•[four]- Global Cultures Petra Goedde Introduction ■] [ t -urn of the twenty-first century the major metropolitan centers of the oilii li much 'n common- Visitors to New York, Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, Mum-s'j-.robi could find the same clothing brands, eat the same foods, stay in f,t s j ne hotel chains, and sip the same beverages. Yet as people found more of ],t si ne in each of these places, they also encountered more diversity within a sisi j ' ,u;ale. Urban populations, culinary habits, and cultural offerings, includ-in' j:Hi^ic, film, theater, and literature, became multiethnic and multicultural. In thew nlaces homogenization moved in tandem with heterogenization, creating d global cultures.1 Scholars have attributed these cultural transformations to fl» forces of globalization. Globalization, in turn, has remained an elusive coned at times to describe the more recent developments that have connected iWi,u ate parts of the world into ever more intricate webs of goods, people, and ului. a lid at other times to describe the much longer history of premodern trade roiitt'. migrations, military campaigns, and explorations.2 To be sure, local cuisines .iave always evolved in response to internal and external impulses through tht [■ oduction ofknowledge and contact with other cultures. At the turn of the mi ni.'th century, cultural anthropologists began to study more systematically tlii: nuvhanisms of cultural evolution and change.3 While they focused primarily on o plaining patterns of cultural difference, the globalization literature of recent ; increasingly emphasized patterns of cultural assimilation and adapta-tio 1 Vtt a close examination of the global transformations of cultures since 1945 how assimilation and difference interacted with and complemented each ucliu I lares about cultural globalization after World War II cannot be separated f 10:11 ill bates about economic globalization. In fact, the term globalization emerged the 1970s among economists who described the effects of the increasing integration of business ventures worldwide.4 Both critics and supporters saw cul-'i iial globalization as a consequence of economic globalization. Supporters argued •[ 537 ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES that creative adaptation as well as wholesale adoption of superior econunif cultural practices would create more wealth and power for all who partich i : They celebrated economic globalization at annual meetings of the VudJ Tr-| |" Organization and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, v ]i..r government and corporate leaders discussed ways to foster and manact; >l ■' i economic cooperation. They lobbied national legislatures to lower tn.cx [\\~tlK and supported international business ventures, promising economic growth i-industrial countries as well as modernization in the developing world. Skeptics warned that corporate greed and economic exploitation w;; Al d^trov local self-determination. In their estimation, globalization created more wealth .\nA power for those in control of the global marketplace, dependency for those on ;|«-margins, and greater inequality for all. Globalization, to these critics, meant iiulc more than Western, primarily American, economic and cultural imperialism, li crushed indigenous economic development and local self-sufficiency, creatine new postcolonial dependencies in its wake.5 Businesses run by local merchants folded as larger and more cost-effective corporations moved in. Indigenous producers could not compete against the lower prices of these giants and thus faced either elimination or absorption into large impersonal corporate structures. George Ritzer Ik, termed this process "McDonaldization," likening the greater rationalization, citi-ciency and standardization in production and service industries to the techniques employed by the world's most successful fast-food chain.6 Associating eco-io n it-self-sufficiency with cultural distinctiveness, critics also predicted the Joss of local ? cultural identity as a consequence of economic imperialism. They demanded die protection of indigenous cultures against the onslaught of what they identified as the cultural imperialism of corporate powers. In an effort to counterbalance -.he World Economic Forum, and to foster instead an alternative globalization mar championed global causes like human rights and social justice, some globalization critics founded the World Social Forum (WSF). Since iooi the forum has met annually, around the same time as the World Economic Forum in Davos, to discuss ways of strengthening global democracy, equality, and human rights.7 A parallel disagreement about the effects of globalization emerged in the political sphere. On the one hand were those who credited political globalization with fostering democratization and local empowerment. They usually pointed to international organizations such as the United Nations, which since its incq>- •[ 538 ]• '■-''on'in 1945 nas attempted to create and safeguard certain fundamental rules of lobal engagement among states and individuals. One of its first and most deci-'*'"ve acts was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which member states ■"' -vned in December 1948; this declaration asserted that "the inherent dignity . ni-,.. the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is jie foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world."8 The United Nations and other international organizations were built on assumptions of univer-■J iiws and rights governing the interactions among people and nations, regardless of their cultural heritage and political ideology. 2ven though international institutions embodying the ideals of universal rights and laws proliferated after 1945, they did not have the mandate to interfere in local governance.9 Nonetheless, supporters voiced optimism about these institutions' ability to advance the process of political liberalization by making available to a growing number of people the tools with which to achieve both greater visibility and greater political and economic autonomy.10 Those tools included new means of communication through radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet, as well as new opportunities for social and geographical mobility. Supporters hoped that advances in communication technology would lead to greater awareness of world f affairs on the periphery as well as greater awareness in the metropole of the fate of •those at the margins. They likewise hoped that mobility would allow people to escape oppressive regimes. International organizations, according to their supporters, were both a reflection of and motors for greater global connectivity. Critics, on the other hand, blamed political globalization for the disenfran-: chisement of local communities. They claimed that multinational organizations : such as the United Nations did not represent the interests of the world's poor nations. Instead the wealthiest nations and international economic and political conglomerates reached farther into the provinces, transforming local economic, political, and cultural power relations. The loss of political autonomy was often a direct result of the loss of economic autonomy, they argued. Thus, instead of greater self-determination and democratization, as supporters hailed, opponents of political globalization saw the opposite: a marked decrease in democracy and autonomy, as political centralization proceeded apace with economic centralization. This chapter traces the emergence and evolution of the world's cultures since the end of the Second World War as they responded to the contradictory as well ■[ 539 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE as complementary forces of homogenization and heterogenization. U I attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the cultures of the .wi j] 1945. Instead it focuses on cultural transformations chat transcends '-MS national boundaries to leave a global imprint. Cultural globalization .ihLr proceeded in three distinct phases. The first phase, from the end of World War to the 1960s , was dominated by the competing cultural vi ki.isih K Soviet Union and the United States. This period saw the most hc.i', y \t lln\v j state-sponsored attempts at achieving global cultural conformity a-i ouli.i < r, the respective ideological premises of the two superpowers and their aim 1;, w ever, the period also saw the most serious challenges to that conform i;^ 11 tt , Soviet and American spheres of influence. Dissident counterculture; ' and ultimately undermined the power of state-sanctioned culr.iral 10.1t-um t on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the nonaligned world. The u v ,m. teradture as used here refers not only to the specific phenomenon in 1 ■ , industrialized world in the 1960s but more broadly to the proliferation of aherna.-tive, oppositional, dissident, anticolonial, and subaltern cultures that cmui-ccl throughout the Cold War world. The second phase, from the 1960s to tin uid ->r the Cold War, saw an increase in cultural diversification as newly inder m uit former colonies asserted their cultural independence while residents in the hk-io pole explored alternative cultural forms as never before. As travel, econor works, and migration proliferated, so did the level of cultural transfer, u.aiini: greater exposure to foreign cultures and bringing more people of diliercni natural backgrounds into contact with one another. The third phase began \\ itli ilu. end of the Cold War, when the movement of people, goods, and infonnar.....1- celerated exponentially. The political transformations brought about by the coll ipn. of communism in Eastern Europe provide only part of the explanatiomTccli no-logical changes in the communication industry, above all the inauguration of tlit Internet in the early 1990s, as well as an increase in global migration and navel, connected the most remote areas of the world and diversified urban area-. I Ik pace of urbanization itself increased dramatically in the last two decades o tlic twentieth century, especially in Africa and Asia. The United Nations Pop il ui< -n Fund (UNFPA) announced in 1007 that more than half of the world's citizu"-now lived in urban areas.11 Newly emergingas well as old urban cent<"i-« rclViiwd the complex interplay between local idiosyncrasies and international p:v.i-t -.o H I" Wk GLOBAL CULTURES I nd in" t'ie l°ca^ w""^ C'"1C gl°kal anc* creating hybrid cultures that were both Ipiiiicc an^ internationally recognizable. Iliree central premises guide this chapter. First, although the process of cultural denization undoubtedly accelerated after 1945, the world at the beginning of twenty-first century was still characterized by cultural diversity rather than ; -i niity- Second, a cultural history of the world, even if it covers only the rela-V short span of sixty-plus years, inevitably has to paint with a broad brush. Thus, objective of this chapter is to show the global convergences of the world s cul-s racher than the persistent idiosyncrasies (of which there are, fortunately, still many to do adequate justice here). For that reason this chapter focuses on broad informations over the past decades. It will focus on clusters of cultural change have expanded to global significance. Those include the cultural sources and 1 ,n 1 sequences of global political developments, above all the Cold War and decolonization; the movement of goods, people, and ideas; and the cultural effects of economic globalization, particularly through the medium of consumerism. Third, infused local diversity forms an integral part of cultural globalization. Therefore this chapter will show how the continual emergence and proliferation of dissident forces and countercultures resisted pressures toward cultural conformity; how uni-u rsalism and particularism remained constant cultural forces drawing the world's populations both closer together and pushing them farther apart; and finally haw global homogenization and local heterogenization were mutually reinforc-ingprocesses. These took hold in remote places hitherto isolated from the global marketplace as well as in the metropolitan areas of the industrialized world. To better understand the interplay among these three sets of forces— conformity/dissidence, universalism/particularism, and homogeneity/heterogeneity—the chapter will concentrate on particular cultural transformations in their global context since 1945. Some transformations occurred early in the Cold \\ -ir period, others emerged only after the end of the Cold War, and still others arc woven into the fabric of the entire period. The symbiotic relationship between 1'nmogeneity and heterogeneity, between universal and particular human experiences, and between conformism and dissidence will be a persistent theme throughout. The challenge of the twenty-first century will be to understand the centripetal and centrifugal forces of cultural change and to embed local distinctiveness within the network of cultural globalization in a meaningful way. ■[ 540 ]- •[ 54* ]• GLOBAL CULTURES FROM the end of World War II to the 1960s, Cold War politics don 1 international exchange of people, goods, and ideas. Both the Soviet Uni'm ,ln 1 the United States, followed by their allies and client states, invested he.ivih in cultural diplomacy in an effort to win the political allegiance of nonali^iicd i, tions and to contain further advances—ideological as well as territori. 1—b\ t^, |r counterpart. Trying to overcome the cultural legacy left by the forriu , powers, these new nations were understandably reluctant to enter jntu a international arrangement with either Cold War power. Between 15^", ,iikj .i.-0 sixty-four countries gained independence, some through the peaceful m :isit , of power, others through violent uprisings.12 Even before colonial empire cri : bled after World War II, they had sought to redefine their cultural identity in pendent of the culture of the metropole.13 These large-scale political transform-tions had a lasting impact on the evolution of cultural globalization since :c>4<; The cultural aspects of the Cold War competition between the United Stm-and the Soviet Union and the process of decolonization have to be understood in relation to the transformations generated by the Second World War. With .1.1 estimated death toll of fifty to seventy million, including six million lews. . total human cost of the war was monumental and the level of destruction i.r.j cedented in modern history.14 The war also brought the world's populations int ■ closer contact, as millions of civilians, forced from their homes by advancing armies, moved across Europe, North Africa, and Asia. On the European con nent, authorities in Germany and in areas under German control deported intu concentration camps Jews and other groups they deemed undesirable. In;addition they pressed thousands of forced laborers into service at German factor In Asia, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 led to a massive cxodu Chinese nationals. In the United States, the government forced Japanese im grants and their children from the West Coast into internment camps.15 ■ ■ Furthermore, the postwar redrawing of borders in Central Europe forced out > lies ff°m tne eastern Part of their country ceded to Russia, Germans from terri-■ies ceded to Poland, and Germans from the Czech Sudetenland. Most Holo-iis't: survivors left Europe after the war, looking for new homes in the United lt*S) jsrael, and Latin America. Eastern German refugees and expellees relocated ■he central and western parts of the country, often encountering mistrust and . • itright hostility from local populations. Japanese nationals, in turn, were expelled Loin or fled Asian territories liberated from Japanese control.16 Most of these poster migrants tried to strike a balance between preserving their cultural heritage uid adapting to the local customs of their new homes.17 They did so within the n- itext of renewed international tension, pitting the communist sphere of influ-. rx around the Soviet Union against the capitalist West, and demanding an unprecedented level of cultural and political conformity on both sides. Within its own sphere of influence the Soviet Union showed little tolerance for political and cultural diversity. It surrounded itself with a cordon of buffer states in Eastern Europe and controlled their political, economic, and military affairs. It actively supported a communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1947 and crushed uprisings and reform movements in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. It curtailed free speech, incarcerated dissidents, and exercised direct control over cultural institutions in Eastern Europe through an extensive domestic police apparatus.18 The infringements on free expression led to a vibrant underground market in art and literature, some of which was smuggled to the West. Known as samizdat, the genre included world-class literature, such as Aleksandr Solzhenksyns Gulag Archipelago." Outside its sphere of influence, the Soviet Union tried to project an image as the guarantor of international peace, protector of the underprivileged classes of the world, and advocate for those suffering under the yoke of colonialism and imperialism. By contrast, the United States in the postwar period emphasized its international role as the protector of freedom and justice and as a model of modern consumer capitalism, promisingprosperity to all who adhered to a democratic-capitalist ideology. At the same time, however, it supported authoritarian regimes in the name of anticommunism, particularly in Latin America. It repeatedly interfered in the affairs of other countries, both overtly and covertly, at times actively •[ 54*. ]• S •[ 543 ]• PETRA GOEDDE disposing of democratically elected leaders, as in Iran in 1953 and Gu.n^n,,^ l( 1954, all in the name of national security,20 Americans refrained from ls direct control over foreign cultural institutions and instead actively^.- , cultural diplomacy. Tliey also turned a blind eye to the censorship and pciM „nio ^ of political dissidents in countries governed by authoritarian dictat.i .hip. ts long as they were anticommunist. Even though the United States did noi mtcrJ fere directly and as deeply as the Soviet Union into the domestic politic: 1 A'a\\, „■ its client states, it aided local elites in their consolidation of power and sup ou-sMin of opposition in exchange for a US-friendly policy.21 Decolonization complicated this bipolar rivalry, both in the pol,.,,. u , ,cila of the Cold Wat and in the cultural realm of identity formation. In-».Ikvtiial* and political elites in the newly independent countries of Asia and Ai 1 n.a 1 fen viewed the Cold War as the latest manifestation of European imperhi 1 iui. ics They were reluctant to accept the cultural offensive from either of the twn on posing camps, but sometimes utilized their own leverage in this global competi-l tion. They had to weigh this newfound leverage against their efforts to re-i icmA for themselves an independent postcolonial cultural identity that was be ih in-1 cally distinct and able to connect to other postcolonial identities. Tliis negotiation between local particularism and universal postcolonialism played 011: m international forums throughout the 1950s and 1960s and significantly shaped the evolution of the Cold War system. Spreading the American Dream The United States at the end of the war was in a position to shape the futuic of world affairs more than any other country in the world. Unlike its European ;mil Asian allies, its cities and industries had suffered little physical damage ar d us : population was economically better off at the end of the war than at the beginning." More importantly, Americans were willing to take on a leadership role n- ■ world affairs, in marked contrast to the aftermath of World War I, when congres- > sional leaders and the public rejected President Woodrow Wilsons grand vision ; of a new world order.13 Prior to America's entry into the war, a small but influential segment of the American public advocated for a more activist involvement in foreign affair1;, GLOBAL CULTURES ■ jiepresentative °^ Poslt*on was Henry Luce, owner and editor in chief oiLife ■ja^azine. In an article ambitiously entitled "The American Century," he 1 (ined chat the United States had not only the capacity but the duty to "now .t conle the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and :, - heir mysterious work of lifting the lid of mankind from the level of the hcjscs to what the Psalmist called a little lowei than the angels."2'' He identified ^four areas in which America had to shape world affairs: enterprise, technical ex- ■ pt'rtise, charity, and the defense of the ideals of freedom and justice. In all of .^tkese areas, he argued, the United States had to play a leading role in the second half of the century. *** Luce saw Americas cultural influence in the world as a foundation for its political influence. 'American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products," he determined, "are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common." He concluded that "blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves we are already a world power in all the trivial ways—in very human ways."25 What America had left to do in the second half of the century, he surmised, was to channel its "human" influence into the political arena. By the time Luce published his visionary blueprint, President Roosevelt had already laid the groundwotk for pressing America's cultural influence into political service. In 1938 he created within the State Department the Division of Cultural Relations to coordinate and foster the spread of American culture abroad. The motive for the creation of the division emerged from a growing concern regarding Axis propaganda in Latin America and elsewhere.26 After the United States entered the Second World War, the Roosevelt administrations established other propaganda agencies, among them the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), later renamed the Office of War Information (OWI). In July 1942., the Voice of America (VOA), an American propaganda radio station, began broadcasting in Europe and Asia. OWI and VOA were dismantled after the war, only to be resurrected with the onset of the Cold War in 1947. A year later Congress provided funding through the Smith-Mundt Act, with the objective "to promote the better understanding of the United States among the peoples of the world and to strengthen cooperative international relations."27 VOA resumed broadcasting into Russia a month after passage of the Act. By 1953 it had two •r ws i- PETRA GOEDDE thousand employees, a quarter of them foreign nationals who broadcast h h t, six languages. Most of its budget went toward transmitting into connijin,,,^ countries.28 In 1953 the Eisenhower administration established the United States Ti|;,-. mation Agency (USIA), which operated independently from the State 'Jep.u unL | lt and reported directly to the National Security Council and the pix-sulur Over the next four and a half decades, the agency funded educational and ml. tural missions abroad, distributed information material in foreign count] |L> and supported foreign information centers. The agency also took over the broadcasting of the Voice of America. Because USIA's main objective h t] been to combat communism in Eastern Europe and the nonaligned wi iIJ, ,t had outlived its mission with the end of the Cold War. The Clinton administration finally dismantled it in 1999 and folded its remnants back into th.: Si n. Department. For much of the 1950s and 1960s the US government also engaged in aiuit funding of anticommunist organizations, most prominently the Congress lor Cultural Freedom (CCF). One of the founders of the CCF was Sidney Fool,, .s professor of philosophy at New York University and one of the leading anii^i .1,1-munist intellectuals of the early Cold War. In the span of a decade Hook made a complete intellectual turnabout from Marxist to anticommuni'r. Lk._ other former leftist intellectuals, including George Orwell and Arthur Kcsrla, Hook had become disillusioned with the Stalinist version of repressive and an thoritarian communism. After the war he watched with alarm as So-ici ..mi communist intellectuals created international networks to advocate for \.cilo peace and against the atomic bomb. When internationalist communist and leftist peace advocates met in April 1949 at the Waldorf Astoria for the "Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace," he resolved to counter what he ">wL-ceived as a Soviet propaganda campaign by organizing a protest meeting re.-ib; Out of this countermeeting emerged the CCF, which Hook, Karl Jaspers, Md-vin Lasky, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Aron, Bertrand Russell, and ud.<.:% founded in Berlin a year later. The official mission of the CCF was to sponsor art and cultural endeavors that celebrated liberal democracy and countered Soviet efforts to portray communism as the champion of peace and civilization. Put unofficially the CCF became part of America's cultural containment strategy. 