Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe by Victoria de Grazia

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe Victoria de Grazia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. One of the most visible and contentious ingredients of globalization today is the worldwide spread of American-style mass consumer culture. Enthusiasts of the global economy cite broadening consumer choice and access to world markets as essential to promoting global democracy, but as Victoria de Grazia states in her exhaustively researched and complex book, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, "globalizing consumer habits have established only the most tenuous foundation for a peaceful, egalitarian global society" (3). One of the problems, de Grazia points out, is that while the American origin of twentieth-century consumer culture has clearly played a role in US "global hegemony," the diverse mechanisms of spreading American-style consumer culture around the world, enumerated in the book as "the sum of myriads of marketing strategies, second-order decisions of government, and mundane choices about getting and spending" (4), have sometimes been difficult to connect to each other and did not always directly or obviously augment American global power. However, de Grazia points out that the power of this "Market Empire" is no less pervasive because of its elusiveness. In Western Europe, she argues, vocal criticisms of the incursions of American consumer culture obscure an underlying adherence to Market Empire values and methods. Thus, today, a squarely European company like Ikea is as ubiquitous a symbol of global consumerism as Coca Cola. The origins of the Market Empire, de Grazia contends, is not in the capitalist international development efforts of the last several decades. It is not even entirely in post-World War II efforts to secure markets and curtail the spread of Communism though such policies as the Marshall Plan. Instead, de Grazia turns the bulk of her attention (three-fourths of the book) to the period between the World Wars, and to the piecemeal, halting inroads the Market Empire took in Western Europe toward replacing bourgeois, class stratified, imperialist practices of buying and selling with what de Grazia identifies as the American ideals of consumer choice, the democracy of goods, and a "standard of living" determined not by class or political ideology, but by technological innovation and consumer desires. This pre-1945 section of the book is an impressive feat of international and multilingual research consisting of a series of case studies based upon archival materials in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France, and the United States. In each case, the triumph of the Market Empire is partial at best. The first chapter, for example, is an illuminating account of the spread of Rotary clubs in Western Europe after World War I. American Rotarians hoped that the mission of the clubs (providing a collegial, noncompetitive, and nonpolitical venue for urban businessmen and professionals to socialize, and plan service projects) would prove a blueprint for promoting peace in Europe. …