Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (51 page)

The advertising revolution spread through the new mass media: commercial advertising appeared on television from the mid-1950s, while the growth of telephone ownership stimulated the emergence of Yellow Pages retail directories at the start of the 1960s. In that same period, the Sunday papers began to introduce colour supplements which carried articles as well as adverts extolling the new “lifestyles” on offer. And there was even help for the anxious purchaser negotiating this proliferation of goods. In 1957 the new Association for Consumer Research, supported by the American Consumers’ Union, began publishing
Which?
, and in a few years acquired a readership of nearly half a million.

The new desires thus created and diffused were satisfied faster than before. Attitudes to credit and debt were changing. The French peasant’s view that “credit is a festering sore on the body of commerce” was challenged, not only by the spread of hire-purchase schemes, but even by the commercial banks themselves through “the active merchandizing of a range of banking services that are increasingly being adapted to cater for customers who have never before held bank accounts.” Thanks to these financial innovations, the consumer revolution got under way. Mild inflation acted as an incentive. As one cautious
French villager put it in 1961: “The way prices keep going up, it’s stupid not to get what you want when you want it—within reason, of course.”
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“Well-being” started in the home: all the evidence points to people purchasing refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and other domestic appliances as a priority. Although sales of such goods boomed, it must be emphasized that it was only gradually that the poorer social strata shared in their enjoyment. In this respect, contemporary adverts from the 1950s and early 1960s were not so much depicting reality as proposing the future. In 1959, for example, roughly three quarters of all French executives owned a car, compared with a fifth of workers and an eighth of agricultural workers; TV ownership lagged even more slowly, becoming widespread only late in the 1960s.

The car was perhaps the single most important consumption good of them all. Car production in western Europe grew from half a million per annum in 1947 to over nine million annually by 1967. Ownership soared from 51,314 in 1950 to 404,042 in 1960, and 876,913 in 1966 in Austria; from 342,000 to 4.7 million in Italy between 1950 and 1964; from 1.4 million in 1949 to 9.5 million in 1962 in West Germany. As rail usage declined, the network of motorways spread across the continent. Work on the Paris Périphérique started as early as 1956; the expressway along the right bank of the Seine in 1967; in October 1964, at the completion of the Autostrada del Sole which united Milan and Naples, the Archbishop of Florence held a thanksgiving service in the Florence North service station.
⁴³

Congestion created a need for specialist traffic planners—competing with wartime bombers to level Europe’s historic city centres—for traffic wardens, parking meters (first spotted around 1959) and yellow no-parking lines. From the late 1960s, cars also stimulated the development of out-of-town shopping, hitting small retailers in town centres and reinforcing the spread of the new supermarkets. In France, for instance, there were just forty supermarkets in 1960; by 1970 there were over 1,000: the age of Prisunic and Monoprix had arrived.
⁴⁴

Rising living standards also encouraged spending on leisure. Not by chance did Coca-Cola stick for two decades to its winning slogan for the German market: “Mach mal Pause” (Give yourself a break). In 1948 some 3.1 million manual workers in Britain enjoyed two weeks’
paid holiday; by the mid-1950s that figure had risen to 12.3 million—virtually the entire manual workforce. More people were taking holidays than ever before, and spending more on them. From the late 1960s, package deals to foreign destinations became increasingly popular: in 1971 only one third of British adults had ever been abroad on holiday; by 1984 only one third had not. As the United Nations recognized in making 1967 “International Tourist Year,” tourism was now a major industry and Europe was at its heart, both supplying and receiving the bulk of the world’s tourists. For the OECD, tourism was “one of the most spectacular features of the ‘leisure civilization’ which is gradually developing in the western world.” Tourism was also redistributive, channelling money—at some environmental cost—back into those areas which had been left behind by the boom, places like the continent’s southern fringes, now lined with new tourist developments, or its unspoilt rural landscapes, now as often visited as worked.
⁴⁵