1« •[ 546 ]• GLOBAL CULTURES c[ie ipfios the American magazine Ramparts revealed that the CIA had funded the CCF since its inception, exposing the covert operations of the US government in liberal intellectual circles.25 For much of the Cold War, American initiatives, such as the sponsorship of die CCF, were designed not only to foster understanding of American culture ,uid society abroad but also to loosen the ideological grip of communist-led countries on their populations. Those efforts ranged from open propaganda early in the Cold War, such as the Truman administration s resurrection of the World War II-era Psychological Warfare Division (now called the Psychological Strategy Board, or PSB) during the Korean War, to more subtle forms of cultural "infiltration" under USIA auspices.30 Increasingly aware of the power of \merican popular culture, including jazz and Hollywood movies, American uiltural diplomats shifted the program's emphasis to the export of music, films, and consumer goods. By the end of the decade the most popular program on VOA was Willis Conover's "Music USA," which played jazz for audiences in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia,31 In addition, the USIA sponsored international jazz tours and made a special effort to recruit black musicians. Initially African Americans were reluctant to participate, because they suspected they ■were being used to deliver a far rosier picture of American race relations abroad than existed in reality. Ultimately, however, as the historian Penny von Eschen has shown, those who went, among them Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, used these tours to connect with new audiences (particularly in Africa) and to deliver independent and at times subversive messages at home and abroad. One of those subversive moments occurred in 1961 when Dave and Iola Brubeck teamed up with Louis Armstrong to write the musical The Real Ambassadors, which satirized the State Department tours and featured some blunt critiques of race relations within the United States.31 A principal weapon in the American arsenal of cultural diplomacy was consumerism. In the aftermath of World War II, the American economy shifted production from war machinery to consumer goods, unleashing an avalanche of spending among Americans who had suffered through a dozen years of Depression-era deprivations and war-era rationing. In the postwar period shopping became a patriotic duty, as policy makers linked consumer spending to national security.33 Moreover, Americans used consumerism as a Cold War ■[ 547 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE Louis Armstrong plays the trumpet at a concert broadcast by the Voice of America, around itj6^ VOA operated under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and featured popular jazz programs such as Willis Conover's Music USA, directed at audiences in Eastern Europe, Amj, and Africa. Armstrong's music featuted prominently on those programs. (Getty Images) propaganda tool. The July 1959 exhibition of American industrial products 111 Moscow, for instance, featured lavish displays of consumer products and household appliances, including a fully furnished American ranch house. The exhibition stood in glaring contrast to a Soviet exhibit in New York the previous month, which had featured primarily displays of heavy industry and space technolog1,. 1 Americans found that kitchen gadgets, nylon stockings, Pepsi-Cola, jr./7, .-ml the latest women's fashion were far easier to sell to communist audiences r'un elusive promises of democracy and freedom. Cultures of Anti-Imperialism As Americans worked diligently toward the cultural infiltration of Easter • Lu rope, the Soviet Union struggled to maintain control over its sphere. After 5u- •[ 548 ]■ GLOBAL CULTURES [jn's death in 1953, the Soviet leadership under Nikita Khrushchev inaugurated a period of cautious liberalization, in which politicians and intellectuals were able to express themselves more freely. Aware of the growing gap between East and \Vcst, Khrushchev tried particularly hard to accelerate the production of consumer goods. However, these efforts were punctuated by moments of coercion and repression at home as well as military interventions abroad, particularly in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviet Union's violent suppression of dissident movements damaged its reputation even within the communist world.35 During Khrushchev's tenure, Soviet cultural propaganda focused increasingly on areas outside its direct sphere of control, above all in Southeast Asia and Africa. In its international campaigns, the Soviet Union capitalized on two essential weaknesses in the Western capitalist world: its close affiliation with colonialism and its history of racism. Many of the countries that advocated freedom and democracy in the postwar era had been at the forefront of colonization in the nineteenth century. In fact, most colonial powers, including France, Belgium, and Great Britain, were reluctant even after World War II to give up their colonial possessions. The West's rhetorical support for freedom and self-determination thus rang hollow in many parts of the world. Suspicion of Western imperialist ambitions continued to linger even after colonies gained independence, thus providing an opening for the Soviet message of anti-imperialism. The Soviet Union was also able to point to the West's dismal record of racial discrimination. Colonialism was based on a sociocultural system of racial hierarchy, which Western powers had used to legitimize their dominance over Mionwhite peoples. The Second World War exposed the gruesome consequences of a philosophy of racial hierarchies taken to its extreme. While the United States condemned in the strongest terms Hitler's policy of racial annihilation of the Jews, it supplemented its military campaign against Japan with apropaganda campaign of racial denigration." In addition, America's domestic system of racial discrimination undermined propaganda messages postulating the links between democracy, freedom, and equality. Throughout the war black and white troops remained segregated within the US armed forces. Drawing on Lenin's 1917 treatise on the connection between imperialism and capitalism, the Soviet Union condemned both colonialism and imperialism, ignoring its own domination of 549 PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES neighboring states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Lenin's ideas h, (l , spired many of the anticoionial activists of the intervvar and postwar periu \' Soviet propagandists' message of anti-imperialism coupled with the lc\v.i Western abuses of power in Asia and Africa sufficed to raise doubts ubdnr'd,, American message of freedom and democracy. The Soviet Union showed particular ingenuity in linking the postwar rhetoric of internationalism to the message of world peace. As Cold War tensions increased in the summer of 1947, the Soviets, through organizations hl.i ch, Women's International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, and the World Peace Council, sponsored international gathcrium designed to celebrate and foster the idea of world peace. One of the fir-t , K|, gatherings was a World Youth Festival in Prague in 1947, which convened umki the banner "Youth United, Forward for Lasting Peace," and drew some seventeen thousand participants, mostly from Europe and the Americas.38 Subsecuc:ic juudi festivals continued with various combinations of the themes of internationalism, peace, and anti-imperialism. Most of the participants were young people :m:n nonaligned and communist countries, but some noncommunist Western paa groups also attended. The World Peace Council (WPC), in turn, attracted Western intellectuals with leftist political leanings, many of them communists. Emerging out of the "first World Congress of the Partisans of Peace" in Paris in 1949, the organization operated independently of the Soviet Union in name only and became increasingly partisan during the 1950s.39 Because of its prolific utilization of the term peace, the Soviet Union succeeded in linking communism to the idea of peace in world opinion. For that very reason, Western political officials and pundits relentlessly condemned the World Peace Council and many other peace organizations as communist front organizations and their members as "fellow travelers." In 1951 Henry Luce called the World Peace Council "a coldly calculated master plan to sabotage the West's efforts to restore the world's free econo mies and to defend itself."40 Others derided peace advocates and pacifists as subversive communists or naive victims of a communist propaganda plot. Soviet officials significantly expanded international propaganda efforts in the non-Western world through the printed press and Soviet news service.-, li\ the 1970s the Soviet news agency Novosti regularly published abroad; these pnl> ■[ 55o 1- rations included weeklies and monthlies such as the English-language New rimes, The Soviet Weekly, and The Soviet Union. In addition, propaganda offi-•als blanketed the globe with a rich array of radio broadcasts. The area of broad-tsts, the languages in which the broadcasts were read, and the number of hours f broadcasts increased steadily over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. Propagandists were determined to utilize all available means of communication to win " er the nonaligned world. This included foreign translations of carefully seated ideologically acceptable Soviet literature, which rose from 18 million Rus--ian books in eleven foreign languages in 1956 to 55.5 million books in thirty-six language by 1970.41 The Soviet efforts at foreign information dissemination 1 ,irrored those of the USIA in many ways, even if they were more unabashedly nropagandistic than the USIA's. The Soviet Union, like the United States, iccognized that the battles of the Cold War had shifted to the nonaligned world jrtd that these battles were fought with not only military but also cultural weapons. As Asian and African countries struggled to gain independence from the ■ijrmer colonial powers, they were receptive to the Soviet message of anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and peace, especially if that message was bolstered by .-ffers of economic and financial aid. Yet as the case of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s proved, the gains were often more elusive than real. Nasser was quite willing to turn to the Soviet Union to finance his Aswan Dam project after the United States exerted pressure on him to conform to US demands, yet he never subscribed to communist ideals. To the contrary: in 1958, two years after the Suez aisis, he actively cracked down on communists within his own country.41 : The Soviet Union's twin rhetoric of peaceful coexistence and anti-imperialism sounded appealing to other newly independent countries as well. In India, the Soviet Union bolstered its claims of peace with offers of technical and financial aid as well as increased trade relations "free from any political or military obligations."43 India and other former colonies remained acutely aware of the military might of the former colonial powers, and the potential for renewed economic dependency if they accepted aid from the West. Even though the Soviet Union was able to build temporary alliances with several newly independent countries, it rarely succeeded in establishing full-fledged communist regimes in any of them. PETRA GOEDDE Cultures of Postcolonialism Though decolonization shaped and in turn was shaped by the Cold \\ .1 r ,t tural impact can be understood only in relation to historical processes 1 hi-10 4 preceded the Cold War. The global system of colonial rule altered ioiw<.r J^' cultural identity of people living within it. The economic-political processes exploiting natural resources, consolidating power, and creating dependencies' the colonies were inextricably linked to the cultural processes of subjn\i u ,n similation, and resistance. European powers had long rationalized the oaiiKin,; exploitation of colonial possessions by claiming a cultural mission to civilly i„j raise the living standards of the nonwhite peoples of the world. Cultmal o un-is sion was never the primary objective of colonialism, but it nonetheless k„inie an integral part of colonial politics in many parts of the world. Europeans su ui schools and other educational institutions in the colonies to educate am.' ti m the indigenous elite for leadership positions in the local colonial bureavci.ia. Some of these students moved to the metropole to continue their ediic.iL'on .t* European universities, among them the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minli ihp Martinique-born Algerian activist Frantz Fanon, both of whom studm: m France, and Indian anttcolonial leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas (, u, dhi, who studied in Britain.44 Western thought and values, not least of jll tilt: idea of nationalism, thus influenced the ways in which many indigenous leaders approached their political fight for independence. However, it would bt n.s-leading to assume that their political activism emerged only through t\[n;5 iu to Western thought. Rather, knowledge of those ideas allowed anticolonialists to develop effective strategies in their struggle against the overwhelming power of the metropole. Politically, most newly formed states adopted the territorial boundaries set by the colonial powers, even though those boundaries did not necessarily ovcilip with cultural, tribal, or even ethnic boundaries. They also followed the Em-i pean model of the nation-state in an effort to impose order and estabi 1 ,h car I ized control.45 Indigenous elites struggled to forge independent national identities out of sometimes arbitrary conglomerates of tribes and ethnicities within the territorial confines of the new state, often clashing violently with conipi'ti V ethnic groups for dominance. The French colony of Indochina, for infante, §§■§ GLOBAL CULTURES ;,foke into three states: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After the disengagement "f the French in 1954, the Geneva Accords split Vietnam into two zones, the oitinutnist-controlled Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North and the ■sfestern-allied State of Vietnam in the South. In India, ethnic and religious di-■ isions prompted the British to promote the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two separate states: Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-ruled Paki-fan gast Pakistan, a territory disconnected from West Pakistan in the northeast orner of the Indian subcontinent, fought a bloody war for independence with upport from India, becoming Bangladesh after independence from Pakistan in 19-[. Likewise, tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East permanently scarred the region after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Ethnic conflict erupted in Rwanda and Burundi even before the two countries achieved independence from Belgium in 1961, exposing the political, social, nd cultural rivalry between Hutus and Tutsis. In 1959 in Rwanda Hutus massacred Tutsis, who then sought refuge in Burundi and other neighboring counties. 'Die monarchies in both countries were of Tutsi heritage and Tutsis enjoyed 1 higher social standing under Belgian rule. In fact, according to Mahmood Vtamdani, the political rivalry between Hutus and Tutsis was a product of Belgian colonial rulers, who had designated Tutsis as cattle herders and given them privileged positions within the colonial regime.46 In many colonies a centralized colonial bureaucracy had allied itself with one ethnic group or another and had suppressed cultural and ethnic tensions with an iron fist. The transfer of political control to indigenous groups therefore occasioned an internal power struggle . mong several competing political or ethnic groups, sometimes leading to violent clashes and even civil war.47 ; In areas with a significant white settler population, as in Algeria, Namibia, jnd Rhodesia, decolonization led to bitter, often violent racial confrontations. White settlers in these communities followed the model of South Africa, which .lad established a white-controlled centralized state in 1909 and had maintained dose ties to the British mother country. Left without the military protection of "he European colonial power after independence, whites often took drastic mea--ures to preserve their privileged positions over a black indigenous majority. The white South African ruling class instituted a rigid system of apartheid and political repression in order to preserve its power vis-ä-vis the increasingly well-organized 553 PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES African National Congress.48 Like South Africa, Algeria's white settler pt pu| tion retained close ties to the French mainland, and a significant portion i.| \ gerians lobbied for inclusion in the French nation after World War II. Yei 1 tj, 1950s Algerian nationalists gained strength and organized the Front ce Libti 1 tion Nationale (FLN), a powerful and violent movement in opposition to Fundi rule. The struggle for independence lasted from 1954 to 1962., when the Fund, government gave up claims to the Algerian territory. Millions of European' Algerians, known as thepieds-noirs, fled Algeria and settled in France.49 As former African colonies sought political independence, they stri-.j^k J tu redefine their cultural identity. Colonial rulers had introduced Wesierr. riiu.iK. customs, and culture into these areas and often suppressed indigenous practica, setting up a false dichotomy between European modernity and colon -ijl1. wardness.50 Though the anticolonial struggle had unified indigenous populations against their oppressors, the postcolonial era revealed new fissures among indigenous interest groups with competing visions of independence. Political lcjil 1» success often depended on how well they were able to overcome this ai u ru] juxtaposition between local tradition and cosmopolitan modernity, and lio\ well they were able to transcend ethnic, tribal, and cultural differences ai i-their own constituents. In newly independent states in Africa, one way to reclaim cultural auronoim was to draw on the Afro-Caribbean nigritude movement that had emerged in the 1930s. Its founders, among them Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and essayist who in i960 became Senegal's first president, and poet Ainic Cc-.-aire, from the Caribbean island of Martinique, provided the cultural rationale for the political drive for independence. Both drew inspiration from Ahn. 11 and African American writers, particularly those of the Harlem Renais: .ui, including Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who had celebrated black pride and black culture since the 1910s. Both also drew on historical prei ei eici of struggle against white colonial rule, such as Toussaint Louverture, who 111 the 179 os had led a revolt against the French in Haiti.51 Each of them, however, developed their own practical application of tin. cuii cept of nigritude. For Senghor, nigritude was "the whole complex of civilized values—cultural, economic, social, and political—which characterize tin. bl.nk peoples, or more precisely, the Negro-African world____In other words, the Leopold S^dar Senghor, a poet and linguist from Senegal, who became the country's first president after independence from France in i960. Together with Aime Ccsaire and Leon Damas, lie developed the concept oinigritude, which sought to reclaim Africa's cultural independence in opposition to the cultural repression of the colonial system. (Getty Images) sense of communion, the gift: of mythmaking, the gift of rhythm, such are the essential elements of negritude which you will find indelibly stamped on all the works and activities of the black man."52 Senghor's nigritude became a unifying lorce in the postwar Afro-Caribbean struggle for political independence, Cesaire's idea of negritude relied on a less rigid notion of black cultural independence. ■[ 554 1- •[ 555 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES Like Senghor he called into question the validity of Western cultural doniin » yet he did so without denying the utility of Western texts to make the < a L | ' cultural independence. For instance, he appropriated the Shakespearian p];n Tempest as a vehicle to assert the colonials' cultural emancipation, arguinti [, r the adaptation of the 1610 play for black theater" Cesaire saw in the prolan, n s Prospero "a complete totalitarian," "the man of cold reason, the man of metli- conquest—in other words, a portrait of the enlightened European." His o part, the native Caliban, on the other hand, is "still close to his beginnings link with the natural world has not yet been broken." Cesaire equated Pr6»|M, and by extension, enlightened Europe, wirh totalitarianism, Caliban with cultiiril authenticity.54 More importantly, though, Caliban is able to traverse the \voi,d of the colonized and the colonizer. He speaks a European language, knows the Vlm ern ways, and thus has a cultural advantage over his master, Prospero. Like Ca Cesaire turned his cultural knowledge of the West into a weapon for cu liberation by reinscribing indigenous meaning into Western texts. The concept nigritude encountered powerful critics. Frantz Fanon .11 ual in 1})e Wretched of the Earth that African and Caribbean intellectuals, including o Cesaire, whose call for nigritude rested on the reinterpretation of European Enlightenment texts, were complicit in reinforcing the power of colonial culm Rather than reviving indigenous national cultures, Fanon charged, the) Accepted the European label of all African and Caribbean cultures in monolithic terms. "The concept of negritude," he stated, "was the emotional if not the I iy cal antithesis of that insult which the white man flung at humanity."" TI111 in suit was to lump all Africans, regardless of their national origins or culuu il identity, together, to deny them the existence of an indigenous culture anc ■■) instill in them the values of Western culture. The fallacy of native intellectuals steeped in Western culture was, in Fanon's view, their attempt to prove that there was an African culture, rather than an Angolan, Kenyan, or Gh.111.1u1 culture. Fanon condemned the process as essentially an inversion of the coloi.i I system of cultural oppression. Negritude, which emerged as much in the Amer -cas as in Africa, signaled to Fanon the racialization of cultural identity." Fanon's critique revealed a crucial aspect of the process of cultural di.inij. and the idea of cultural identity. Contact with foreign cultures, whether by or by choice, invariably altered the native population's own cultural matrix. It •[ 556 ]• ffould have been a futile undertaking for native intellectuals to reverse the process of cultural transformation and to erase the impact of colonial domination. F.ven advocates of nigritude did not propose a complete reversal. Instead they sought to integrate the Western colonial cultural canon in a way that met their pwn indigenous political and cultural needs. By the early 1990s, cultural anthropologists and sociologists labeled this process cultural hybridization or ueolization.57 Though there existed no Asian counterpart to the African negritude movement, colonial engagement in Asia created in Europe a particular notion of Asia the "oriental" other. In his 1978 book Orientalism, the Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said argued that notions of inferiority of Middle Eastern colonial subjects were deeply ingrained in the Western world's cultural and literary texts. He was interested primarily in showing orientalism as fundamentally a Western concept rather than exploring the ways in which ideas of orientalism might have become deeply embedded in the postcolonial identities of hon-Western peoples.58 Said's critique of orientalism sparked a new wave of scholarship, exploring the influence of Western notions of the East in popular culture sind political relations, interrogating ethnic and national identity formation, and analyzing the ideological foundations of the Orient/Occident dichotomy.59 Embraced by many, his writings also drew criticism from some academic scholars, who challenged his definition of orientalism, questioned the existence of a single orientalism, or accused him of polemicizing an academic problem.60 Said continued to develop his interpreration of the cultural consequences of imperialism, arguing in his later work that empire had created not just cultural subjugation but integration, hybridization, and heterogenization. This reading of the mutual teshaping of imperial and colonial cultures allowed him to claim writers like William Shakespeare for the decolonizing project as Cesaire had clone before him. Shakespeare's plays would thus lose their particular European identity and become global repertoires of human experience. Drawing on Ces-aire's version of The Tempest, Said laid out alternative readings of the play's main colonial characters Caliban, the rebellious slave, and Ariel, the assimilated and accommodationist spirit (in Shakespeare's version) turned mulatto (in Cesaire s version). According to Said, the play offered answers to a central question for independence activists: "How does a culture seeking to become independent of 557 PETRA GOEDDE imperialism imagine its own past?" The Ariel-Caliban dichotomy ir. U\-pest offered three distinct options, he suggested. The first was to take Ariel as tj model and to accept one's subservient status as long as the colonialist rulu, t|1j afterward resume the native self. The second option was to follow Caliban's ex ample, which was to integrate the "Mongrel past" into an independent tVu>r-The third option was to view Caliban as fighting to shed the past oppression and return to a "precolonial" self. Said identified this last option as the r.idieil n tionalism that produced the ideology of nigritude. Like Fanon, he ?xprt\.iwj deep reservations about this form of colonial emancipation, because it cou" I . . deteriorate into a simple form of "chauvinism and xenophobia" that i:iir-{j:"cd the European colonial rationale for colonization in the first place.61 By the mid-1960s, leaders in many newly independent nations disagreed oi\.r whether there existed a common African or Asian identity and what the n..tiirj 1 if that identity might be. Language, religion, and tribal customs significantly i minrdcd the process of cultural unification. In addition, at least in Africa, the colonial Ic^uty divided the former colonies into Francophone and Anglophone countries. M.mv prominent writers and poets expressed their search for a common African :dcntit v not in their native language but in the language of their former oppressors, among them Senghor, who wrote in French, and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebr, ho wrote in English.62 Achebe, author of the internationally acclaimed novel 7})in& Fall Apart, defended his choice by pointing to the importance of communicating across language barriers with other victims of colonization and with the 1 .m nizers." But he also acknowledged that particular local experiences o-uld not In. expressed adequately in the English language and advocated extending the lim.ts. • if English to accommodate those African ideas and experiences" These debates exemplified not only the scars left by more than a ccntur. of colonial domination but also the diversity of postcolonial experiences. Africans more than Asians had to renegotiate their identity within an increasiiig.v hit erogeneous environment where the recovery of a lost tribal culture held both great promise but also the threat of continuous conflict and war, which might create living conditions no better and sometimes worse than those expei i.'in.nl under colonialism. Cultural creolization was as much part of the process of decolonization as were ethnic strife, violence, and war. GLOBAL CULTURES I he cultural debates accompanying the process of decolonization formed of a broader challenge to the rigid structures of the Cold War cultural con- si-nMis in East and West and exposed the cultural diversity that had been sup-nosed by the Cold War rivalry. Others included the increasing movement of ■ le and goods, the emergence of an international protest culture, and an in-.