case in ch. 8, on ‘Supermarketing’.

8 For the origins and uses of these terms, see for instance Geir, Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe since 1945: From ‘Empire’ by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and Reinhold, Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

9 Koht, American Spirit, vi.