These Are the Ties That Bind Europe and America

Don’t be put off by this book’s subtitle. It’s silly and not very accurate.

“Not Like Us” is, rather, a history, from both sides of the Atlantic, of certain aspects of the cultural relations between Americans and Europeans both before and after 1945.

Pells, a cultural historian at the University of Texas in Austin, first encountered Europe when he went to teach in the Netherlands in 1979. Arriving in Amsterdam, he was first enchanted by the canals and the gabled l7th century houses. Then he was startled to hear the voice coming from the taxi driver’s radio; it was Willie Nelson’s.

“The juxtaposition of Europe’s sights and America’s sounds came to symbolize for me,” Pells writes, “the way each culture collided with and depended on the other. It suggested as well the mutual infatuation and frustration that has marked the relationship between the two continents for centuries.

“The sense of conflict and entanglement--the ambivalence that shaped the personal, political and cultural confrontations between Europeans and Americans . . . became the inspiration for and a central theme of this book.”

In a brief but comprehensive tour of European-American relations before 1945, Pells writes of the important work the Rockefeller Foundation and other American foundations did in fostering trans-Atlantic academic and cultural exchanges between the wars.

He also chronicles the beginning of the continuing dispute between Europe and America over American movies. Before World War I, France and Italy each exported more films than America did. But the war shut down the European industry, and afterward Europe lacked the money to rebuild it.

American filmmakers and distributors filled the gap and gained a lead Europe could never undo, not even with the import quotas the European nations were already imposing. “By the mid-1920s,” Pells writes, “approximately 95% of the films shown in Britain, 85% in the Netherlands, 70% in France, 65% in Italy and 60% in Germany were American.”

Thus began the infiltration of American popular culture that persists to this day. Hollywood’s early movies represented American popular tastes just as the ubiquitous McDonald’s does today at Rome’s Spanish Steps. Why do they both succeed? Because Europeans like them. They meet a need for fresh, new ways of doing things that Europe does not supply.

American movies and fast food also became targets of the anti-American sentiments many Europeans had long held, and still do. Pells stresses that the upper classes of Europe were defenders of their old culture against the inroads from America, and that the working classes were more open to innovation and the novelties from America.

“Europe’s ordinary folk [in the 1950s] thought of America as a land of high wages and upper mobility, a country where the majority lived well (certainly better than the average European),” Pells says.

The long shadow of the Cold War falls across this book. The attitudes of Europe and America toward one another were inevitably shaped by the great contest between the two superpowers, with Western Europe and Eastern Europe split between the two in their treaty obligations, if not their moral allegiances.

The communists in both parts sided largely with Moscow in the early days. So did much of the French intellectual class, led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The anti-Americanism these attitudes preyed upon was only made stronger by the long entanglement of the United States in the Vietnam War.

But in all this time, American popular culture extended its European appeal, as it was doing throughout the world. Pells makes the sensible point that some of the European opposition to American culture was really opposition to modernity. Mobility, the relaxation of rules of conduct, working women, independent children--these “American” trends that represented freedom to some meant moral decay to others.

That Hollywood’s early export, Charlie Chaplin, was English only underscores a major point in Pells’ book: The two Atlantic cultures nourished one another even as they sometimes clashed. Now, he says, they are learning also to live in the “global culture” while retaining their affection for their own ways, their own communities.