■riutionai language of rights that transcended the East-West divide. Those L.n illenges led to broad cultural transformations over the course of the 1960s, 1.,...nanently changing the political, economic, and cultural relations among ivoples and nations. Even though the Cold War heated up again in the late [cj-os with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the two superpowers no longer t-ict.ited the cultural terms of their exchange. These transformations represented, i-.oi so much a linear development from cultural conformity to cultural diversity, ■ enegotiation of the relationship between the two. •[ 558 ]■ •[ 559 ]• GLOBAL CULTURES 2. People and Goods on the Move THE transnational movement of people and goods accelerated alter V/urld War II, as national boundaries shifted, colonies gained independence:, and means of transportation improved. Migrants, including refugees, to-.uisis. an J guest workers, played key roles in the global process of cultural heterogcui /..irio-\ As they moved, they brought with them cultural, religious, and materi.-.l njdi-tions that altered the cultural landscape of their new environment. The-, c ^xh-lished restaurants, houses of worship, and cultural centers, which iniualb- ii-rved the immigrant population, yet over time transformed neighborhood^ into 'ntil-tiethnic patchworks of cultural diversity.65 Wherever they went, these :r..n ;:iiv created both greater tolerance of cultural difference and new fissures, bunging cultural conflict into every part of the world. As people moved, so did t^owls, creating a global marketplace of consumption. The material aspects of this global migration have often been associated with the rise of the multinational .-oipo-rations, and thus the charge of cultural homogenization. But although r ktc Is some evidence to support this charge, not the least of which is the rapid prr-H-eration of global brands, other evidence points toward greater material divcLYtv within a single locale, such as the proliferation of ethnic restaurants in in.ij.jr urban centers. As the transnational movement of people and goods ace.v.ciiite.d, so did the process of cultural hybridization, making places at once moie i.imilwr and more alien. Migrants The patterns of migration in the second half of the twentieth century were more , diverse and multidirectional than before. North America remained a primary destination for people from all parts of the world, though the postwar lev.I <"f immigration was never as high as the level at the turn of the twentieth century,. when the immigration rate to the United States had been over n immigrants per-; •[ 5<5o ]■ thousand US population. It fell to 0.4 immigrants per thousand in the 1940s ..,d reached its postwar peak of about 4 per thousand in the 1990s.136 The ethnic compos'"011 of migrants changed dramatically as well. Most of the immigrants ro the United States in the earlier wave had come from Europe; in the second half of the twentieth century they came primarily from Latin America, Africa, • ad Asia. The reasons for migration, however, remained the same: economic urdship, population increase, and violence. Decolonization accounted for part of world migration since World War II. sometimes called reverse colonization, the influx of former colonial subjects diversified the cities of the industrialized world as Africans and Asians migrated to Lngland, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands; Filipinos moved to North America, the Middle East, and Japan; and Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans migrated to the United States and Canada. To be sure, the colonial world had intruded upon the metropole ever since the time of contact, largely through the import of raw materials, artisan goods, and foreign foods, including spices, trrains, coffee, and tea.67 As colonial peoples followed their products, they changed not only the rnetropole's ethnic composition but its cultures as well. ; Decolonization generated three successive waves of migration. The first was the return of white settlers and administrators to the homeland. These returnees, some of whom had intermarried with the indigenous population, provided the incentive for a second wave of migrants: indigenous relatives and members of the colonial elites who had lost their positions of power and privilege in the newly formed independent state. A third wave of migration was internal as indigenous populations moved from rural to urban areas, from impoverished to prosperous land, from regions with low demand for labor to those with high demand, within or across national boundaries. An example of the latter was the large-scale seasonal migration within Africa of almost a million laborers to South Africa from areas to the north.68 Europe's migration patterns shifted considerably as well in the postwar period, beginning with the massive movement of people displaced by war and persecution. Between 1965 and 1000, the foreign-born population in Western Europe rose from x.z percent to 10.3 percent. Western Europe thus shifted from being a point of departure (mostly to the Americas) to becoming a destination for immigrants both from other European countries as well as from Asia and Africa. ■[ 561 ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES Immigration to countries within the European Union reached an all-Litii-high—over one million annually—between 1989 and 1993, largely as a .vuili _■ Icisiin. since the nineteenth century. In the second half of the twentieth century, inr.i-national travel increased manifold, thanks to improved modes of transposition and affordability. This transformation resulted in a higher proportion of the world's population gaining greater than ever exposure to foreign peoples, Ian s\u$.\ customs, and foods. Only recently have anthropologists, sociologists, and historians begun to explore in more depth the cultural impact of global tourism i-n travelers and indigenous cultures.'2 In the early decades after World War II, American soldiers, tourists, and business managers dominated international travel. Wartime military deployment in Europe, North Africa, and Asia afforded most soldiers their first oppoi tunity to explore foreign places." At the end of the war the American military occupied Germany, Austria, and Japan and established permanent military bases in the Pacific, Asia, and Europe. The experience of overseas deployment altered their attitudes toward foreign cultures, but also brought America closer to tin. people living in the vicinity of the bases. GIs became major exporters of Anient. vi popular culture.94 They became Europe's first tourists during and immediauh 4 ifcer World War II. As soldiers moved across France in the spring and summer of i944> the'r curiosity about all things French often accompanied and at times interfered with their duties as combat soldiers. One soldier remarked that as he arrived in Normandy, his "thoughts were not so much of liberating, fighting, or helping to chase out the Germans as the thought of stepping foot upon the land of France, of saying one French word to someone French in France."95 When combat duties transitioned into occupation duties in Europe and Asia in the aftermath of the war, soldiers increasingly took time to explore the region as regular tourists. Mass tourism became an integral part of the postwar global economic recovery. As American, and later European and Asian, international travel increased, so did tourist spending on consumer goods, hotels, and transportation. International travel became so extensive that the US government created a travel branch under the auspices of the Marshall Plan in 1948. Known as the Travel Development Section (TDS), the branch set up shop in Paris with an initial staff of three, but soon expanded to seventeen with a representative in every Marshall Plan country in Europe. The task of the TDS was to facilitate international travel in Europe and encourage the local travel industry to improve standards. In addition, it developed a program to facilitate American investment in Europe's travel industry. American policy makers further tried to encourage travel and spending abroad by raising the duty-free import level from $100 to Sjoo."5 One of the first initiatives on a global scale was the United Nations' establishment of the International Union of Official Travel Organizations (IUOTO) in The Hague in 1947. The organization sought to ease travel restrictions and standardize passport and visa requirements across the world. Prompted by the IUOTO, the United Nations declared 1967 International Tourist Year (ITY), using the slogan "Tourism, Passport to Peace." The organization's mission lay at the intersection of promoting international understanding through easing the flow of people across national boundaries and promoting economic development and modernization through the increase in global consumption.97 As international travel became more affordable and Western European and Asian countries recovered from the wartime ravages, the social and ethnic profile of tourism changed. By the 1970s, internarional travel was no longer the exclusive domain of the upper classes. It brought a broader cross section of the wotld's -[ 568 ]- ■[ 569 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES population into contact with one another. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), established in 1974, intenutinn,,| travel rose from 15 million in 1950 to 806 million in 2.005. Global income geii'i ated through international travel stood at an estimated $680 billion in 1605, reflecting an average annual increase of n.z percent since 1950. As the numb: 1 o: travelers increased, so did their destinations. While in the early postwar pern id fifteen top destinations, most of them in Europe and North America, made in 88 percent of all travel, their share fell to 75 percent by 1970 and to 57 percent m 2,005. Many of the new travel destinations were in Africa and Southeast Asi„ indicating the global reach of international tourism.58 The tourism industry, according to Marc Auge, also created "non-places," places of transit exclusively designed for and frequented by tourists. These airp-m terminals, hotel lobbies, highway service stations, and so on were devoid of !c 1 j| cultural significance but nonetheless functioned as important cultural sites, signifying the culture of tourism rather than the tourists' experience of culture. They were the essential localities of cultural and geographic transiency, and a*, such were embodiments of cultural change as well as cultural diversity. According to Auge, travelers often reported a sense of being in a non-space even n< tlie\ entered their local airports. In line at an airline counter, they already had men tally left their place of origin. The non-spaces of the traveling world were strangelv unmoored from their actual physical locale. The local population rarely frequented these places. By the same token, those who moved through them rare!)' experienced the culture of the local environment." The cultural impact of the rise in international tourism is harder to measure than its economic impact. Although the United Nations and other international organizations promoted tourism as a path toward greater understanding and peace, tourism created new sources of friction as differences in standards o\ living and social customs among various cultures became visible. By the early 1960s, American government officials became increasingly concerned that some American tourists' rowdy behavior and conspicuous display of wealth abroad would damage America's image in the world. A i960 Parade magazine article on tourism warned American readers: "Don't be an Ugly American."100 The article's author, Frances Knight, was the director of the US Passport Office, and thtis (•-miliar with complaints from foreign law enforcement agencies about America.) •[ 570 ]• tourists' delinquent behavior. Knight's rendering of the "Ugly American" as a spoiled and insensitive tourist inverted the meaning first put forward in the 1958 novel with the same title by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer. They portrayed the ugly American, a less-than-handsome American engineer named flomer Atkins, as the embodiment of the American spirit of grassroots entre-preneurship and benevolence. Burdick and Lederer's Ugly American helped the local population in a fictional Southeast Asian nation more effectively than any of the foreign service officials in the sheltered consulates of the capital.101 Soon, liowever, Knight's version of the ugly American came to dominate the global 'public image: an image of Americans as loud, overprivileged, and demanding. The rising tide of international tourism proved a mixed blessing for popular destinations. Local communities greatly benefited from the influx of foreign currency and the boost to their infrastructure, but they often chafed under the massive buildup of expensive hotels, restaurants, bars, and tourist attractions, most of which were beyond the means of local residents. In addition, many feared that these transformations undermined indigenous cultures. The problem became more prevalent in the 1970s when middle- and upper-middle-class Europeans and Asians joined Americans in their passion for travel, further internationalizing the world's prime resorts but also adding new sources of friction with local populations, In response, some communities began to regulate the expansion of the tourism business. Others were unable to counter the power of international hoteliers and travel agents. They stood by as their local communities turned into "non-places," tourist destinations without a cultural identity. International travel was closely tied to international politics as well. The outbreak of domestic unrest or armed conflict in any region effectively shut down an area's tourist industry. In addition, for much of the Cold War, leisure travel hetween East and West was subject to tight control. Eastern Europeans who wanted to travel to the West were often in a catch-n. If their own country was willing to issue an exit visa, Western customs officials usually denied them an entry visa on the rationale that if their home country was willing to let them go, they must be at minimum ardent communists and possibly spies. Western Europeans and Americans also restricted their own citizens' travel into the Soviet Bloc, particularly those with known ties to the Communist Party. In the 1950s the United States confiscated the passports of leading communists and leftists, among them •[ 57i ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, the writer Albert E. Kahn, and Conirnu us Party functionaries.102 In 1958 the US Supreme Court ruled against the pr.ici^ and reinstated the right of American citizens, communist and noncommuhisr to travel abroad.103 As Cold War tensions declined in the era of detente in U, 1970s, both sides eased travel restrictions across the East-West divide. Robeson and others on the political left, of course, were not tourists in search of places of leisure, but part of an increasingly active cohort of internationalpo-litical travelers. Their travel motives were twofold: to explore the political and social conditions in countries other than their own, and to transmit information abroad about social and political conditions in the United States. While ik American government prevented leftists such as Robeson and Du Bois fiui \ tn gaging in this mission for much of the 1950s, it encouraged and promoted ■ochcri who could transmit a benevolent image of the United States. In fact, the US government actively recruited artists, entertainers, and intellectuals to deliver America's message of freedom and democracy abroad. Bob Hope and the-Har-Iem Globetrotters performed in front of mass audiences in the Soviet Unior in 1959. Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and others played jazz in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s. US policy makers pursued two related objectives with these international tours. First,they sought to capitalize on the growing international popularity of American mass-culture, and second, by including African American entertainers they sought to counter the damaging image of the United States as a place of facial discrimination. Seeing itself in a fierce competition with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of nonwhite peoples in Africa and Asia, the United States was acutclv aware of its own shortcomings in advancing racial equality and tried to o^-ei-come those by sending its black artists on tours abroad.104 Those who participated in these goodwill tours often gained a new and sometimes more critical perspective on American foreign policy. Among them were young Americans who since the early 1960s had joined the Peace Corps. Inspired by Kennedy's message about public service, these young idealists—around seventy thousand of them in the first decade since the inception of the Peace Corps in 1961—embarked on two-year sojourns into areas the US governmcn: deemed threatened by communist agitation.105 When they returned, uk) brought with them a new appreciation for the hardships in underdeveloped ar- L--s, and sometimes a new appreciation for leftist and egalitarian political values.""' Within the chatged atmosphere of 1960s student protests, many Peace Corps volunteers became vocal advocates for the rights of the countries in which chey had served. Students and academics made up another gtoup of transnational sojourners. Since rhe end of World War II the number of official exchange programs grew exponentially, as individuals and governments sought better educational opportunities for their youth abroad. In the 1950s the United States became a major destination for foreign students and academics, because the top US universities, :nany of them private, invested heavily in research and development. This was a remarkable reversal—only a few decades earlier the flow of students and academics had gone the other way, when well-heeled American students flocked to prestigious European universities for advanced academic training.107 The US government fostered educational exchange as another weapon in the .Ltsenal of the cultural Cold War battles, both to attract brain power from abroad xnd to influence the future elites of foreign countries. A cultural agreement reached between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1958 included a provision for the exchange of students between the two nations. However, during the first year of the agreement only twenty students from the Soviet Union and the United States participated in the exchange, well short of American expectations. The Soviets remained cautious about the program, fearing possible recruitment of their own students for US intelligence. Even though Eisenhower dismissed their suspicions as unfounded, he must have been aware that the CIA at that very moment was infiltrating the National Students' Association, a strong lobbyist for increased US-Soviet student exchange. Despite well-founded Soviet concerns, the exchange program expanded to over fifteen hundied students from either side within the next two years.108 Soviets and Eastern Europeans also made an effort to recruit students from rtonaligned countries in Africa and Asia. The education of the political and social elites at the major schools and universities of the industrialized world had been an integral part of colonial regimes, which is why decolonization left many citizens in the newly independent states suspicious of the educational mission in those countries. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union thus offered a welcome alternative to the former centers of imperial power.109 However, funding for •[ 573 ]• PETRA GOEDDE higher education in the Soviet Bloc lagged far behind the West, making it haii i -i to recruit highly qualified students from the former colonies. The Soviet U:i had to compete with the highly successful American Fulbright program,-wr-1 brought thousands of students, academics, and professionals to the UnitedStii and sent thousands of American students and academics abroad, i-'statilis i in 1946 through the efforts of Senator J. William Fulbright, Democratic sen; from Arkansas, the program grew into a major government-funded organizat 'nr with exchange programs in 144 countries. Throughout the Cold War, liawj the Fulbright exchange program never transcended the Iron Curtain into E em Europe and the Soviet Union.110 The global movement of people since World War II both exposed a g < it number of them to foreign cultures and in the process altered their understa ■ ing of their own cultural identity in relation to others. Cultural tradition.;] often tried to stem the tide of cultural hybridization through demand.1-. :oi strictions on immigration as well as more stringent requirements for the assin 1-lation of outsiders into the dominant culture of the homeland. Others, pan\ accept and welcome the increase in cultural diversity around the world as a permanent and irreversible fixture of the modern world. In fact, by the end o; t'\ twentieth century rhe ability to live, work, and communicate in more than c-w cultural orbit became an important asset for personal advancement. International studies, business, and language programs proliferated in all major uniu-i sities, accelerating the pace of economic and cultural globalization. Those u-i\ changes further illustrated globalization's simultaneous drive toward homogeni-zation and heterogenization. Global Consumption Ethnic diversity in urban areas manifested itself in material ways through the accelerated flow of goods across national boundaries after 1945. In fact, the emergence of a global marketplace for consumer goods might be globalization's most visible feature. The global marketplace reached a symbolic pinnacle on November 4, 2.008, when the residents of Dubai celebrated the opening of what then hailed as the world's largest indoor mall The mall boasted a record num at GLOBAL CULTURES mm of retail spaces (twelve hundred, of which only six hundred were occupied at the rime of the opening), a record number of square feet (iz million), an indoor aquarium, a skating rink, a children's entertainment center, movie theaters, as well as restaurant and hotel facilities. The developers' promotional video dubbed rhe mall as the "new center of the earth."'11 Its opening came at a time when a global economic downturn and the precipitous drop in oil prices after an all-time high seriously jeopardized the financial viability of such grand-scale projects. Its location in the Middle East served as a manifestation of the shirting center of gravity of global capitalism, away from the old industrial powers of Europe and North America toward new areas of economic power. The mall differed in scale but not in content from countless other retail malls in urban areas all over the world. The convergence of retailers from Europe, North America, and East Asia in a single space symbolized the globalization of consumption as well as the centrality of consumption in the evolution of a global culture. The mall represented not quite the world in a nutshell but the world on the equivalent of fifty soccer fields. The merchandise in the mall was as global as its clientele, because the majority of the mall's visitors were not native Emiratis, The array of stores within the mall—every major international retailer had moved in or reserved space—mirrored the array of international residenrs and rourists in Dubai. The mall epitomized the expansion of places of consumption beyond the industrialized North and West.112 More significantly it seemed to confirm the worst fears of globalization's opponents, who had predicted that the overwhelming economic power of a generic Western consumer culture would crush indigenous cultures on the periphery. Critics associate the rise of a global consumer culture with the rise of the United States to world hegemony and thus with the global spread of American Consumer goods. But as the historian Kristin Hoganson has noted, the process of global consumption began before America's ascent to world power, at a time when the United States consumed more foreign products than it produced for foreign markets.113 Americans had become avid consumers of imported goods already in the eighteenth century—so much so that some items, such as tea, became rallying points for political independence from Britain.114 Still earlier, Euro-Asian trade routes created a lively exchange of goods between the two worlds. Spices and tea brought from India and China transformed •[ 574 ]■ 575 PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES European cooking and drinking. Coffee, a staple of Western society [><, t|t twentieth century, originated in Ethiopia and made its way through 7m M j the sixteenth century to Southern and Central Europe in the seventeendi ur tury.115 Travelers along the Silk Road, which stretched between Southt ■ and the Mediterranean, transported fabrics, food, plants, earthenware, pr id v tion techniques, and ideas. This exchange of goods and ideas established tin i- (l. terns of cultural and material hybridization over three thousand vcai Consumption and the cultural transformations associated with it long | ,r(.Ll t|tl j the rise of capitalism. Nonetheless, international trade expanded rapjJh lnl^ Africa and the Americas during the age of exploration, and particularly ;,utL t, 1Ľ emergence of mercantilism and capitalism. The import of foreign goods into American households, which o: i i i ! and even increased over time, has been overshadowed by the more drama:1 isv in the export of American consumer goods worldwide in the twentieth cei'tuiv1 " Selling America to the world became an integral part of US foreign poliev by r h. end of World War II. Consuming America turned into a major pursu íl in Western Europe in the early postwar period and across the globe by the 197;"^. Yet while it is relatively easy to trace the spread of Coca-Cola or McDonald's branches abroad or to quantify the international proliferation of American :n n ies and Starbucks coffeehouses, it has been far more difficult to determine tV cultural and political impact of this proliferation. Global consumption, more than any other development since 1945, has invited the charge of homogenization.118 The sociologist Douglas Goodman pos-tulated in 2007 that "to the extent that there is a global culture it will be a u>n-sumer culture."1" If Goodman's premise is correct, then America as the leading producer and exporter of consumer goods in the world became the tenplare fin global culture. However, goods and cultural products such as music and film do not carry a fixed, normative meaning that is closely tied to their place of orijm Eating a McDonald's hamburger carries different cultural meaning tor Tam n ese, Dutch, and American consumers. Sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural historians have only recently begun to explore in more depth the multipk meanings of objects in different cultural contexts, even though the glob:;: dissemination of goods began a long time ago.uo The German philosopher Walter Benjamin was one of the first scholars to . I; about an object's relation to time and space. In a 1936 essay about the effects i niass production on the cultural meaning of art, he argued that through the Ir;:vf techniques of mechanical reproduction, art was losing its "aura," which he eiitified as its "presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place it ippens to be." Through the process of mechanical reproduction, a work of art fiild be transferred in time and place and thus become "reactivated" in a vastly different context. This transfer, Benjamin concluded, represented a "tremendous scattering of tradition," commodifying but at the same time democratizing art J h.