These tourists were easy meat for cultural critics, who rarely admitted that tourism might have any merit in, say, breaking down the insularities of the past. American Paul Fussell contrasted the gentlemanly and perceptive “traveller” of pre-war vintage with the modern package barbarians. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
Theorie des Tourismus
saw tourists as engaged in a hopeless, fundamentally bourgeois quest for freedom from the travails of industrial society. Alternatively, they were just part of that “flight from freedom” which according to Erich Fromm betrayed the bourgeoisie’s susceptibility to fascism.
⁴⁶

But such intemperate attacks formed part of a much broader assault on the new consumerism that brought together everyone from Catholic clerics, alarmed at the threat to the “family and moral order,” to high-minded Marxists like Pasolini who despised the fetishism of goods. In Franco’s Spain, conservatives saw the boom of the 1960s corroding their “Organic Democracy,” driving the new “tele-addict consumers” away from the old Catholic values. But even in genuine democracies, the dramatic social repercussions of the “economic miracle” were encouraging alarm as well as satisfaction. Giorgio Bocca in his
Discovery of Italy
(
La scoperta dell’Italia
[1963]) described “Italia boom!… transformed, hypnotized by
benessere
[prosperity].”

The consumer—a passive, conformist object of commercial pressures—seemed to have replaced the active citizen imagined by social theorists during the 1940s. Now—in this brave new world of market research and TV advertising—perhaps not even people’s desires were truly their own. For the influential early theorists of consumerism, centred around the Marxist Frankfurt school, the new “mass society” allowed the forces of modern capitalism to play on the “false consciousness” of ordinary people. As these left-wing elitists saw it, the same masses who before the war had abdicated their own judgement to follow Hitler, were now flocking mindlessly in droves into the stores.

Such interpretations were propped up by snobbery and exaggerated the homogenizing and conformist tendencies of the new consumerism; in fact—as a later generation of cultural critics pointed out—by the 1960s, “lifestyle” merchandising was actually breaking down the standardization of 1950s fashion. For some optimists, like Baudrillard and Bourdieu, consumer cultures actually offered people a new freedom to define themselves and shape their own identity.

Against this, the rise of the new individualism
had
apparently eroded older, collectivist solidarities. The strike wave of the late 1940s—especially visible in France and Belgium—tapered off in the 1950s. “There is little point in talking about the ‘proletariat’ … because it simply no longer exists,” observed a source in 1958. As a former miner explained to an American journalist: “I look around me here in Doncaster. It’s not so long ago since I saw people ill-nourished, ill-clad, their homes sparsely furnished. Now you see them well-dressed, well-fed. You go into their homes and they have decorations, pianos, carpets, radios, some of them are getting TV sets. It’s all changed.”
⁴⁷

Working and middle classes alike split between those able to enjoy the new wealth and those left out in the cold. The white-collar and managerial sectors expanded, while the peasantry rapidly contracted. Ferdynand Zweig, in his study of the British worker, found the connotation of class changing. The term was “invariably linked with
snobbishness but rarely, if at all, with class struggle.” Its range of associations had shrunk, and was increasingly regarded as belonging only to the workplace itself. As one worker told him: “I am working-class only in the works, but outside I am like anyone else.”
Classes
in the old-fashioned sense—offering collective action, identities and activities inside and outside the factory—were vanishing. Converging patterns of consumption (and reproduction) were blurring the old social boundaries.
⁴⁸

German commentators seemed especially conscious of the dangers in a society which had swung from one extreme—of political fanaticism and violence—into passivity and apathy. A society once torn apart by class struggle seemed now to have fallen asleep. Karl Bracher warned of “the frightful image of a mere technocracy” leading to an “authoritative remodeling of parliamentary democracy.” Without an active citizenry, Europe would degenerate into a “self-satisfied expertocracy” which placed all its faith in managerial solutions. Jürgen Habermas insisted that technology and science had themselves become a sort of ideology “that penetrates into the consciousness of the depoliticised mass of the population.” American political scientists who hailed the “end of ideology” were talking about the same process, but more positively.
⁴⁹

