Although Christopher Lasch coined the term ‘cultural Cold War’ to describe the ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union back in 1967, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that the cultural values and perceptions that motivated Cold War politics became a focus of scholarly debate. Groundbreaking in this respect was the volume of essays edited by Larry May under the title “Recasting America”.1 Since then, numerous studies have been dedicated to different aspects of Cold War culture, covering almost everything from high culture to popular culture, and from propaganda initiatives and cultural diplomacy via media transmission to the reception of political and cultural ideas. Whereas the vast majority of publications until the 1990s dealt with the American point of view, the last two decades witnessed a stronger interest in Europe and the Soviet Union. Present research in the field of the cultural Cold War tends to address issues of cross-bloc cultural interaction, comparative perspectives and cultural Cold War periodization.2 In recent years media studies have greatly contributed to a deeper understanding of several aspects of the Cold War. James Schwoch’s new book on ‘Global TV’ deserves a special place within the range of these studies due to its original research, broad scope and outspoken viewpoints.

Schwoch’s book title indicates a history of global television in the early phase of the Cold War, but this proves to be slightly misleading. On the one hand the topic is more narrow than suggested because the clear – though not exclusive – focus is on the American point of view. On the other hand, however, the book offers much more than just an insight in the early years of Cold War television and debates about the realization of global TV. The reader is treated to such various topics as the role of the media in the context of post-war Germany and early Cold War Europe, psychological warfare, the Ford Foundation and its strategic support of social science research, the American exchange exhibition in Moscow 1959, the coincidental interference of the launching of the first American television satellite (Telstar) with nuclear testing in 1962 and much more. The thread holding everything together is the strategic use of new media for improving the global image of America, especially American science and technology.

An important quality of the book is that it tries to reconstruct the plans and debates about global television and cultural diplomacy in terms of contemporary experiences and expectations, refraining from interpreting them in a teleological way as pre-history of later developments. Schwoch makes perfectly clear that the eventual outcome of these plans and debates wasn’t always the logical and necessary result of conscious mastermind planning. On the contrary, he indicates that the politically motivated rhetoric supporting the distribution of television programs took a clear turn during the late 1950s. Before that time, American politicians were not much interested in, let alone worried about, the development of Soviet television, whereas the media were primarily discussed in terms of unilaterally spreading American propaganda to improve the global image of the USA abroad.

All this changed rather dramatically during the second half of the 1950s, especially since the launching of Sputnik in 1957, which caused a stir among American scientists, politicians and the general public because it was obvious by now that the Soviet Union had taken the lead in the field of space technology. The Americans tried to counter the inflicted loss of prestige by a double strategy: large investments in the development of American science and technology, especially space technology, media and consumption articles on the one hand, and a new policy coordinated by the United States Information Agency (USIA) focusing on the global reception of American science, culture and society on the other. The presentation of the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959 and the extensive collections of data regarding the reactions of the Soviet public are a case in point. One might add that Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th congress of the CPSU in 1956 announcing official destalinization must have been another important reason for the USIA to worry about global sympathies in the bipolar world order of the Cold War, a point which is not duly mentioned by Schwoch.

Be that as it may, Schwoch shows that this new emphasis on reception research had its immediate repercussions in the fundings of the Ford Foundation, which supported large research programs of social scientists like Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT, Boston) and Wilbur Schramm (Stanford) who developed sociological and psychological models for measuring public opinion and public behaviour. It is interesting to note, and this is one of the main conclusions of Schwoch’s study, that this turn from sending unilateral messages to anticipating global reactions went hand in hand with a new rhetoric supporting the idea of global television. Whereas during the late 1940s and early 1950s the strategic interests of the Western world in confrontation with the Soviet bloc were continually stressed, a new emphasis on global culture and world citizenship began to dawn during the late 1950s and early 1960s, gradually eclipsing the confrontational mode. Remarkably the people initiating the new course were largely the same who had been instrumental in the earlier days of strategic confrontation.

Although it actually exceeds the subject of his study, a word must be said about the book’s epilogue, where Schwoch addresses the question what the American government at the beginning of the 21st century has actually learned from the history of Cold War diplomacy. His judgment is devastating: After 9/11 the Bush administration programmatically reduced the complexities of the post-Cold War world order by strictly dividing the world into partners and enemies, imposing its own interpretation as universal truth and completely neglecting the impact of modern media and the meaning of global reception. During the second phase of the Cold War, American policy makers had learned to listen and sometimes to incite enthusiasm with their promise to contribute to a world community where in the end all would benefit from the progress of science, technology and consumer culture. This rhetoric, strategically motivated as it may have been, did contain at least a core of idealism and sincerity. According to Schwoch this has radically changed after the end of the Cold War, when America cherished the illusion that it had entered the end of history under its final leadership, and even more so after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when the American government put their cards on aggressive unilateralism. It must have come as a great relief to Schwoch that the new American president is willing to communicate again.

Notes:
1 Larry May (ed.), Recasting America. Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, Chicago 1989.
2 See for instance the international conferences ‘European Cold War Cultures? Societies, Media and Cold War Experiences in East and West’ organized by the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam (ZZF) 2007 and ‘Divided Dreamworlds. The Cultural Cold War in East and West’, organized by Utrecht University in cooperation with the Roosevelt Study Center and the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation 2008. A conference review of the conference at ZZF is available at: <http://www.zzf-pdm.de/Portals/_Rainbow/images/versanstaltungen/Tagungsbericht%20ColdWarCultures.pdf> (20.07.2009).