< making it accessible to a broader audience.121 From this critical perspective, • t!ie transfer of products of popular culture, especially film, from their place of iginal production in the United States to places of consumption anywhere in ; lie world, stripped them of their "authenticity," their uniqueness in time and space. They became symbols of the generic nature of modern consumer culture. ;njamin was right about the epistemological unmooring of artifacts, whether * art or consumer products, when removed from a specific time and place. But the kiss of "aura" should not be confused with a loss of meaning. Consumers of art and artifacts reassembled the cultural meaning in ways specific to their own ace and time. jl Benjamin's analysis sheds light on European intellectual disputes over mass ||_ consumption and modernization since the beginning of the twentieth century. On one side were those who saw it as a tale of progress. Since industrialization, IE. they argued, people had produced and consumed more, knew more, and lived W. longer and in greater comfort. In cultural terms, advocates associated modern-} ization with a better-informed public, greater political participation (Benjamin's jk democratization), and greater equality of the sexes.122 On the other side were Jl those concerned about the loss of what Benjamin had called "aura" or authentic-H ity. They saw in modernization the depersonalization of production, the loss of jfc individualism in an increasingly technocratic and bureaucratic society, and the predominance of materialism and consumerism in people s lives. Spearheaded by the Frankfurt School in the 1910s and 1930s, this view became a major critique of Western industrial society in the period after World War II and helped I spark the protest movements of the 1960s. Adherents of this view warned that •[ 576 ]■ ■[ 577 ]" PETRA GOEDDE the forces of materialism and the overwhelming power of the capitalist sy-tei would replace indigenous cultures with generic ones stripped of any autliuin 123 meaning. Once scholars looked closely at the reception of global, mostly Amei products abroad, they found more diversity than critics had predicted, MlI aid's became a favorite object of investigation for anthropologists and sociolo perhaps because its rapid global proliferation made it a prime target lor .it by cultural traditionalists. Founded by two brothers in suburban Lo> Angel , -n 1937, the chain expanded nationally in the 1950s under the management and later ownership of Ray Kroc. Kroc applied the methods of Fordism and TavLri- ni to the preparation of food. The burgers and fries were "assembled" along a In ic ■ j( production much like Ford's Model T automobiles earlier in the century process made the product more uniform, cheaper, and thus accessible n> ;i nc,< set of consumers with limited means. Aided by the changes in American d graphics and infrastructure—suburbanization and the baby boom—McDonald's thrived as an affordable restaurant choice for lower- and middle-class families in » the United States. In the 1960s McDonald's began its international expansion reaching 12.0 countries by the end of the century.114 More than any other international brand, McDonald's came to symbolize the globalization of American culture. Apart from burgers and fries, the company sold a way of life associated with America: cosmopolitanism to some, generic blandness to others. Critics charged that McDonald's represented the worst of global culture, devoid of local authenticity. They saw Max Weber's dire prediction realized, that rationalization would restrict "the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct. Rationalization and modernization became McDonald's greatest asset. In Asia, for instance, customers frequently cited high sanitary standards, t.-c pre dictability of food choices, reliable quality, and the professional courtesy of the staff as major benefits of the restaurant chain. While customers associated eating at McDonald's with American culture, researchers found little indication that the presence of these restaurants threatened local customs. Instead, they found that the restaurant chain itself engaged in a process of indigenization and hybridization. Franchises adapted to local culinary and service preferences, while nearby businesses emulated some of McDonald's innovations.126 : c. n new kitchen. Their kitchen is obsolete by that time----The American systuii i\ designed to take advantage of new inventions and new techniques."137 Ni\.<,r. emphasized Americans' desire for new consumer products whereas Kliru-il,. iLV emphasized Soviet production skills. The debate symbolized the paradoxes of Soviet attitudes toward o u*. 1 tion during the 1950s. On the one hand, Khrushchev seemed to reject the u>n. spicuous consumption on display in the US high-tech kitchen mode]. On ;,u other hand, he claimed for the Soviet Union success in the area of mass con imp. tion, thus validating mass consumption as a national goal."8 For Nixon .-. id tl.c. exhibition's organizers, the higher quality of American consumer goods ■ ■ superior living standard of ordinary Americans became the major argmr.cm lor the superiority of the Western capitalist system. The exhibition also includd ,t display of an American voting booth, but that symbol of democracy was ■ shadowed by the dazzling array of American consumer gadgets. The American company PepsiCo, one of the sponsors of the exhibit, distributed free soft »11 i.ks to visitors, further driving home the message of material abundance in the United States. The Moscow exhibit suggested that in the United States life wa- la 1 kmc comfortable than in the Soviet Union, and that this comfort was grou-d< d in the material goods available to ordinary citizens rather than the abstract Irtt-doms and democratic privileges they enjoyed. The American exhibition in Moscow put into sharper relief Soviet and Eastern European shortcomings in the development of consumer goods, despite IChr js.i-chev's effort to conceal them. He had been aware of the potential poli:ic.il I allow from the widening material gap between East and West and had already delivered a promise at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 to increase livnv, ->z,\k-dards in the Soviet Union. Following his famous denunciation of Stab 1 he declared, "We are setting ourselves the task of overtaking and surpassiiii; -In-richest capitalist countries in the matter of per capita consumption, of achieving a complete abundance in our country of every type of consumers' goods." : ■ GLOBAL CULTURES > Die thaw that followed, however, did not produce the desired prosperity but ■ ns'tead accelerated disaffection in several Eastern European countries, culmi- '' luring in strikes and riots in Poland in the summer of 1956, followed by a popu-| 1 uprising in Hungary in October and November. Soviet troops intervened t-i'l crushed the revolt, demonstrating the limits of the post-Stalinist liberaliza-cicui. Stalinist methods thus prevailed in the political realm, even though <, u'i. nges were un^er way in the cultural realm, particularly in the creative arts, ■..■here modernism took hold in industrial design and architecture.140 The push for consumer goods occurred in other socialist states as well. East CkTinany's ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party, announced at its Fifth Party Congress in July 1958 that by 1961 the GDR would not only reach, but surpass, the per capita consumption of its West German rival. The objective, declared party leader Walter Ulbricht, was to show the superiority of the socialist social order over the imperialist forces of the Bonn regime."1 Manufacturers increas- J nyly turned from housing to furniture, household goods, and fashion design in -.he 1960s. East Germany became the Eastern Bloc's leading manufacturer of j m plastics and other synthetic goods, relying on a well-developed chemical indus- j f' try dating back to the prewar years.142 \ '• East Germans used thermoplastics in the manufacturing of a wide variety I at products, from household goods to cars. These cars were meant to showcase Last Germany's progress toward a consumer society. Instead they became sym-k>ls of socialism's failures in consumer manufacturing and marketing. East ' icrmans had to wait an average of fifteen years for the delivery of a Trabant model. The design of the car and its sister model, the Wartburg, changed little urn- the years. East German officials hailed the longevity of the design as a sign I |r "fthc superiority of the socialist over the capitalist system. "In the USA," one Socialist design analyst postulated in the late 1950s, "large amounts of plastics .111. produced. But they are made in the main into worthless, cheap and shock-ugly kitschy mass wares, into Woolworth products. Owing to their mania for j |r ornamentation, these in turn tend to be rendered quickly obsolete by something ic iv and more fash ionable." Socialist production, by contrast, the statement con- ! I, tinned, focused on long-term practicality, thus implicitly condemning America's ■Usteful consumption.143 ■ f <8a 1- •[ 585 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES Eastern European government officials proved only marginally moi nable to shifting tastes in clothing during the 1950s. Long production cy( the five-year economic plan made it virtually impossible to keep up with 1,1L. j, pace of changing designs offered in the West. By the end of the decade, he officials were confronted with the increasing popularity of American-style clothing. Blue jeans and T-shirts became prized commodities in an unde rgi,)Uni, market of Western consumer goods. Jeans in particular served as a sy -ib 1 ,,1 youthful rebellion against the strict norms of traditional European soc both East and West. While Western European conservatives ultimately atveptiv the commodification of youth culture, their Eastern European counit continued to deride it as evidence of capitalist materialism and decadence and worse still, as an incentive to juvenile delinquency and a threat to comimn sr ideology. Soviet officials uncoupled their disdain for Western materialism froii thui own push toward increased consumption and modernization. Khrushche\ packaged higher living standards as a socialist goal. He acknowledged that shouag« in consumer goods were a major source of dissatisfaction for Soviet and Ea^r,, ,, European citizens and resolved to build a consumer economy within the idsi.li^i-cal parameters of the Soviet system.144 This meant accelerating the production it domestic versions of Western consumer icons, including passenger vehicles. m: American-style jeans.HS The Soviet effort to create consumer socialism without ideological 11Tuiv ultimately failed. Consumption championed individualism and private u\i 1-ership. Ownership of automobiles and homes gave citizens more freedoms, more privacy, and more mobility, thus limiting the possibility of state surveillanc". nc control. By endorsing consumption, communist states allowed limited free expression in material terms while still curtailing it in word and image. Howevci, tlia soon discovered that objects could symbolize political rebellion against the state. Appearing in public in authentic American jeans, for instance, could symbolic political dissent in the context of the Cold War. Consumption in the communist bloc remained a highly politicized and contested arena throughout the dui .-.ri«m of the Cold War. More importantly, however, Eastern European governments could not deliver the goods. Despite public promises to outdo the West in the production of consumer goods, Eastern European manufacturers lacked the material resources c0 launch large-scale production of their new designs, whether jeans, household goods, or cars. Design and propaganda consistently outperformed real existing production in Eastern Europe. East Germans, in particular, became acutely aware of their own material shortcomings as they compared their own postwar living standard to that in West Germany.146 Even though political barriers kept Western consumer goods out of the communist bloc, advances in transportation technology facilitated their spread everywhere else. They allowed local products to reach a global market and respond to consumer demands faster than ever. International brands such as Coca-Cola relied on cheap production, an international distribution network, and global marketing. Advances in communication technology provided another vehicle for the globalization of consumer products, primarily through new means to advertise products to a global clientele. Advertising evolved as an industry in the United States in the 1910s and expanded rapidly in all major industrial countries in the postwar period. Advertising agents became major interpreters of popular culture and producers of popular desires. They fine-tuned their messages to local, national, and international markets, and tweaked a product's image to match the cultural, social, and economic environment of their target audiences. Advertisers proliferated their messages through print, audio, and, by the 1950s, television media. As new communications technologies reached larger audiences, advertising became increasingly profitable. The advent of television in particular offered the opportunity to broadcast visual messages to millions of people simultaneously, thus greatly accelerating a product's national and international recognition. Although the webs of consumption drew an increasingly larger number of people from different parts of the world closer together, it is important to recognize that many of the world s poor remained outside of that globalized consumer society. Consumption signified and reinforced inequality and thus, by extension, difference. Most of the poor in the industrialized and the developing world had access to the images of luxury consumer goods through billboards, newspapers, and television screens, yet they did not necessarily have access to the goods themselves. The inequalities remained largely tied to the North-South differential, yet not exclusively so. In many places, particularly in the global South, abject poverty and conspicuous wealth existed side by side within a single locale. As 586 ]• •[ 587 PETRA G OED DE urban elites became linked to a universal community of global consume: \ tl-were separated from their impoverished neighbors by the inequalities of el.i, Like other areas of globalization, consumption fostered both homogt ii>, tion and heterogenization as consumers made individually, economu all-,, Jni| culturally determined choices in the marketplace. Middle- and upper-clas; .,, sumers in major population centers enjoyed a greater choice of product,\ but t, ,r same diversity replicated itself in every other metropolitan area of the world Whether consumers entered the Dubai Mall in the United Arab Emirates oj n . Mall of America in suburban Minnesota, they could count on finding .1 (,, t group of global brands. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, class u.on- th ir nationality seemed to separate people s experience as consumers. 3- Challenging Cultural Norms \S the pace and volume of transnational exchanges of goods and people accelerated, challenges to dominant cultural norms and practices multiplied. Beginning in the late 1950s these cultural challenges burst onto the political stage, undermining the power of cultural and political elites everywhere. Civil rights advocates in the United States demanded racial equality before the law. Youth in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia demanded greater cultural and political freedoms, undermining the Cold War consensus in East and West. Women challenged gender and sexual norms and demanded equal rights. And religious groups demanded both greater tolerance of different belief systems and a return to fundamental religious values in an increasingly secular world. These transformations raised important questions about the effects of the grearer connectivity of the world s cultures across vast distances. Did they create a better undersranding of and higher tolerance for cultural difference, or did they instead cause increasing cultural fragmentation and the potential for cultural conflict? Transnational Youth Cultures Young people more than any other population group drove the postwar movement toward cultural globalization. Emerging first in Western industrialized countries, but eventually spreading globally, young people began to identify increasingly with a deterritorialized culture of shared tastes in music, fashion, language, and behavior across national boundaries. They sought connections to a transnational youth community independent of, and often in opposition to, dominant regional and national cultures, provoking intergenerational conflict within their own communities. They played a vital role in resisting and ultimately undermining the pressures toward conformity within their home societies. Their search for alternatives began in the cultural realm with the creation of cultural niches within existing structures. By the 1960s the search turned into a ■[ 5S9 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE TABLE 4.1 Crude birth rates (number of births per 1,000 people per year): Germany, Japan, and United States Year Germany Japan 1 :sa '945 16.1 30.9* 2.0./: 1950 16.3 zS.i 2.4.1 1955 1S.8 »9-4 17-4 17.2. 13-7 1965 17.4 18.6 19.4 Sources: Scatisnichcs Bundesamt Deutschland, Genesis, table nfiix-ooi6: "Lebcndgcborcne je-'iooj J ln, wohnen Deutschland, Jahre," www.gcnesis.dcscatis.de/gencsis/onlinc; Japan, Statistics Bureau,"UiMmitgj Statistics of Japan, chap, i, "Population and Households," table 1-14, "Live Birthsby Sex and Sex Ration nt l,ne Birth, 91871-1004," www.stat.go.jp/cnglish/data/chouki/oi.htmiMicliacl R. Haines, "Crude Birth Rm, .huL* General Fertility Rate, by Race: 1800-199S," tabic Ab-fo-v, in Historical Statistics of the United States ' ' Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Mi Haines, Alan L. Olmsccad, Richard Sutch, and GavinWright (New York: Cambridge University Pres lutp://dx.dot.org/io.roi7/ISBN-975a$ni3i97i.Ab40-643. * Data from 1943. political challenge to those very structures, leading to political and cul:.ir,il fragmentation. The concept of a separate youth culture became identified primarih v nil American popular culture in the early postwar period. The reasons fni lIk American predominance lay in the historical role of the United States in tin. production and dissemination of mass entertainment, dating back to the war period, but also in key postwar economic and demographic developments in the United States. Economically Americans emerged from the Great Depi and war with unprecedented productive capacity. The manufacturing of con l 11 1 goods coupled with the social and economic consequences of the baby boom in. Table 4.1) fueled Americas postwar economic prosperity and ensured the dnrri-nance of American products on the world market well into the 1960s. Demographic changes influenced the evolution of a separate youth cu I: the United States. Birth rates rose from 1.4 children per family during tl pression to 3.1 in the 1950s.'47 Suburbs around New York, Cleveland, Chicag GLOBAL CULTURES uid Los Angeles expanded rapidly, where a growing middle class raised the baby-boc-m generation. Suburban life revolved around the needs and desires of these baby boomers. As these children grew into teenagers in the 1950s, they became a nWjor force in the development of a separate youth culture as their tastes in fashion, music, and entertainment began to diverge significantly from those of their ciders and their purchasing power helped shape the national and international market in consumer products. Die postwar children confronted in their parents a generation that came of age during the Depression and war and retreated to the suburbs in search of security, financial stability, and middle-class status. The sociologist David Riesman presented a psychological profile of the Depression generation in his study The Lonely Crowd (1950). He identified the other-directed individual as the dominant social type of the postwar generation, a type that sought to fulfill the expectations of those around him or her, to fit into a social environment prescribed by others. Riesman s stinging critique of postwar society would resonate with youthful tebels over the next two decades.148 By the mid-1950s, Riesman's diagnosis had become embedded in fiction and nonaction works. Sloan "Wilsons 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, illustrated the struggles of middle management employees who needed to come to terms with work, home life, rising material expectations, and their wartime traumas.148 The novel addresses two key social expectations of men: as successful breadwinners and caring fathers. Both were supposed to define the successful man in the postwar era, and both at times stood in direct conflict with each other. The 1959 book The Status Seekers by Vance Packard exposed the social constraints faced by an expanding middle class. Packard produced a meticulous analysis of the social stratification of American society, concluding that the rise of big corporations in the United States made the American ideal of social mobility and individual creativity ever harder to achieve.150 The monotony and conformity of the workplace seemed to undermine some of the core values of the American dream. America's postwar youth culture emerged in opposition to these social pres-iSures toward conformity and rising expectations. The first to mount the challenge were working-class youth who felt excluded from the rising living standards and .better employment opportunities afforded their middle-class peers. In the early •[ 590 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE T postwar years they developed a distinct style of dress, language, and inusu ,' taste that drew on African American music and culture, and rejected rnidjl . class conventions and codes of conduct. The look and language of workin<--J n,. youth culture received national attention through the 1953 movie The Wit J r starring Marlon Brando as Johnny, the leader of a working-class motorcy^ , johnny and his fellow motorcyclists wear blue jeans and black leather making them oddly conformist in their nonconformity. The plot w,ts ]r.(lv^ based on a real-life incident in July 1947 when about four thousand motor.- ulu;,, terrorized the small town of Hollister in central California for several 1 Even though the movie was highly critical of the disrespectful and dest. 1 tiu behavior of the club members, it tried to provide a psychological and socic explanation for their behavior. Johnny's rebellion seems random and unlocu^J at first. When one of the patrons in the local bar asks him what he is rejellnv against, he answers: "What have you got?" But as he develops a close bond w irii Kathie, a waitress and daughter of the local police chief, he reveals his emotion .1 scars, brought on by the physical abuse suffered at the hands of his fathu. ■ k bonds with Kathie because she too has a difficult relationship with her fathir, who shows no backbone as a law enforcement official and is pushed around both the townspeople and the motorcycle youth. The movie makes a statement as much about fatherhood as about youthful delinquency. It suggests that both abusive and spineless fathers are to blame for the troubled youth. Two other films consolidated youth rebellion as a blockbuster genre in Hoi wood. In Blackboard Jungle, a young Sidney Poitier plays an inner-city high school student who with his classmates challenges the authority of one of 1 teachers. Blackboard Jungle adds a layer of racial conflict to the theme of deli quent working-class youth who both rebel against and crave parental ar.thnri Blackboard Jungle, like The Wild One, critiques as well as humanizes youth L havior and blames broken families and insufficient parental supervision.'5" Tf- 1 same year, the emerging youth icon James Dean played the role of a disillusion^ high school student in search of love and parental guidance in Rebel ivithoui Cause. Dean made youth culture attractive to white middle-class adolescen The three protagonists in the film, Jim (James Dean), Plato (Sal Mineo), and Jiu!\ (Natalie Wood) all feel alienated from their parents—Jim because his fathci ^ not standing up to his overbearing and controlling mother; Judy because ihi on Brando leans on. a motorcycle in a scene from The Wild One, 1953. The movie showcased rican youth culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Brando became an international icon of iful rebellion. (Getty Images) PETRA GOEDDE feels rejected by her father, who seems emotionally cold and fails to relate 10 since she has become an adolescent; and Plato because his father left him when he was a little boy and his mother is largely absent, leaving him in the caie .i| housekeeper. The three of them create an imaginary nuclear family with Jim L iKf Judy assuming parental roles toward Plato. They search for authentic^v, < ni,,. tional support, and moral guidance, yet receive only material comforts and emotional rejection from their parents.553 The movie's critique of the shallowjie-s it the parents' lives foreshadowed the political and cultural critique of Amu it. n materialism launched by the New Left in the 1960s. The spiritual rift between the generations was amplified by the emergence of a new genre in music: rock and roll. In the postwar period, young Americans, many of them white, experimented with new forms of rhythm that drew on |. /j, blues, and other black musical traditions. Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Elvis Pr.-sL-v. and others drew on African American music to create their distinctive rln-lim and sound.15"* The established industry at first rejected Elvis's music urn. K found fame through a little-known label, Sun Records. Still, because 11 J „■ African American influence, white radio hosts in the South refused to play his songs. Some black radio stations also rejected his music because they knew he was white and felt he had pirated songs from black musicians.155 After his hu, k-through in the mid-1950s, conservative critics, mostly whites, were appalled nor only by the sound of his music, but also by his sexually suggestive dance mou's. They accused him of being both oversexed and effeminate. Because his pi.bk performances often generated uncontrollable screams and even riots among "is fans, law enforcement officials saw him as a threat to public order. Despite the negative reactions, or maybe because of them, Presley's popularity quickly rose to phenomenal heights in the United States and abroad. Young people copied 1 is dance moves, his hair (which Elvis dyed black to look like the actor Tony Curtis), and his way of dressing. His music as well as his public appearance had no precedent and therefore became easily recognizable when copied, and his style became a vehicle for challenging established cultural norms and social conventions. Urban youth in Europe and Japan adopted the dress styles, music prefeiciin-s, and even some linguistic terms from their American counterparts, and the, did so for much the same reasons: to challenge the deeply conservative and confonn- GLOEALCULTURES =jsc culture of their parents' generation.156 Jazz, rock, blue jeans, cigarettes, and chewing gum became universal symbols of postwar youth rebellion. In the United Kingdom, the "Mods" embraced modern consumerism and stylish clothes, rode Ground on Italian scooters, and listened to rhythm and blues. Their model was 'not so much the American rocker as the American version of the Italian mafloso. Ihey listened to jazz and congregated in urban coffee bars.15' In Germany these youth became known as Halbstarke. They rode around on motorcycles, sported ■ Elvis-like hairstyles, and wore jeans and leather jackets, emulating Marlon Brando and James Dean. More worrisome to their parents was the sudden spike in juvenile rioting and crime in the mid-1950s.158 Rather than searching for indigenous icauses, West German officials identified the riots as a problem imported from America, reviving the interwar debates about the evils of Americanization. They 'thus turned a domestic generational conflict into an imported cultural one. America's youth culture seeped into Eastern Eutope as well, where young people followed closely the trends of their peers in the West. East Germans had access to the latest trends in American popular culture through Western radio •stations, such as West Berlin's Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS) and the Voice of America. They also frequently crossed over into West Betlin to watch newly released American movies. East Berlin authorities estimated that in 3956 and 1957 around twenty-six thousand East Berliners attended West Berlin movie theaters every day.155 American-style motorcycle gangs proliferated in the East as well. East German government officials condemned these youth trends in much the same ways as the West did: as a threat to public order and a foreign import. For East German authotities, however, ideological concerns were at stake as well. They interpreted the behavior and dress styles of the Halbstarken as • a mindless adoption of the materialist culture of the capitalist West and there- i jfc- fore a threat not only to German traditions but also to the ideology of socialism."0 By the late 1950s the East German state stepped up its assault on rock and roll. Party leader Walter Ulbricht and defense minister Willi Stoph declared I: that rock and roll was an anarchistic and capitalist invasion and a threat to East Germany's national security. Law enforcement officials meted out harsh punish-; ments for fans who dared to advocate or listen to the music in public. In one 1 typical incident in the fall of 1959, the courts sentenced fifteen Leipzig youth •[ 594 ]' mm -[ «s 1- PETRA GOEDDE demonstrators to jail because they had marched through the streets demanding rock and roll rather than a watered-down domestic version called the Lipsi, anj booing the Socialist leadership.161 In postwar Poland, American youth culture seeped into the doiru.-rii. • c.iu through a group called the Bikiniarze (Bikini Boys), named for the Amciu j atomic test site on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The Bikiniarze, pri'j mu\\ located in Warsaw, were easily identifiable in public by their Western clothes and public mannerisms. They listened to jazz, smoked American cigarettes, and' alhd each other by American names. Polish authorities derided them as hooIi"am (chuligani) and accused them of sexually promiscuous behavior.162 In Czechoslovakia, fans of American pop culture called themselves pdsek; in Hungarv they were thejam-pec.16* Across Europe, socialist as well as capitalist, state authorities shared similar concerns about American materialism, cultural imperialism, and social disintegration. For European youth Americanization meant something entirely different, however. It stood for emancipation, modernization, and in some cases democratization. They perceived their embrace of American pop culture not as cultural imperialism but as rebellion against the cultural conformity and authoritarian isjii of their parents' generation and the state. America thus became an integral part of the domestic intergenerational conflicts between cultural homogeneity ami heterogeneity.164 Local youth utilized the foreign as a way to challenge what thev perceived as conformism at home. From their perspective American poptL.it culture offered diversity rather than imposed conformity. Not even the Soviet Union could prevent the spread of American pop culture among its youth, despite state officials' concerted efforts in the first deca'di after the war to keep Americanization at bay. In 1946 Stalin appointed ( A\ remarkable restraint, tolerating open access to Western popular culture, political debate, and the forging of personal relations. A surprising number of those 111.1-sonal contacts morphed into romantic relationships, as contemporary oS\ei\u , noted with a mixture of wonder and alarm.1*9 Many young Soviets would later credit the youth festival with transforming their views about Western cnlnnL and politics and with leading them into political opposition in the 1960s i|U| 1970s.170 Although this and subsequent youth festivals had far less of an impact on Western youth, they nonetheless helped lay the foundation for a transr.ation.il cultural and political dialogue. Moscow strengthened the determination of ,-n entire generation to overcome the Cold War divide, fleeting and illusionarv .1» ir may have been. Political Rebellion The politicization of international youth culture occurred at different moments in East and West in response to local as well as global concerns. In the United States, the civil rights movement became a major catalyst for galvanizing youth activism in the late 1950s. Organizations like the NAACP had fought racial discrimination since the early twentieth century, primarily in the courts anc wi.li-out significant grassroots participation. This changed in the 1950s when African Americans began to stage large-scale popular campaigns, such as the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins in i960, and the 196? effort to desegregate the commercial district in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. These campaigns drew international attention and led to significant pressure on the federal government to address the problem of racial discrimina:ir>n in the United States.171 By the 1960s, Americas civil rights struggle became de-ply enmeshed in the decolonization movements in Africa and Asia, Cold War politics, and the American war in Vietnam. GLOBAL CULTURES \ Young activists not only played a critical role in the struggle for racial equal- -iV jn the United States; they also began to challenge the international Cold War ' ,-:-der. In the late 1950s they joined long-established groups of pacifists, leftist in- ■llectuals, and concerned scientists in Japan, Western Europe, and the United K* _ States, calling for an end to the nuclear arms race, which had escalated since the I ioviet Union acquired the atomic bomb in i94?.m By i960 the antinuclear cam- i ,ij 174 citizens. j The philosophical and cultural critique of mass culture and Western democ- [ racy found expression in the 1961 Port Huron Statement, the founding state- ment of the American New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Its main author, Tom Hayden, had become involved in student politics at PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES the University of Michigan. The Port Huron Statement advocated "particpaior' democracy" the return to direct citizens' engagement with the political pro, o, Drawing on Horkheimer, Adorno, Sartre, and Mills, the statement observed th, growing alienation among students and citizens, the increasing bureaunviiij tion of everyday life, and the lack of autonomy of workers, managers, and sin-dents. It shifted the locus of radical political activism from the traditional ba^e of the Left—the industrial workplace—to the university and the corpoj„lL office complex.175 The statement reflected the generational transformation fit n-the traditional political assumptions of the old Marxist Left to the grassroots activism of the New Left. Racial equality, the prevention of nuclear war, and national liberation movements in the Third World emerged as core elements of the New Left agenda iii the United States and Western Europe over the course of the 1960s. Some ol tl\ more radical groups began to conceive of their opposition against goverr.n , n restrictions in their own country as part of a global struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Militant activists were particularly inspired by Frantz FV.non, who argued in The Wretched of the Earth that violence was an inevitable part of the liberation of the colonized from the colonizer.15,6 His writings offered a praj* matic rationale for their romantic notion of the militant Third World revolutionary, exemplified by figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong. Che Guevara in particular achieved iconic status among Western youth by the mid-1960s as he moved from one guerrilla campaign to the next. A fix-helping Fidel Castro oust the Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista on New Year's Day 1959, he continued his revolutionary struggle first in the Congo and later in Bolivia, both without success. Che was captured in the Bolivian mountains on October 8,1967, and executed two days later.177 His death cemented his mythical status as a hero of the militant struggle for national liberation, a myth that endures to this day.178 It would be wrong to conclude, however, that violence was a foreign import into the Western world through revolutionary fighters like Che Guevara o: radical writers like Fanon. Violence had been an integral aspect of the 1960s youth protests worldwide. In the United States, violence occurred among angry mobs of white segregationists who assaulted peaceful protesters at lunch courier sli-ins across the South. Police beat civil rights protesters or sent dogs to attack i i t f I IB them at marches, as they did in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. Militant secrregarionists bombed churches, lynched African Americans, and assassinated civil rights leaders, including Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. By the mid-1960s, violence erupted frequently in American cities as frustration with police injustice and the slow pace of civil rights reform mounted. Some riots were sparked by instances of police brutality, others occurred in response to street violence and murder. In the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968, riots occurred in cities across the country, including Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.179 A few months later at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police chased and beat protesters in what an official report later called a "police riot."180 The state thus both initiated and became the target of violence throughout the 1960s. In Europe, too, state violence begat popular violence in a vicious cycle that escalated in the late 1960s. When German students took to the streets of Berlin in June 1967 to protest the visit of the shah of Iran, a police officer shot and killed a demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg. The killing of an innocent protestor— Ohnesorg had been shot in the back of the head and thus could not have posed an imminent threat to the police as initially claimed—galvanized the student population across Germany.181 It also catapulted Rudi Dutschke, leader of the Berlin branch of the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) to national prominence. Dutschke himself became the victim of violence a year later when a young radical rightist shot him in the head on April 11,1968, apparently inspired by the hateful anti-Dutschke reporting in the sensationalist conservative German newspaper Bild and the assassination a week earlier of Martin Luther King. Dutschke narrowly survived the attack, but died a decade later from related health problems.182 Already radicalized after the Ohnesorg killing, students turned their anger against the media and the government. The most radical among them joined or supported militant organizations, such as the June 1 Movement, the Baader-Meinhof Group, and the Red Army Faction (RAF). From the 1970s to the 1990s the RAF engaged in bombing attacks, kidnappings, and murders of leading industrial and political figutes.183 Violence also erupted on the streets of Paris in May 1968, as student protesters clashed with police in what became known as the "night of the barricades." The clashes represented the culmination of months of unrest that had begun eatlier 600 601 PETRA GOEDDE that year at one of the city's suburban campuses in Nanterre. The initial piotesis were directed at university regulations, chief among them strict rules prohih-.t-ing men from entering women's dormitories. When administrators showed :n, sign of relenting, the protests intensified and the catalog of grievances expanded.1'' It ultimately encompassed a broad critique of the conservative social and political course of the de Gaulle government, a demand for greater democratic participation of students in the governance of the university and the state, and oiitr.i^ over the increasingly aggressive measures of the local police in quashing student protests. By early May the protests had spread beyond Nanterre to the Sorbonnc in the heart of Paris, The more the conflict escalated, the more support rite protesters received from moderates who had become convinced of the authorises' abuse of power. During the night of the barricades on May io-ii, prompted h>, the arrest of more than two hundred students who were held without recourse tc legal representation, several thousand students set up roadblocks and engaged in street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Several hund:.ed suffered injuries and more activists were arrested.185 Building on the momentum of the student protests, French labor unions announced a general strike on May 13 that almost brought down the nationalgov-ernment. Notably absent in this struggle were the French Communist Party .1 mi the Communist-dominated labor union, the Confederation Generale du 1 V.-viil (CGT). They supported neither the students nor the workers' demand for auto-gestion (self-management). The French communists saw the rise of the New Left student movements as a threat to their dominance on the political left, and the) were not altogether wrong. The students and workers challenged the regimented and hierarchical authority of the Communist Party elite. Daniel Cohn-H.- id it, leader of the enrages, as the student protesters became known, often attacked the communists as authoritarian "Stalinist slobs."136 The student-worker coalition h: France challenged both state authority and the predominance of the Old ["ft ir. French politics. However, despite the pressure from below, little changed permanently in the French political system. The next French national election i:-. Turn-produced a decisive victory for conservatives under President de Gaulle. State authorities on the other side of the Iron Curtain viewed the Western protest movements with increasing unease. They shared the French communists concerns regarding the loss of control over the leftist political agenda. Ra.Kv f \ GLOBAL CULTURES than interpreting these protests as an encouraging sign of the imminent collapse of the capitalist system, Eastern European government officials feared that the spirit of protest could incite Eastern European youth against their own governments. Thus, when reform movements emerged in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, Soviet and other Eastern European leaders reacted with alarm. The Prague Spring of 1968 became the Cold War era's biggest social, cultural, J and political challenge to the Soviet Bloc system until its collapse in 1989. The Soviet response to this challenge—a joint military invasion by most of the Warsaw Pact countries—effectively crushed any hope for a reform of the system for the next twenty years.187 §:,:■:. The initial impetus for reform in Czechoslovakia came not from students, as in the West, but from the country's literary elites. However, their critique of Czech socialism resonated with the nation's students, intellectuals, and professionals, who transformed the critique into a broader reform movement. Participants at the Fourth Writers' Congress of Czechoslovakia, June 27-19,1967, openly criticized |-; ■ the Czech Communist Party's policies, particularly those concerning restrictions on free speech. One of the speakers, the poet Pavel Kohout, told listeners that it was "the duty of our congress, the congress of a union to which the great majority of writers and commentators belong, to demand an amendment to the press law so that each author should have the right to defend the freedom of their speech within the framework—I stress, within the framework—of the constitution."188 Czech leader and first secretary of the Communist Party Antonín Novotný |,;; roundly condemned the writers for their oppositional rhetoric and threatened a J campaign against the liberalizing forces. However, Alexander Dubček, the first j party secretary of Slovakia, adopted a more supportive position. At the Central Committee Plenum held at the end of October 1967, he called on the party leadership to "deepen intra-party democracy" and to loosen up the hierarchical top-down power structure.185 Novotný, who held the nation's top military, governmental, and party functions, became increasingly isolated within the Communist Party structure. By January the party had decided on a fundamental restructuring that separated the party from the government. Novotný retained the title of president, a largely ceremonial post, while Dubček became first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz). This bureaucratic and personnel ■[ 602. ]• ■[ 603 ]• PETRA GOEDDE reform opened the path toward sweeping changes in the country. It brought to power the progressive wing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, whirl hllu been pushing for more openness within the social and political structures of trie state since the early 1960s. In April 1968 the new party leadership under Dubček officially approved the "Action Program," a series of measures to allow for more political divcrs.ty .mj greater freedom of expression.1'0 Tire Action Program officially sanctioned de velopments already under way within the country. Since March, newspapershatj been printing an increasingly broad spectrum of political views, including con mentaries critical of socialism. Noncommunist political parties reemergcd frdm internal exile and publicized rheir own blueprints for reform. In June 19/,H leading Czechoslovak writers and intellectuals published the "Two Thousand Words" Manifesto, which laid out the grassroots hopes and expectations of the reform movement and the ideas behind the concept of "socialism with a human face." It called on workers, students, and intellectuals to continue to push f ;i a form in their immediate environments.1" The Manifesto shared some common ground with the Port Huron Statement composed by the American New Le'i six years earlier. Like the American statement, it called for a coalition between workers and intellectuals and for mass participation of all citizens in the deno cratic process regardless of their political ideology. Despite Dubček's assurances, hard-liners in both Czechoslovakia and neighboring countries expressed grave concerns about the reforms. Soviet leader í m-nid Brezhnev pressured Dubček to rein in the popular wave of liberalism. East Germany's leader, Walter Ulbricht, was especially adamant about curbing the reform course, fearing that reform momentum from both the West German .md the Czech sides might inspire youth in his country. Among the Eastern Eu.ti-pean socialist states, only Romania and Yugoslavia seemed unfazed b) tin-Prague Spring. Both had followed an independent course toward soci-limi 1..10. the end of World War II and rejected foreign interference in what they rega 1 ds. d as the internal affairs of a sovereign brother state. Albania, already estranged from the Soviets, feared infringement on its own sovereignty more than a possible spillover of the Czech spirit of reform."2 The invasion of Czechoslovakia by five Warsaw pact states—Poland, Tasr Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Soviet Union—on August 10,:t-j *,iíSI. GLOBAL CULTURES brought a sudden end to the reform spirit in Eastern Europe. Politically, the party leadership returned to a conservative interpretation of socialism that fol-0wed closely the ideological line of the Soviet Union. Thus, much like in France in the summer of 1968 and in the United States, challenges to the Cold War oiler appeared to have failed. Nonetheless, they left a cultural legacy that was nurtured in alternative communes in the West and in underground dissident groups in the East.193 Cultural Fragmentation Even though politically the Prague Spring failed, culturally it brought about a vibrant underground culture of nonconformism in the 1970s and 1980s that gradually eroded the power of the communist regime. American bands like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa became a strong inspiration for Czech youth. Besides listening to foreign recordings of rock music, as early as the 1950s Czech musicians created their own rock groups, among them the Akord Club, which performed at the Raduta Club in central Prague, and The Plastic People of the Universe, who took their name from a 1967 Zappa song. While most of these groups were allowed to play in any number of prominent Prague nightclubs in the late 1950s and 1960s, they faced restrictions after the failure of the Prague Spring. The party leadership banned bands like The Plastic People, forcing them underground where they continued to nurture a dynamic collection if music groups called "the second culture." This "second culture" movement staged rock concerts in small Czech and Slovak towns away from the close scrutiny of the party bureaucrats, and thus succeeded in keeping rock music alive behind the Iron Curtain.194 Vaclav Havel, one of the leading activists in the Czechoslovak dissident movement and the first democratically elected postcom-munist Czech president, stressed the tremendous influence of Western music and youth culture on his own political and cultural growth.1'5 '■:: Even though youths' infatuation with rock music was not a political form of protest, state authorities interpreted it as such. Violent confrontations between police and rock fans erupted at several underground rock concerts in the mid-1970s. On one occasion young fans rioted in the small Bohemian town of Kdyně after organizers had canceled a concert for fear of rowdy behavior. Angry youth •[ 604 ]• •[ 605 ]• PETRA GOEDDE went on a rampage through the town, smashed car windows, and battled p( ], at the local train station. The riot left more than one hundred people injuiej "* Moderate voices within the party hierarchy warned that the party's hard 1" against rock music was turning apolitical music fans into opponents of the gime. Undeterred by these cautionary detractors, the party leadership com !ri its campaign against the second-culture rock bands, thereby ensurirr; n,„, liticization of a cultural opposition movement. Youth in the West in the 1970s channeled their political activism into causes-related more directly to their personal lives. This transformation reflecred not w much a coming to terms with their own inability to change the political s\ - ,., as an effort to find local and personal solutions to global problems. The 1 novemur ^ that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s—among them the environm'cn al women's, and gay and lesbian movements—expressed greater concern with the well-being of individuals regardless of nationality, gender, or race. In th-ir unn.i sal applicability, they were at once local and global. Young Americans and I.u , peans experimented with alternative ways of organizing partnerships, families and communities. Some created alternative work environments for adults uid alternative learning environments for children.1" This fragmentation dlfli sU| the power of the 1960s movements. At the same time it gradually tran.sro- .