European Union

Europeanization and Americanization

The global emergence of consumer culture is often premised on Americanization. Yet Europe has its own distinctive, even if somewhat belated, patterns and processes related to consumption. It was not until the late 1950s that consumption became widespread among the general population in Europe. Critique of destructive effects of consumer capitalism had started long before World War II, however. Often, the United States served as a proxy of admiration and contempt. While conservatives complained that European ways of life would be swamped by American culture, the political left feared consumerism as a distraction to class consciousness. Later, German intellectuals—for instance, of the Frankfurt School—who had fled Hitler warmly welcomed the safety granted by their American host country but nevertheless warned of totalitarian aspects of the American mass consumption and culture. In the 1960s, French structuralists like Pierre Bourdieu or Jean Baudrillard emphasized the emptiness consumption is predicated on and its dubious role in the constructing or articulating of identity. In the British context, there was a debate on the intensification of moral regulation and the commercialization of working-class leisure.

This rough sketch of the theorizing about consumption only serves to illustrate that critique of [Page 559]mass consumption used to be a more regular feature of the European than the American intellectual debate. This time-honored transatlantic difference has been replaced by a common focus on the history of consumption. Hartmut Kaelble, for instance, makes the case that European consumption patterns are still distinctive. He mentions a certain European style of goods, European preferences for longer holidays, or a larger amount spent for food and clothes as examples of these peculiarities. Consumer icons like the automobile had been invented in Europe, and the standardization of consumer products, department stores, fast-food restaurants, or packaged foods had been developed equally in Europe and North America. Two world wars derailed Europe on its way to becoming a consumer society earlier, however.

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