If the Americans had indeed intended to defuse class tensions in western Europe through their “politics of productivity,” it looked—during the fifties—as if they had succeeded. One is reminded of the American official in Italy who had opined back in 1947 that “there is little hope that the Italians will achieve a state of prosperity and internal calm until they start to be more interested in the respective merits of cornflakes and cigarettes than in the relative abilities of their political leaders.” Had his desires now been realized? Had western Europe in its turn abandoned politics and been transformed into the society of “happy slaves” which French anti-Americans saw across the Atlantic?
⁵⁰

THE AMERICANIZATION OF EUROPE?

“Ten years ago we could still look down on the snack bars, the supermarkets, the strip-tease houses and the entire acquisitive society,”
wrote a French critic in 1960. “Now all that has more or less taken hold in Europe. This society is not yet ours, but it—or one resembling it—could be our children’s. The United States is a laboratory exhibiting life forms into which we have entered whether we like it or not.”
⁵¹

In the 1950s, the homogenization of patterns of living across national and social boundaries seemed to many people to mark a loss of identity, and the evolution of a typically American model of society. If mass consumption was an American invention, then did not the spread of the car, Coca-Cola and the TV presage the end of Europe’s distinctiveness? “Is what we have here the tendency of a new age through which it is possible to make out the pattern of future societies,” asked Pizzorno, “or only a momentary flash after which we can expect the return of the same old problems and impasses, the same old contradictions and conflicts?”
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So far as most American policy-makers were concerned, Americanization was indeed the goal. In other words, they regarded the USA as providing a model for the resolution of social and economic conflicts which should if possible be applied faithfully to western Europe: this was the conviction underlying the productivity drive, the promotion of European federalism and free trade, and the advocacy of new types of technology (such as TV) and marketing (scientific management, aggressive advertising).

But how far had Europeans entered this new world? Their protests were certainly loud enough; American hegemony elicited a growing anti-Americanism, particularly in France. Keeping out Coca-Cola, struggling hard to gain a foothold in France, was seen by
Le Monde
in a revealingly hopeless metaphor as fighting for the “Danzig of European culture.” Across the Channel, playing Greece to Washington’s Rome, the British too found themselves torn between humiliation and pride at their subordination in “the special relationship.”
⁵³

Yet anti-Americanism was markedly less pronounced lower down the social scale among those enjoying the new popular cultures than among the intellectuals and defenders of the old high culture. It was also weaker in the countries that had lost the war (Germany, Austria and Italy) than in those which believed they had won it. This was surely because anti-Americanism (and by extension fears of “Americanization”)
was closely connected first with the goal of neutralism (“neither Coca-Cola nor vodka”) and second with a sense of post-imperial humiliation. It was not enough that the former imperial powers should be forced to lose their colonial possessions; they—or their elites—now saw themselves turned into a colony in their turn. By contrast, in Germany and Austria, the
Amis
were seen as more of a positive force, offering a new modern identity to mask the awkward national memories of the recent past.

Moreover, the shaping of a less deferential, more egalitarian and forward-looking society was not indeed solely nor even primarily the product of American influence. Images of American life certainly helped, as seen in films from the 1920s onwards. But mass democracy, fascism, the war and Nazi occupation had all effectively swept away much of the old order in Europe before the Americans arrived. The process continued under their hegemonic gaze, it is true, but reflected forces rooted deep in European politics as well. The cinema—often regarded as the spearhead of Americanization—in fact betrayed a more complex relationship: Hollywood films were, of course, immensely popular in Europe. But indigenous film-making traditions—British “Carry-On” farces, the German Heimatfilm, and the French
nouvelle vague
—survived and flourished, even if they did not export well.