-.iul the social and cultural landscape of Western Europe and the United Stau-s. The idea of personal fulfillment and cultural diversity manifested irsc.fin education reform in many Western countries. Daniel Cohn-Bendit's post S biography illustrates one aspect of this transformation. After being expelled from France for his role in the 1968 upheavals, he worked as a teacher in an experimental nursery school in Frankfurt. Together with other educators he followed the concept of anti-authoritarian education, developed in the 1960s and adopted by New Left activists as a rejection of the strict authoritarian pa rent r <; and teaching many of them had received as children and adolescents. Desert some controversial aspects, including the idea of permitting young children 1.. explore their own sexuality as well as that of their peers and elders, the ...iu authoritarian movement contributed to the establishment of a more cooper him learning environment in modern pedagogy. School curricula reduced rote memorization and encouraged more questioning, debate, and experiential learning.1''' Universities, too, gradually transformed their curricula as a result of the civil •[ 606 ]• GLOBAL CULTURES cjcrjits, ethnic, and women's movements, even though the pace of change was ,|neven across Europe and North America. North American universities led the ^ay by establishing African American studies, women's studies, and ethnic studies programs in the 1970s. The environmental movement had a far-reaching impact on late twentieth-century culture and society. The environmentalists of the late 1960s were very much a product of postwar consumer culture. Clean air, clean water, and unpolluted parks were consumer amenities for middle-class suburbanites.159 But envi-•onmentalism also shared the antimaterialist philosophy of the New Left, and ■he antinuclear demands of the peace activists. The detrimental effects of consumption were revealed in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's expose on the dangers of pesticides and other harmful chemicals, published in the United States in (962.. The book galvanized opposition to chemical and industrial pollution of the global ecosystem and led to tighter environmental regulation.200 It connected the local to the global environment, because contamination of land, air, ind water in one part of the world had environmental consequences in other parts of the world. Pollution knows no national borders. The publication of Carson's book came on the heels of heightened concern ibout nuclear war and nuclear waste. The antinuclear movements of the 1950s had already begun to conjoin their political message with an environmental one. nuclear scientists had warned from the beginning about the long-term damage of nuclear war to the environment.201 Yet the dangers of nuclear contamination did not enter the public consciousness in a major way until the mid-1950s, when fallout from a US nuclear test site in the Pacific reached populated islands and international fishing grounds. A Japanese tuna trawler, the Lucky Dragon, was fishing in the path of the radioactive cloud, and its crew and catch received high closes of radiation. The incident created worldwide public concern, boosted the antinuclear movement, and led to international campaigns to stop nuclear testing.202 In 1963 the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain signed the Partial Test Ban treaty, which abolished surface testing of nuclear weapons. Underground tests continued unabated.203 Fear of nuclear, chemical, and industrial pollution helped catapult the environmental movement to global prominence. In the 1960s and early 1970s Americans were at the forefront of the movement. In 1970 they designated April iz as ■[ 607 1- PETRA GOEDDE annual Earth Day in order to boost environmental awareness amone citi/u- and encourage efforts to preserve the Earth's natural resources. Between i h,- n lv sage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the Superfund Act in 19S0, Am environmentalists achieved a number of important legislative successes h ronmental protection.204 Europeans, on the other hand, succeeded in cruu w enduring political parties focused on environmental issues, which gained 1 uJ. 5 erate legislative success and helped pass stringent regulations against pol; In West Germany, the Green Party entered into its first governing coalition * ith the Social Democrats in the state of Hesse in 1985 and joined a federal coal 1 i m ; government between 1998 and 1005. The emergence of environmental pii the European political scene forced mainstream political parties to eml least some environmental policies, such as curbing pollution, subsidizing :cnn\-. ' able energies, and limiting the use of nuclear power. Nongovernmental environmental organizations also proliferated slice iIk 4 1970s, reflecting a broad spectrum of environmental concerns and channeling - ^-w the grassroots youth activism of the 1960s into a more focused vehicle of political ~J~ |j advocacy. Most organizations operated on a regional and national levek eral developed an international base, among them Greenpeace and Earth Frist."" j. JA Greenpeace in particular garnered international attention and support unoi'di j its orchestration of spectacular and widely publicized protests. Founded ii Bi 1:-ish Columbia in the early 1970s, the organization combined antinucleai wuli 't^il environmental protests. Its first action was a protest against nuclear tesiu y "'ii the island of Amchitka in southwestern Alaska. Further campaigns included " "jK protests against the French testing site on Moruroa Atoll in the South Pacific, leading the French government to order the secret bombing of the Grccnpe,.ee -'m ship Rainbow Warrior. A photographer, unable to evacuate the vessel in tircu .\ •■ s killed in the blast. In the late 1970s, after it had evolved into the leading a,.: \ ist environmental organization, Greenpeace moved its international hcad<.]i.liters to Amsterdam. This move symbolized the increasing strength of envuonn.rr il activism in Europe. Since its emergence as an antinuclear activist group,r oiga nization has taken on a broad range of issues, including whaling, global wai ning and deforestation.20 s r The antinuclear movement reconnected with the international peace rvne- 1 ment in the early 1980s in opposition to the 1979 NATO double-track deciM-'n- r GLOBAL CULTURES in which NATO countries proposed a mutual reduction of medium-range missiles while at the same time threatening to increase nuclear missiles in Western I:urope should the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact partners turn down the proposal. As the deployment of those missiles in Western Europe neared, massive demonstrations and peace marches erupted in all major cities across Western liurope. The protesters charged that the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" rendered additional nuclear weapons futile, because Europe already had enough nuclear warheads on its soil to destroy the Soviet Bloc multiple times. £ven though most Europeans shared the protesters' concerns that adding more nuclear weapons to the arsenal would accomplish nothing, their governments proceeded with the deployment. The youth cultures of the 1970s and 1980s proliferated into a myriad of political and nonpolitical subgroups, connected across vast distances through new technological means of communication. They epitomized the complex interplay between the forces of homogenization and heterogenization. Transnational youth movements and youth cultures challenged dominant cultures and became major producers of local and global countercultures. The result was, depending on one's viewpoint, either cultural fragmentation or cultural pluralism. Fragmentation meant loss, pluralism signified gain. Those who had been part of the dominant culture saw this diversification as a loss of cultural traditions and cultural unity. Others, however, saw diversification as an opportunity for greater choice. Most in the younger generation were at ease with the idea of multiculturalism, yet they also developed an acute sense of globalization's potential for crushing the very diversity it helped to create. Challenging Gender Norms One of the most far-reaching global challenges to cultural norms came from the revitalization and expansion of the international women's rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, women's rights advocates struggled to make women's lives visible in the public realm and to make their rights explicit in the political realm. They received a signifl-*■■> it boost from the civil rights movement in the United States, and more bioadly from the expansion of the human rights agenda in the early 1970s. .r ^^s 1. ■r 6oo 1. PETRA GOEDDE Women helped shape and were shaped by the culmral transformations (.|\llc postwar period. Since 1945 more women than ever before worked ou-shIl \\\. home, participated in political processes, and became vocal advocates T01 thLlt M, rights. Economic and cultural globalization, in turn, affected the waysrn v. |,„ |, societies defined women's roles and women's status. There remained hu ences, however, in the social and political spaces women occupied and the they achieved, depending on the prevailing gender norms in their resp< clp.l mj. cieties. The debares about women's place in society rested on cultural ay unii,. tions about gender relarions and thus formed an integral part of the msatsu.n about global cultural change in the twentieth century. As women w overcome the inequalities within their own environments, they also stringed define a universal understanding of the rights of women. Ethnicity, class, and cultural customs shaped women's experiences u u.n, similar to men's, making them part of the global transformations brought abi-it by the Cold War, decolonization, and migration. Nonetheless, conception-, n gender shaped women's engagement with these transformations in particula ways and thus warrant separate treatment. When exploring cultural ch,me< through the lens of gender, the competing forces of homogenization versus hcicro genization, on the one hand, and universal ism versus particularism, on the ottii-i become visible. Women's lives became at once more alike in disparate pa:> <>■ the world and more diverse in each particular local setting. Their roles and thei rights were embedded both in the local traditions of their home communitie and in the global debates over human rights. Women's status within society became one of the battlegrounds in th. emerging Cold War of the late 1940s and 1950s. Communists and capirJiM each put forward an idealized image of women's roles in their respective sock'1 ies, highlighting the benefits afforded women in their own society and denouru ing the conditions in the other. Americans, and to a lesser extent Western Euk peans, propagated the rising living standards in the West, which afforded wwiii 1 greater comforts in increasingly mechanized households that included wash.n. machines, vacuum cleaners, and other modern amenities. The Soviet Uni-jn an Eastern Europe, in contrast, advertised the accomplishments of their women i \ production and research. What emerged in these idealized portrayals were tw» ■ GLOBAL CULTURES competing visions of women's lives and women's roles; one stressing women's role ai consumers the other their role as producers. In the United States women played a central role in the postwar creation of what Lizabeth Cohen has termed a "Consumers' Republic," which elevated consumption to a patriotic act that confirmed America's democraric ideals.207 The deological underpinning of the "consumers' republic" was that mass consumption fueled the postwar economy, which in turn strengthened the nation's security vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. In addition, higher living standards and an abundance of goods, consumer patriots hoped, showed the benefits of the capitalist system over socialism and communism in the international arena. The democratic consumer ideal went hand in hand with reconstructing women's place within the home. Though American women had joined the ranks of producers in factories during the war, they were now encouraged to return to their Traditional roles as mothers, homemakers, and consumers. Shopping became a way to ■enjoy the benefits of the modern liberal-capitalist state and strengthen America's national security at the same time. The gendering of consumer democracy was not confined to the United States. In postwar West Germany the private home became the source of rhe nation's postwar economic recovery and the housewife as rational consumer became the guarantor of postwar freedom and democracy. Through their conic ious choices in the marketplace (weighing cost, benefits, and quality of products), women were seen as active shapers of the national economy, and thus fully vested participants in the civic project of nation building. The 194S Christian Democratic campaign poster of a mother with a shopping basket served as a conscious reminder of women's patriotic duties as consumers.208 By contrast, the Soviet-controlled socialist eastern part of the country, where economic recovery progressed at a much slower rate, measured women's participation in nation building by their level of participation in the workforce.20* The public emphasis in the Western world on women as consumers did not mean that they did not also contribute to society as producers. During the war women's participation in the workforce and public life was largely a result of necessity. Female employment outside the home, including military service, rose significantly in all countries affected by the war. In the United States, government • f ftn 1- •[ 611 ]• PETRA GOEDDE propaganda porcrayed women's employment as an extension of their dir. « Jv wives, mothers, and daughters of fighting men. In Germany, too, Nazi prop,-?. > gandists encouraged women's work outside the home as a service to the rui.i r yet with far less success than their American counterparts.210 Most of those why I did work outside the home regarded their jobs as a temporary arrangemcri c, help the war effort and support their family through supplemental income 'u chc > absence of the male breadwinner. Some, however, saw new opportunity, to " branch out into occupations previously barred to them. Most of the womei u, ; traditionally male occupations such as welding and construction lost tha, ;nk even if no male candidates came forward to take their place.211 Despite ihtv setbacks women's employment rose steadily in Western industrialized coimin:.'. over the next decades, indicating changing attitudes among women about work -outside the home and changing social attitudes toward working women. In the United States the percentage of women in the workforce stood at 34 percent in 1965, an increase of 9 percent since 194c212 The communist regime in the Soviet Union took a dramatically diffcn.ui approach to women's participation in the workforce. Since the 1910s it had tn- .: couraged female employment outside the home. During the 1930s, when So\ icr authorities actively began recruiting women for their push toward industrial ev- i pansion, female participation in the workforce reached 4% percent. Even choi'gh women's employment included traditionally male occupations, it did not neccs- ■ sarily translate into greater equality within Soviet society.213 Men were often hostile to women in their workplace and subjected them to discrimination and J harassment.214 Nonetheless, the labor shortages of the war years pushed women into all areas of the labor force, including agricultural work in the countryside, 1 where some acquired leading positions on large collective farms. Most of these women lost their positions of leadership after the war, much as American women did, yet the overall number of women in the workforce continued to rise, albeit ;. at a slower pace.215 By the end of the Khrushchev era, women's participation in the industrial workforce had reached 45 percent.216 Other Eastern European states followed a similar trajectory. In East Germany, the percentage of women > in the workforce was 45 percent in i960 and rose to 48 percent in 1970.217 In public displays of art and culture, the Soviets propagated an image of the communist woman as producer. The Polish artist Wbjciech Fangot's painting ■f 6iz 1- GLOBAL CULTURES Postaci (Form/figure) in the Socialist-realist tradition used gender to illustrate the contrast between capitalism and communism. The painting shows a robust couple, dressed in simple work clothes, on one side of the picture, and a fragile woman, wearing a white dress, pearl necklace, yellow sunglasses, and heavy makeup, on the other. The facial features of the working woman are muscular, serious, and similar to those of the man behind her. Her rolled-up sleeves reveal strong arms; one hand rests on her hip, the other on a shovel. In sharp contrast the Western woman's delicate hands with painted fingernails clutch a dainty purse. Her dress is printed with commercial advertisements, including for Coca-Cola and Wall Street. The contrast between the figures is amplified by the painting's background, a tall white building under a blue sky behind the working couple, a grey, possibly polluted sky and a brown landscape of ruins behind the capitalist woman.218 The superficial, painted beauty of capitalism appears barely able to hide the decay and pollution in the background, whereas the clear, honest and hardworking face of socialism shines before an equally clear, modern, and productive urban landscape. A 1959 picture by the Latvian painter Michails Korneckis celebrates both women's work and their femininity. It shows three female masonry workers on the scaffolding of a building. Two of the women wear overalls, the third a skirt; -;. all wear headscarves. The women appear completely at ease with this traditionally male occupation.21' These celebrations of gender equality in the workplace hide the reality of continued discrimination. Despite women's greater advances in the labor force under socialism, inequalities in pay and job placement persisted. In addition there was little willingness among men to take on traditionally female tasks such as housekeeping and child rearing, leaving women to balance wage labor, housekeeping, and child care on their own.220 The gendering of the consumer and producer ethos among the Cold War rivals became obvious in the 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate. Nixon invoked „\vomen's centtal position as beneficiaries of America's consumer culture. Showcasing the abundance of kitchen gadgets, Nixon declared: "In America, we like to make life easier for women." Khrushchev retorted: "Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism." Though Khrushchev did not elaborate further at the time, he alluded to the ethos of equality concerning gender relations. In his view, under communism things were not done for women, ■[ 6i3 ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES but women and men did things for the greater welfare of the community. In Khrushchev's communist society women produced and consumed goods. In an ingenious publicity stunt, the Soviets showcased their idea of gender equality with the introduction of the world's first female cosmonaut in ].,-... 1963. The move added another level of humiliation to an already bruised N"AS-\ confidence and unleashed a transnational debate about gender and sxicncL Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova's launch into space on June 16,1963, was i\K latest in a long line of Soviet firsts. Six years earlier, on October 4,1957, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik I, the first satellite, into space. A month lati-r Laika, the dog, followed on board Sputnik II. Instead of acknowledging the launching of a living being into space as a great achievement, Americans highlighted the cruelty of the experiment: the Russians had not yet developed ;i mechanism for reentry into the atmosphere, leaving Laika to perish in space,"' By 1961 the Soviets had solved that problem as well, launching the first man, Yr.n Gagarin, into space and returning him safely to Earth. The way the Soviet Union publicized Tereshkova's accomplishment and the way the Western world received the news illustrate how much gender relation were entangled in the Cold War conflict. Tereshkova was born in a small town in the Yaroslavl region in central Russia in 1937 and worked in a texrile ll-cton when Soviet officials selected her for the cosmonaut program in 1961. Her onlv qualification until then had been a training program in parachuting, which she had begun in the late 1950s at a local facility.222 Khrushchev and the Soviet press immediately turned her into a symbol of women's equal status in communist society.123 The successful launch of a male colleague two days earlier in a sepaiv.te flight that would break the record for rotations around Earth was almost forgotten in the publicity surrounding Tereshkova. Soviets celebrated her retui:i s% iih pomp and circumstance in Moscow's Red Square. Khrushchev called her flight the pinnacle of Soviet achievement. "That's the weaker sex for you," he triumphantly declared. "The name of Valentina Vladimirovna will go down in wo-Id history. She has demonstrated once again that women raised under socialism walk alongside men in all the people's concerns, both in self sacrificing labor and in heroic feats, which amaze the world."224 She became a national heroine in the Soviet Union. Tereshkova's space flight generated much publicity in the Western world as well- The initial reports, though overall positive, showed an undercurrent of .eVlsrn diat would only increase over time. Because Tereshkova's flight coincided ivith that of her fellow cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky, American newspaper reports speculated on whether the two would attempt a "rendezvous in space." They also repeatedly commented on her physical appearance. One article described her as j "blonde" in space (though elsewhere she is described as having brown hair), mother announced that she "loves spiked heels and long-haired music," a third called her a "space girl."225 Life magazine subtitled its article "Blue-Eyed Blonde with a New Hairdo Stars in a Russian Space Spectacular."226 Soviet propaganda agencies actually promoted the disproportionate attention to Tereshkova's looks by releasing pictures of her at a beauty parlor prior to the space flight.227 Soviet officials clearly aimed at countering American portrayals of Russia's working women as lacking in femininity. I-or American women who aspired to go into space, news of Tereshkova's launch was bittersweet. It proved what they had argued for some time, that women were as capable as men to join the space mission. But it also magnified the discriminatory treatment they received within their own program, because NASA officials continued to bar women from the astronaut training program. NASA pilot Jerrie Cobb expressed regret that "since we eventually are going to put a woman into space, we didn't go ahead and do it first." She had earlier joined nineteen other women in a privately funded test regimen equal to that of male candidates for the program. Even though thirteen of them had passed the tests, they were still excluded from the program. With the test results in hand, she had been lobbying Congress for two years to allow women into the astronaut training program Cobb received support from Jane Hart, wife of the Democratic senator from Michigan, Philip A. Hart, and herself a pilot, who expressed her hope that NASA would soon change its policy.226 Another outspoken supporter was Clare Boothe Luce, prominent Republican and wife of publisher Henry Luce, who wrote a spirited editorial in Life magazine the week after Tereshkova's flight. She took particular issue with the male establishment's insistence that women were inherently less qualified for the space program than men and that the Soviet lis ape- mm ■[ 6i5 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE move was little more than a publicity stunt. In a bold conclusion, considering ),,_.. association with the Republican Party and its strong anticommunisi jj she declared, "Soviet Russia put a woman into space because communism pi i JL |k ^ and, since the Revolution of 1917, has tried to practice the inherent equ men and women." After inundating the reader with a barrage of figures Russian women's advances in the technical and medical professions, occ[.pL,tu Rl still overwhelmingly male-dominated in the United States, she declar "the flight of Valentina Tereshkova is consequently symbolic of the em uilih.1- ' tion of the Communist woman. It symbolizes to Russian women tli . actively share (not passively bask, like American women) in the gl or) quenng space. Efforts to rationalize the American decision to exclude women frmn die ■ space program ranged from the scientific-technical to the cultural c!\m\ uii*;k Some American editorials called into question Tereshkova's qualification ln.r aerial experience was limited to parachuting, and her technical trainii-.g un. ited.230 Others dismissed the flight as a publicity stunt aimed at upstaging .In. Americans in the space race, because it did not produce any tangible scKiitifk benefit.231 A German article quoted a NASA official's facetious comment tlur ip ( the future American space capsules would have more room and could theicrore S accommodate an additional 12.5 pounds of "recreational equipment.'2,2 Sri 1 th ers portrayed Tereshkova's and other women's successes in male-do 1 11 ,i:ed fields as a loss. They argued that Russian women's multiple duties as mothers, I housekeepers, and workers left them overworked and, worse still, deprned ot their femininity. "For a generation and a half since the Revolution," Audrc* 1 op-ping, the wife of the New York Times bureau chief in Moscow, wrote in an aid- j cle, "Russian women have been torn between a drive for equality witli ■ compulsion to prove their worth in building the glory of the state and a dcm. to be feminine." After women were initially told to reject Western-style femininity J as "bourgeois," the article continued, they were now again interested in '.ash-in and beauty. However, "the average Soviet woman has a long way to go bei n d n' . reaches the standard in America and Europe." Topping's conclusion \va iuni- ' niscent of the Nixon-Khrushchev debate four years earlier: "No number nt fact, flights can free the average Soviet woman from household drudgery as could the J good old clothes dryer, dishwasher or efficient diaper service. These thing-, an- j GLOBAL CULTURES 1 ifldt available in the Soviet Union."133 Topping turned the advances of Russian .