Europe Calling: Cold War U.S. Tourism and the Production of "the West"
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After the Second World War, the future of capitalism hung in the balance as European countries on both sides of the iron curtain sought to rebuild themselves in the wake of utter devastation. For countries in the U.S. sphere of influence, tourism became one of the avenues through which both the international economy and the idea of European “civilization” itself would be resurrected. Europe Calling argues that the development the tourism industry in Western Europe was one of the main mechanisms in the postwar reinvention of “the West.” “The West” was a new geopolitical category that combined the United States and Western Europe. Focusing on U.S. tourism to Rome, Berlin, and Amsterdam between 1945 and 1970, this research reveals in what ways policymakers, advertising agencies, and the culture industry reshaped “the West” as a material and imagined space, how it was experienced by U.S. tourists, and its wider impact on local social relations. The tourism industry created “the West” as an imaginary space, luring U.S. tourists in by selling desirable dreamworlds—mythical visions of past and present—in advertisements, photobooks, and films. Tourism convinced people on both sides of the Atlantic about a sense of community and shared historical roots, as it utilized the past of “Western civilization” to provide “the West” under U.S. leadership with legitimacy and a justification for its global political-economic policies. This dissertation further shows how “the West” was reinvented as a material space, with the rebuilding of European cities as tourist destinations, through the (re)construction of hotels, transportation facilities, and the training of tourism service workers. In doing so, it dissects the roots of a commonplace used and contested concept—that of “the West”—and extends the notion on the nature of U.S. diplomacy in its analysis of the relationship between cultural, economic, and political aspects of foreign policy and its impact on European integration and transatlantic relations. It offers a conceptual contribution in its comparative and transnational study of “the West,” a methodological intervention in centering the study of ideas and culture to access historical political economy and vice versa, and a historical argument in analyzing the transition of tourism into a mass industry as inherently tied to the Cold War production of “the West.”