\v0n1e« in the male-dominated fields of space exploration and technology into a ^deficiency in the areas women allegedly really cared about: fashion, beauty, home management, and consumption. Though Luce and Topping belonged to roughly the same generation, they advocated diametrically opposed roles for women in postwar society. Topping Jit'ld on to a traditional definition of women's roles. Luce's commentary expressed die growing frustrations of countless college-educated women who continued to encounter barriers to professional advancement—women who were the vanguard of the second-wave feminist movement that would emerge with full force jjy the mid-1960s. - The French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir, five years Luce's junior, .provided the philosophical underpinnings for the new feminism. In The Second A'.vshe argued that modern society had defined women only in relation to men. Man was seen as the scientific objective self, woman as the subjective "other." Drawing on existentialist philosophy, de Beauvoir declared that women were not born as women but became women through a gradual process of social conditioning. By separaring sex from gender and identifying the latter as a social construct rather than a biological fact, she provided the basis for a feminist critique of modern society. By altering the social construction of gender, women could make themselves into "subjective" selves.234 Her writings energized the women's rights movement in Western Europe and the United States in the 1960s. ! The American journalist and writer Betty Friedan built on de Beauvoir's articulation of the second sex with her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Published only months before Tereshkova's flight, the book documented women's frustrations with being relegated to the role of mothers and wives when their intellect would allow them to be so much more in public life.235 The articulation of "the problem that has no name," as Friedan called it, played a critical role in Sparking the second-wave feminist movement in the United States. However, critics blamed Friedan for focusing too narrowly on rhe plight of middle-class ivomen and overstating the pressures toward female domesticity.236 Nonetheless, her impact on the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s was unequivocal. , The concerns raised in Friedan's book emerged at a time when more American women were entering college than ever before and when many of them •[ 616 ]■ ■[ 617 ]• PETRA GOEDDE participated in the civil rights and New Left movements. These worn had not yet experienced the constraints of motherhood and domestic elders, nor did they regard themselves as the "second sex." Nonethclc,,, )s tj . fought for racial equality, they confronted gender inequality on a aih b iy' During the day-to-day operations within their organizations, male „ulk.ii,, often relegated them to menial positions, including secretarial work arid In him duties, such as cleaning and cooking. In 1965, Casey Hayden and M.u . k n, two white activists in the American Student Nonviolent Coordiriatn ■ < , mittec (SNCC), articulated their frustrations in a pamphlet called St lncj Caste: A Kind of Memo," in which they drew parallels between the disuiminv tion faced by African Americans within a society dominated by whi discrimination faced by women in a society dominated by men.237 Tli . expanded, updated, and in many ways more radical articulation oi Friu' in\ "problem that has no name" and Beauvoir's "second sex." It created a nuk b u.k-lash within the civil rights movement and helped fuel women's resolve ■ separate organizations dedicated to achieving equal rights for themv \i> ,-vfrh can American women shared many of those experiences but faced a crt 1 I n lemma: would articulating, much less fighting, sexual discrimination de fight against racial discrimination?238 As in the United States, feminist movements in Europe grew our ol":l c •■ru-dent protests of the 1960s, Young women began to demand greater punici 1 within the power structures of their organizations and created advocacy gn> tps to address gender inequality. In Great Britain the London Women's Libei iriori Workshop functioned much along the lines of the American consciousness-raisi 111; groups. At the same time, the Women's National Coordinating Commit 1 ganized conferences, formed consciousness-raising groups, and fought publn-t for women's equality in the workplace as well as abortion rights.23' In i-j6i Wi-.i German student activist Helke Sander, member of the newly minted Akdunw it zur Befreiung der Frau (Action Committee for Woman's Liberation),; ' lated women's frustrations at a meeting of the German Socialist Studen ciation (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS).240 In France the women's movement expanded significantly in the aiteim tt 1 of the student protests of May 1968. A diverse conglomerate of organiz merged into the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes (MLF) around iy"-> •[ 618 !• ItV uf lhl.,r ■ ■ ■ 3 GLOBAL CULTURES I ■ ), l' of the organizations within the MLF—Psychoanalyse et Politique, founded [jy the psychoanalyst Antoinette Fouque—soon charted its own path, in part by opcnh" rejecting the label "feminist" as pejorative. Fouque rejected the struggle |or equality, which she felt denied the feminine, and instead sought the empowerment of women by embracing difference. Much better organized than the other groups within the MLF, and much more vocal through periodical publications- among them Le Qiiotidien des Femmes and Des Femmes en Mouvements Hi'bdo, or Psych et Po, as it became known, soon overshadowed other feminist £ioups within France. Fouque's publicity campaign created the impression in France that Psych et Po was, in fact, the voice of the feminist movement in the country. Fouque herself fostered that misconception by officially changing her organization's name to MLF in 1979, thus effectively silencing other feminist voices within France.141 Women activists everywhere publicized their demands for equality through periodicals dedicated to the feminist cause. In the United States Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine; in West Germany, Alice Schwarzer founded Emma; British feminists founded Spare Rib?42 As circulation grew and reached a wider audience, women's rights assumed a larger role in public and academic discourse. Universities gradually developed courses that dealt with women's issues, some blossoming into full-fledged women's studies programs. As rhe movements matured in the West, they proliferated into a myriad of special interest groups that reflected the diversity of women's lives and political objectives. The fragmentation occurred along the lines of class, race, political conviction, professional affiliation, and sexual orientation. Gay and lesbian groups ^multiplied in the 1970s, creating their own political organizations to lobby for the elimination of discriminatory laws that criminalized homosexuality. Using many of the same strategies as the civil rights movement, gay and lesbian activists in the United States and Western Europe staged sit-ins, organized marches, and challenged the law through deliberate acts of defiance. The Mattachine Society, an American gay rights organization, staged a "sip-in" in New York in 1966 to challenge a New York State Law that prohibited serving alcohol to gays in bars. A year later Great Britain decriminalized male homosexuality through the Sexual Offenses Act.243 By the J980S most Western European countries had eased or eliminated laws banning homosexuality, though cultural reservations about ■[ 619 1- PETRA GOEDDE homosexuality endured. In some countries, criminalization persisted intn ,l twenty-first century.244 Key concerns among women activists in the Western world centered on ual and reproductive rights. The emergence of the contraceptive pii. jn ushered in a sexual revolution in the industrialized world that gave wo:: overturn Roe v. Wade in the United States and prevent similar legislation jK. where. The fight against abortion turned deadly as militant fringe group at tacked physicians who performed abortions. In 1993 Dr. David Gunn of I'uv sacola, Florida, became the first of several victims of deadly anti-abortion violence in the United States: an anti-abortion activist gunned him down 011:-side his clinic.248 ■[ 620 ]• si W£# GLOBAL CULTURES fn Germany, abortion rights became a rallying point for feminists as well. The criminalization of abortion was enshrined in Clause 2.18 of the German Criminal Code. In 1971, prominent German feminists publicly claimed in a lead-n,-,. ■> part of a broader liberation struggle."25 6 B ecause of the vast differences in woman's experiences in the global South and the complexity of local social and political relations, women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America developed women's nuiu-ments and organizations rhat articulated local concerns, which could not uku-sarily be transferred onto a continental, much less global, level. As women's groups began to converge on the global stage through the United Nations and other international venues, these differences became exposed. Feminist Internationalism For much of the twentieth century, feminist internationalism confined itself largely to the Western industrialized world. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), founded in 1915 in the United States, became the first transnational women's organization, but its initial focus was the struggle for world peace rather than women's equality. The WILPF gradually expanded its platform to include racial and economic equality, issues of roncci n t' ■ non-Western women's rights advocates, even though its membership base n. mained largely in Europe and the United States.257 In 1945 the Women's 1 "U- GLOBAL CULTURES clonal Democratic Federation (WIDF) emerged as an alternative venue to the iiýlLPF- Even though it drew members primarily from communist countries, it íiiäde a concerted effort to reach out to women's organizations in the Western and nonaligned worlds.253 WIDF's self-proclaimed mission was to "win and defend national independence and democratic freedoms, eliminate apartheid, racial discrimination and fascism." Even though the WIDF's mission appealed to Women's organizations in the global South, its close political affiliation with the Soviet Union prevented many from joining.259 t':■■ State-centered international organizations like the United Nations were slow io establish subdivisions devoted to women's issues. This changed in the 1970s :ičhen, riding the wave of feminist grassroots activism, the United Nations designated 1975 as an International Women's Year (IWY). It then hastily convened an International Women's Conference in Mexico City in June, because the WÍDF threatened to upstage the UN with an international women's conference In honor of the IWY in East Berlin.2*0 The UN conference consisted of a formal ^enue attended by about one thousand official delegates from UN member nations (about a third of them men) and an informal venue across town of more Ithan five thousand delegates, including women's organizations, NGOs, and individual activists. The official delegates included only one female head of state, the prime minister of Sri Lanka, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. The two other female heads of state in the world, Indira Gandhi of India and Maria Estela Peron of Argentina, declined attendance because of domestic unrest in their own countries. The Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova as its official delegate. Other countries sent wives or female relatives of heads of states, including Leah Rabin ipf Israel, Jehan Sadat of Egypt, and Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, the twin sister of the shah of Iran.261 The unofficial NGO tribunal included several prominent international feminists, among them Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan from rhe ^United States, Australian feminist Germaine Greer, and Bolivian labor activist sQomitila Barrios de Chúngara. £ - Even though the Mexico meeting was supposed to create the basis for a com-:tnon global agenda, and was hailed, somewhat prematurely "the world's greatest sconsciousness raising event," it exposed as many differences as it found common sconcerns. The biggest and most open confrontations occurred at the site of the ;NG0 tribunal. Ethel L. Payne, in attendance for the Chicago Defender, described ■[ 62.2 ]• IM 1RI t.lll pni Delegates co the UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City listen to the speech of \[e> i.m president Luis Echeverria, June 19, 1975. At center is Leah Rabin, head of the Israeli delegation. More than a thousand official delegates—about a third of them men—attended the (.hh'ji. in.e, while more than five thousand other activists and representatives of women's and nongoveiiiniLnca! organizations met at an unofficial forum on the other side of the city. The meeting exposed a\ many differences as common concerns. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) the spectacle as "a comic opera of female fury venring itself in the hall < of ne Centro Medico, where the rag taggle dissidents of all beliefs met in combat Delegates vented their disagreements openly at the tribunal, because its set: rig was less formal and delegates were not bound by their governments to rcpic-nxr a particular position. The fiercest disagreements occurred between Western and non-Western feminists over a global agenda. While the majority of feminists in the indusm.1! /eJ world wanted to prioritize issues of social equality and sexual liberation, including abortion rights and rights of lesbians, their counterparts in the global South demanded a focus on economic development and redistribution of wen'th.'6 Divisions occurred along class lines as well. In one of those altercations Domini* GLOBAL CULTURES Barrios de Chiingara confronted upper-middle-class Latin American delegates about their false sense of commonality with working-class women. She remembered exclaiming in exasperation: "Now tell me: Is your situation at all similar to mine? Is my situation at all similar to yours? So what equality are we going to speak of between the two of us? If you and I aren't alike, if you and I are so different? We can't, at this moment, be equal, even as women, don't you think?"26'' To Barrios de Chiingara, the problem of women's inequality was inseparable from the problem of poverty and economic inequality. She felt that her fight for women's rights had to connect to her fight for economic equality, a fight she shared with the men in her community. Another division occurred along political lines. Tribunal and official delegates from communist countries declared confidently that their societies had already achieved gender equality. Thus, they reasoned, once women focused on achieving a new economic world order, gender equality would follow automatically. Vilma Espin, wife of Cuba's defense minister Raul Castro and sister-in-law of Fidel, declared at the official UN meeting where she served as Cuba's delegate: "We have already obtained for our women everything that the conference is asking fot. What we can do here is tell other women of our own experiences and help them that way." For Western feminists, among them the French delegate Francoise Giroud, the emphasis on economic solutions to gender inequality amounted to a "diversion" tactic.265 For Third World tribunal delegates, such as Chiingara, however, Cuba's success sounded a hopeful note, because the economic conditions in her home country were similar to Cuba's before the revolution. The official conference's final declaration, the "World Plan of Action," reaffirmed the interconnectedness of the three objectives of the conference: equality, development, and peace. It called on governments to establish regulations that would ensure women's full equality and participation in public life and to allocate funds for economic development. Toward that end the UN set up the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNI-FEM).266 The results of the conference and the tribunal disappointed everyone. Non-Western women's rights advocates criticized the lack of attention to economic inequality, and Western observers argued that the plan offered primarily PETRA GOEDDE solutions to problems that had already been solved in the Wi-st. "Ivum,.,^ means little to the poor countries that dominate the United Na::ons." <> it \\ ern commentator lamented. "The feminists come from rich countries th u h, little say at such meetings."267 Tribunal participants were equally frusti atal \i it] the results. Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist made famous bvhci UJ1 troversial 19 71 book The Female Eunuch, called the meeting a "shadcw j\s.-I GLOBAL CULTURES [ight of the transformation between Mexico City and Beijing as "romantic ii.-t'hood" giving way to "strategic sisterhood."2159 In orher words, if the ideal-of Mexico had been crushed by the realization of the vast gulf among femi-s from different parts of the world, the pragmatism of the Beijing conference nduced rhe foundation for concrete solutions to specific forms of inequality in It ■ world. The rransformation occurred not so much in the overall agenda but hi the shifting power distribution between Western and non-Western women's > I its activists.270 The latter had called for a greater emphasis on economic development since 1975, and over time they convinced at least some in the Western tingent. Efforts to create a network of international women's rights advocates took t outside the UN institutional framework as well. In 1984 the American U-ininist journalist and co-editor of .Ms., Robin Morgan, founded the Sisterhood ;lobal Institute (SIGI) to provide a permanent forum of intellectual exchange international feminists. Morgan founded rhe institute after publishing Sisterhood Is Global, an 800-page anthology of writings by feminists from all over the world.271 The contributors became SIGI's first fellows. Over time SIGI grew into a major organization for international feminists. It cooperated closely with the UN and with other transnational organizations, among them Women Living under Muslim Law (WLUML), founded two years later in Paris by Marie Aimee Helie-Lucas.272 'Ihird World feminists, whose voices became increasingly powerful in transnational women's organizations in the 1970s through the 1990s, significantly complicated Western feminists' understanding of "universal sisterhood." Many of the Third World feminists involved in the debate were Wesrern-educated or had lived and worked for part of their lives in the Western world, leaving working-class women such as Barrios de Chungara marginalized.273 Nonetheless, these women used the language of Western feminism to articulate the perspective of non-Western women. Chandra Mohanry, who received her PhD in sociology at the University of Illinois, criticized her Western peers for constructing " "Third World women as a homogenous 'powerless' group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems." In this rendering of otherness, women in the global South were usually portrayed as victims and dependents without agency or individuality in their own right.274 ■[ 626 ]• PETRA GOEDDE T GLOBAL CULTURES Mohanty identified a central paradox embedded not only in the tcinmis discourse but also in the uses of gender as a category of analysis. If gender is in social construction of biological differences, as Joan Wallach Scott had po«iu lated in 1985, then different social and cultural contexts produce different um-ceptualizations of gender.2'5 While difference is common to gender relation, m all cultures, the nature and definition of those differences are contingent upon the social and cultural context. Mohanty and others have charged that Wesii'i 11 feminists' representations of women's inequalities in the Third World miri.jn J the representation of the colonial "other" in imperialist writing.276 Western un inists claimed for themselves the right to define the social construction < >f gcndu and presented it as a fixed category. They measured progress toward women s rights according to this fixed Western standard. Simone de Beauvoir's VwmJ sex" was thus replicated in the relationship between Western and non-W«ixrn women. The latter had become the "other" to the former "self." Third Wo Id women became "second" to the "second sex." Third World feminists well-versed in the language of Western feminism \ j began interrogating their own assumptions of difference in relation to woiikd within their own society. The upper-class Indian literary scholar Gayatri Cha .1 vorty Spivak warned her colleagues (both Western and non-Western) that in order to learn enough about Third World women and to develop a dirfciint readership, the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated, and t,i<. First World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman!'2''' ■ Two cases illustrate this heterogeneity as well as the consequences for the attainment of a universal feminist consciousness. The first is the internatiin'l campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice of female ui-cumcision, prevalent in parts of Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in Muslim Asia, became a major cause for Western feminists beginning in the late 1970s. Brought to national attention in the United States by the An -can journalist and activist Fran Hosken, who in 1979 published the Hoskcn R' port, which documented and condemned the practice, FGM generated outi. iy. and concern in the West.278 Few women and medical experts defended :hc ritn.il, but many criticized Hosken's confrontational and at times paternalistic ip-proach. In a 1980 article in Ms. magazine, editors Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan tried to strike a different tone. They condemned the practice, bur did so •mt I 3 r 1 jjy letting the victims speak for themselves.279 They included the testimony of Saadawi, who had been an outspoken critic of female circumcision in her own country since the early 1970s. Saadawi, already a powerful spokesperson for the nticlitorectomy campaign in her own country, described her procedure at the age of six and that of her younger sister, which ultimately led her on a path toward feminist rebellion.280 Considering their fundamental agreement on the barbarity of the practice, it seems surprising that at the 1980 UN conference in Copenhagen, Saadawi and other Muslim feminists clashed with Western women over the issue of FGM.281 Yet when analyzing the dispute more closely and within the context of the global feminist agenda, it becomes understandable. Even though they were as outraged by the practice as their Western colleagues, Muslim women objected to the debate in this forum for two reasons. First, they felt that the issue detracted hom the problems of economic exploitation and imperialism.281 And second, S.iadawi and others objected to the way in which the primary focus on FGM branded African and Arab cultures as backward and savage.283 Third World women thus still found themselves battling First World women over the right agenda for their struggle and the particulars by which women's advances should be measured. A second issue that illustrated the heterogeneity of women's experiences but also rifts within feminist circles was the controversy over the Muslim veil. Most women in the Western world interpreted the wearing of the veil in Islamic countries as evidence of female degradation. Feminists from countries in which the ptactice was common found themselves in a difficult position. Even if they did not support the custom, most felt compelled to either defend it or at least demand that it should be placed in the right context. For some Muslim women the veil became a way to resist pressure toward cultural assimilation in Western countries. The case of three students at a suburban high school outside Paris in 1989 is illustrative. School administrators banned the three girls, ages thirteen and fourteen, from attending classes because they violated a school rule against wearing headscarves.284 When faced with vocal public protests from the Muslim immigrant community in France and from prominent liberals who favored cultural toler-■ir :e, the Socialist government backed down. In the ensuing debates the different types of head and face coverings—headscarf, veil, hijab, chador—were often •[ 628 ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES used interchangeably, even though there were significant differences among't hui ranging from covering only the hair to covering the entire face.285 More importantly, though, these debates exposed the different mea-iinj^ people attached to the practice. In a poignant editorial in 1994, GermaineG-w. the Australian-born feminist, pointed out the multiple symbolic functions ofi the veil within modern society: "It [the veil] can be identified with onnr-s^or . liberation, with privilege or disability, with impotence or empowerment: On ■ thing is certain, if the right to wear it is denied, it becomes a symbol of free com If the right to wear it is denied by authorities known to discriminate against die group that seeks to wear it, the veil becomes a symbol of rebellion, even a wL'j|:.)n of war."286 The veil controversy thus grew from a battle over cultural norm? aiul cultural integration to a battle over asserting individual rights, whctkci rkv were women's rights or minority rights. Greer recognized the multiple dimensions of the controversy and opted for the primacy of free choice. The controversy in France addressed a larger conflict concerning bothwom- ■■" en's equality and cultural diversity. According to historian Joan W. Scott, "The!: head scarf is a tangible sign of intolerable difference. It defies the long-standinj. requirement that only when immigrants assimilate (practicing their beliefs in private) do they become fully 'French.'"287 The headscarf was seen both as symbol for an immigrant population's refusal to integrate into French society" and a sign of women's degradation within Muslim society, and hence mebmpat-\ ible with French norms of gender equality. However, while for some it meant women's debasement, for others it meant women's empowerment. By ir.sistijig on their right to wear the headscarf, Muslim girls and women asserted their right to a cultural identity, and thus participated in a political debate about c-.:1::ifjI diversity.288 The wide spectrum of symbolic meanings of the veil, and the disagreement | even among feminists about how to approach the controversy, demonstrates that : the dividing line between cultural universality and particularities did not run neatly between Western and non-Western feminists, or even between feminists and nonfeminists. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the diversity of women's experiences precluded a consensus on minimum standards of women's. rights in the global arena. Rather, according to Chandra Mohanty, one needs to find an alternative universality that is not premised exclusively on Wester 1 ■[ 630 ]• .■linceptions of gender relations and women's equality, but takes into account differences in experiences and social contexts. "The challenge is to see how differ-■iiccs allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more vcurately, how specifying difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully."2S9 Difference and universality have to work in tandem, not only, and aybe not even most importantly, to create a new global feminist consciousness. They need to capture the diversity of women's experiences within a universal rights framework. Only by moving beyond the universalist-particularist dichotomy can the full spectrum of women's needs and objectives be addressed. ma1 Continuity and Challenge in Religious Cultures The headscarf controversy in France also ignited a debate about the role of religion in the public sphere. France had long embraced the principle of laicite, which demanded the preservation of a secularized public space. However, despite "its embrace of secularism, France was a religiously and culturally homogeneous :nation, whose Catholic heritage lay deeply embedded in its social, cultural, and ■political identity. The veil controversy arose in the context of far-reaching social -transformations in France, as nonwhite, non-Christian migrants settled in France ■ in greater numbers than ever before. Their different social, cultural, and religious /practices stood in opposition to the secularism within French society, which was ■ constructed on the basis of a single dominant religion and an abstract idea of civic ;unity.290 The existence of different religions in close proximity to each other—a new phenomenon in Europe and North America in the postwar period—posed particular cultural challenges and tested the limits of religious tolerance. In i the global arena, religion became a force for both cultural homogenization and fl heterogen ization. Despite the codification of religious pluralism in all modern democratic constitutions and the guarantee of religious freedom in civil law, most states in Eu- ■ rope and the Americas remained deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian practices and ■: rhetoric. Two of Europe's largest postwar conservative parties were explicitly [' Christian in their political mission, the Democrazia Cristiana in Italy and the 5 Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) in West Germany. The US Congress, ; at the height of the Cold War in 1954, reinserted the words "under God" into PETRA GOEDDE the national Pledge of Allegiance and ordered the addition of "In Godwc nUs. to all US paper money. Thus, although state and religious power had cert: i *l. separated, religious values and religious imagery remained integral to the h n, ness of state and the business of international relations.2" Sociologists, who lu I regarded the process of secularization as an inevitable consequence of polii ic,-J economic, and social modernization since the nineteenth century, began to i „-consider their assumptions in the 1980s. The secularization thesis could nor t ^. plain the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and the proliferation of diversi; religious sects across the globe. As they began to explore the role of religion in modern societies in more depth, they discovered that the assumed secularization of earlier decades had been superficial at best,293 Throughout the Cold War, religious rhetoric played a central role in the 11 valry between the Soviet Union and the United States, prompting one scholar to call it "one of history's great religious wars."2" On the American side, nutMn of providentialism had been integral to the idea of American exceptionalism, which saw in the republic the realization of God's promised land.294 By the cat h twentieth century Wilson infused his foreign policy with religious references to America's missionary obligations toward the world.295 After World War I:. the rhetoric intensified: political and religious leaders portrayed the fight agahsi communism increasingly as a struggle for the defense of Judeo-Christian valm, against the atheist convictions of the communist state.29* Leading American Cold War strategists, among them Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, both sons of protestant ministers, frequently resorted to religious imagery in their [>u litical statements.197 For the United States and its Western allies, religious symbolism bee:: me a major trope with which to transform the geopolitical conflict into an ideological-cultural one. It allowed politicians to cast the conflict in simple binaries of good versus evil and to mobilize their own people against communism.'.'The distinction between democratic liberalism and Judeo-Christian values all but disappeared in the political rhetoric of the time. President Eisenhower was unabashed about the insertion of religion into politics. He mandated that all cab -net meetings began with a communal prayer, regularly consulted with the Protestant evangelical Billy Graham (who would go on to serve as spiritual c ir-sultant to every president, including Barack Obama), and declared in 1955 that J- Í Bliiiiiiili Í--M ■ GLOBAL CULTURES "recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of ■Americanism. Without God, there could be no American form of government, : nor an American way of life."298 His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, shared Eisenhower's deep religious conviction, making it a prominent factor in all ipplicy decisions. The widespread assumption in the West was that the communist state system was not only atheist but outright hostile to religious worship. According to i'the scholar Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, this was a misconception. She argued that the Soviet state had adopted a laicist model of secularism, which meant that its political system was devoid of religious references and that the practice of reli-igion was confined to the private realm,299 Even though Marx had called religion -"the opiate of the masses," the Soviet system under Lenin did not ban religious practice. In fact, Lenin had in 1905 specifically sanctioned the private practice of religion as a right of every citizen. He did not, however, believe that religion 'should have a place in the public or political sphere.300 In this tespect his views ; were not all that different from those of his Western liberal adversaries. Both Were heavily influenced by Enlightenment approaches to the role of religion in : public life and the separation of church and state. Stalin initially took a much ■harder line toward religious groups. In the interwar period he persecuted religious leaders and restricted their ability to operate freely and independently. iDuring the Second World War, however, he made concessions to the Orthodox : Church in the interest of greater national unity. He sought to fuse the people's emotional attachment to the church with an equally emotional attachment to the nation. A similar accommodation occurred later in the socialist German ■Democratic Republic in the 1970s. In an effort to link the socialist present of the :GDR with Germany's intellectual past, the political leadership launched a public rehabilitation of the sixteenth-century Protestant theologian Martin Luther, : who had spent his life in several East German cities. Linking religious and national identity could inspire greater loyalty to the state, officials hoped.301 Despite these accommodations, state officials in Eastern Europe and the Soviet ;Union maintained an uneasy relationship with the churches throughout the Cold War, alternating between repression and integration.302 The prevalence of religion in the Cold War discourse undermined core assump-tions about the secularization of the modern world. Building on Enlightenment PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES chinking, advocates of the secularization thesis had argued that oiodi-rnly.nj,,. led to the decline of religion in politics and society. The logic was often rev^c,) as well, with secularization of society and politics being seen as signs of modei n. ization. The assumed nexus between modernization and secularization has bei-n so deeply embedded in modern thought that progressive forces within si . have insisted on the secularization of public and political life, while telioi,,Uv leaders have at times resisted modernization because of the fear of religious decline.303 These two positions were exemplified on one end of the spectrum by the efforts of Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk to modernize and secularize his ccur. try in the 192.0s, and on the other by the efforts of the Taliban regime in A fgluu-istan in the 1990s to reverse the trend toward modernization in society and politics through the reinstitution of a strict religious code in public life. Supporters of the secularization thesis can point to Western Europe, whe.c religious affiliation and church memberships have steadily declined since the 1950s Grace Davie argued, however, that decline in church membership in these countries did not necessarily mean a decline in religious belief. Rather she deiecteJ alternative forms of religious practice, focused on private noninstitutional worship, including a turn toward alternative religions and the practical application of religious beliefs in charitable institutions.304 In addition, there exisred u-idt. variations in the practice of religion throughout Western Europe. In nottheii, predominantly Protestant countries, religious practice declined more than in southern Catholic and Orthodox parts. Ireland was a unique case, because religious affiliation was caught up in the political conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, non-Western religious mincntus expanded in most European countries, largely as a result of migration from lu-mer colonies. By the late twentieth century Muslims made up about 3 percent d Europe's population. France was home to about 3 to 4 million Muslim.1-. Gei many s Muslim population was estimated to be 1.6 million in the late 1980s, increasing to 3.1 million in 1008.305 Britain had a Hindu/Sikh population of a little over a million.30^ However, as the headscarf controversy in France illustrated, increasing secularization did not necessarily lead to a higher level of religious tolerance in Western Europe. Rather, it revealed a deep-seated secularized-religious foundation for everyday practices and customs in public life. The public display of rcligios'n ^through the wearing of headscarves upset both the appearance of cultural homogeneity anc[ insistence on secularity. Some opponents of headscarves conflated homogeneity and equality. Homogeneity in dress and appearance, school officials argued, allowed for a more egalitarian learning environment that would ■■not single out pupils for their different cultural, religious, or ethnic background. :rfhese officials failed to realize that their idea of cultural egalitarianism was also a prescription for a particularly French, Western, and Christian form of homogeneity, one that demanded public assimilation into the dominant Judeo-Christian cultural system. Just as religion could encourage, even demand, cultural conformity, so it could fuel cultural and political rebellion. Religious activism became one of the key sites of opposition to the communist system in Eastern Europe. When the •Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978, he inspired a ■religious revival in Poland that aligned itself with the labor organization Solidarity in 1980 to form a broad-based dissident movement against the communist state. Leading members of the Solidarity movement, above all Lech Walesa, acknowledged the decisive influence of the pope on the movement. Even though the Polish president, Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared a state of emergency and banned Solidarity in 1981, he was unable to crush the powerful church apparatus in this predominantly Catholic country. Throughout the next decade the Catholic Church provided a protective shield for the Polish dissident movement. In neighboring East Germany the Protestant church came to play a key role in galvanizing opposition against the authoritarian state. Church leaders and the church buildings themselves offered refuge for dissidents in the 1980s. As anti-government protests intensified in Leipzig in the fall of 1989, the St. Nikolai Church in the city center became a gathering point for weekly candlelight demonstrations. The crowds at the Leipzig prayers and demonstrations grew from around one thousand in September to more than five hundred thousand on November 6, just three days before the fall of the Berlin wall.307 If religion had functioned as an ideological weapon of the West in the early Cold War, it had become a locus for political opposition movements in Eastern Europe by the end. Religion played a role in anticolonial and civil rights struggles as well. In lnd ia in the 1940s Mohandas Gandhi developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance based on the precepts of his Hindu faith. His philosophy, in turn, ■[ 634 ]■ •[ 635 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE inspired Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister, in his civil rights c«Xpai. j Kings public speeches in favor of equal rights for African Americans were heav-^-" j ily infused with religious rhetoric, and southern churches became centers of sistance against the system of racial segregation.308 Malcolm X's calls for 'racial--' I justice were inspired by his conversion to Islam and his membership in the-A-'ri- I can American organization Nation of Islam. Though he eventually distanced J himself from the Nation and its leader, Elijah Mohamed, he remained a Mils! in, [ until his assassination at the hands of members of the Nation of Islam in Febm- | ary 1965.309 Strengthened by their respective religious beliefs, King and Malcolm j X shared a belief in the righteousness of their cause against the legal andpoliilc.il - inequalities embedded in American society. S:WsS In Latin America, opposition movements drew on the spiritual precepts of -''"AKfS liberation theology to protest the increasing social and economic dislocation o-':ln- | poor in many parts of the continent. Since 1945, rapid economic growth and ur j banization had dramatically increased the gulf between rich and poor in Cent :1| and South America. Prominent Latin American Catholic theologians, amoiv; 'M them the El Salvadoran cardinal Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980, the '% 1 Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, and the Brazilian theologians Leonani.i j and Clodovis Boff, began advocating publicly for a new understanding of Ch i.i*,Li | anity that reemphasized its obligation toward reducing the suffering of the pe;r j Rather than engaging exclusively in charitable work, as had been traditiona I with 1 r ' the Catholic Church, these theologians openly criticized the political system tlut combined unfettered capitalism with repressive political authority. They demanded instead a system premised on the redistribution of wealth according to Christian morals, and on preserving human dignity through a minimum standard of livii lg -| Politically on the left, they also demanded better labor standards, regulation of industry, and the reduction of the power of foreign, primarily American, investx Their campaign for more equity earned them censorship from the Vatican r.nd persecution—in Romeros case fatal—in their own countries.311 Evangelical Protestantism provided an alternative to those disillusioned with | the Catholic Church's dogmatism and deterred by liberation theology's leftist § politics. Beginning in the 1950s, thousands of evangelical missionaries moved -1 from the core areas of Europe and North America into Asia, Africa, and Latin America and converted local populations with spectacular success.312 Evangelicals :i:J Oscar Romero at his home in El Salvador, November 10,1979. In the late 1970s he came to support the liberation theology espoused by Latin American theologians, which advocated publicly for Christianity's obligation to reduce the suffering of the poor. Romero also became an outspoken critic of the human rights violations and social injustices perpetrated by the military regime in his country. He was assassinated less than a year later. (Getty Images) •[ 636 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE soon became the worlds fastest-growing religious group, challenging rfk ru,|. tional predominance of the Catholic Church in many areas, particular! i America.3'3 By 1000, evangelical Christians were %y percent of Africa's popul,, 17 percent of Latin America's, and 5 percent of Asia's. At the bcg-.niiin;.r ,„ ^ twentieth century, the average in those regions had been less than 1 pein.1,1 1,4 The proliferation of this particular brand of populist CbrUianit', global South could be read both as a form of rebellion against the Iocakesi. li| ment and a co-optation of the local population by wealthy, conservative, „u iliri-l imperialists. Liberation theologians themselves became the harshest cri.ii movement, claiming—not altogether wrongly—that the missionary acti North American evangelical churches in Central and South America n ik^^d American business and foreign policy interests.315 The failure of the C,u 1. In. tv. tablishment to support liberation theology's basic premises might have 1 uted to the tremendous success of Evangelicals and Pentecostals in the k<',ion Unburdened by centralized control, these modern-day missionaries wen- [-, to adapt quickly to the needs and desires of local communities. They created a spi.i-tual message that was deeply personal and focused on individual salvation ^ t. -it the same time they were connected to a global network of influential Evan jj.lu.al» with vast financial resources and political clout in the industrial metropoie. Fundamentalisms and Pluralism The fundamentalist version of Protestant evangelicalism emerged in the mu> in the United States as a rural rebellion against modern industrial socki. .■ml scientific-technological advances that shook the faith of many. The ( o^r s.ir revival of that movement, by contrast, embraced aspects of modernization, above all the latest advances in communication technology to spread the r.i^si^ *J social and cultural conservatism.316 By the 1970s evangelical preacher 111 lIk United States, among them televangelists Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwc.l, '11 mi) Swaggart, and Jim Bakker, created actual and virtual communities of faithful and encouraged them to organize their personal and professional lives an i'id the institutions of the church. Jerry Falwell built the Thomas Street ItopiK Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, one of the first "megachurches" in tin- l hi.liI States. Falwell utilized modern advertising techniques to rapidly enlarge his fok •[ 658 ]■ ■ 4 GLOBAL CULTURES lowing, solicit donations, and create the Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967 ,ind Liberty University in 19 7i.317 By xoio, Liberty University enrolled over 7^,000 students, more than 60,000 of them in online degree programs. This and other megachurches functioned as religious enclaves for fundamentalist Christians who sought refuge from secular society. It would be wrong to assume, however, that Falwell s goal was isolation from the secular world. Instead he sought to make the outside world more like his 0wn. For that reason, in the late 1970s he founded apolitical lobbying group called the "Moral Majority," which openly supported conservative Christian candidates for public office.318 The group gave rise to a host of politically conservative organizations collectively known as the New Christian Right. They made substantial - financial contributions to Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980 as well as to the campaigns of countless other Christian conservatives running for state and national office. Thanks to the New Christian Right's lobbying efforts, religious conservatives began to assert real political influence in the United States by the 1980s. They shaped much of the debates about sensitive social issues, including abortion rights, homosexuality, and the teaching of evolution at public schools. Fundamentalism took root in other major religions as well, particularly Islam. These religious movements have to be understood both as a critique against more liberal strands within their religious denominations and, as sociologist and religious scholar Peter L. Berger calls them, "populist" movements against a "secular elite."319 Not all fundamentalists ventured into the realm of political protest, and even fewer turned to violence. But many of those who did belonged to the most disillusioned and disoriented segments of a population at odds with the processes of economic and cultural globalization. At the same time, though, as Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman have argued, "religion and the religious is an integral aspect of globalization and not an 'outside' respondent or victim."320 'Ihe term fundamentalist has been infused with heavy political baggage as well as pejorative connotations since the 19ZOS. The concept gained wide usage in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a label for a number of religious groups, including Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish denominations, and on occasion even for nonreligious movements. Its occasional polemical usage and its application to several quite distinct religions made a clear definition increasingly difficult. In an effort to gain clarity, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in •[ 639 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE 1987 commissioned the Protestant religious scholar Martin E. Mart-historian R. Scott Appleby to study and define religious fundamental , ments. Over the next eight years, two hundred scholars participated ir duction of a five-volume series on the subject.321 When Marty attenip j definition of fundamentalism in 1988, he began with what fundame-t ilinni „ not: it was not synonymous with conservatism or traditionalism; it wa.< modern, or antiscientific; and therefore it was not a movement seeking i.riirn to some static ahistorical ideal of religious practice. Fundamentalists ■ , not always activists, militants, or terrorists; and they were not necessari uneducated.322 Instead, fundamentalism, Marty continued, was alwav or reactionary; it drew on "selective retrieval," focused on certain asp^^t' .1' m religion and ignored others; it was "exclusive or separatist." Marty even l.iILJ adherents to fundamentalism "oppositional," "absolutist," and "authontm, r," unable to forge any form of compromise with those who think diffcrem lv A. t result, fundamentalism was also "anti-evolutionary, anti-hermeneuttcal, and . . »323 anti-permissive. Though comprehensive, Marty's definition of fundamentalisms (he later pre^..: ferred the plural form) remained contested. Some scholars, particularly specialists of non-Christian religions, righrly argued that the religious and doctrinal elements within each of these movements were so different that it was impossible to compare them, much less to determine common sources or outcomes. Other* believed with Marty that despite their differences fundamentalist religions had something in common, but provided a much more general definition. According to Peter Berger, they "suggest a combination of several features—great religion-, passion, a defiance of what others have defined as the Zeitgeist, and a return to. traditional sources of religious authority."324 The anthropologist Richard An-. toun argued that fundamentalists of different religious denominations wrre united in their belief in the absolute authority of the sacred over every aspect of their private and public life, and that their strict adherence to a religiously inspired worldview determined their code of conduct.325 Religious absolutism was on the rise in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Explanations as to why diverged. Some analyzed it in primarily religious terms (as a disaffection of particularly faithful believers with the .ibernl-ization of religious practice within their faith); others in social or poliric.il GLOBAL CULTURES ■rins as a religio-political response to the experience of social and economic Jccline, including unfulfilled promises of decolonization, persistent poverty, in increasing gap between rich and poor, negative social consequences of ur-'banizati011' lack of opportunities for a young generarion wirh rising expectations, and encounters with a secularized, homogenized, increasingly material global culture.326 The phenomenon of fusing religious and political identity emerged most prominently in the Middle East in the postwar period. The legal scholar Abdul-lahi A. An-Na'im defined political Islam as "the mobilization of Islamic identity in pursuit of particular objectives of public policy, both within an Islamic society and in its relations with other societies."327 The association of modernizing leaders with both secularism and the former colonial powers provided a niche for religious fundamentalists to fuse the ideology and practice of Islam with the political causes of anti-imperialism and anti-Westernism.328 The Iranian revolution in 1979 reflected this conflation of political and religious ideologies. It deposed the secularist and repressive regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ended democratic rule after a CIA-backed coup against the populist democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. After a coalition of liberal inrel-lectuals and Islamic fundamentalists succeeded in ousting the shah in 1979, Islamic fundamentalists turned against the liberal wing and established a theocracy under Ayarollah Khomeini. The new regime limited freedom of expression, apolitical rights, and women's rights. Moreover it rurned decisively against Western cultural and political influence. Iran became a model state of political y 1 • 329 ilslamism. Religion and politics also overlapped in the Arab-Israeli conflict after 1948. Arab neighbors saw Israel as a "colonial implant" protected by the former imperial powers of the West. Radical political Islamists made the eradication of the state of Israel a religious jihad. Begun as a nationalist movement under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its political wing increasingly merged religion with political identity. On the Israeli side, too, the more radical political parties expressed their srruggle against Arab neighbors in religious terms. The extreme religio-political voices often undermined efforts by more moderate and secularized politicians to forge a compromise. The conflict was exacerbated by the economic and social dislocation of populations left in -[ 640 1- •[ 641 1- PO r.1 <:.>_!> ^L GLOBAL CULTURES Ayatoilah Khomeini, January 17,1975. He became Supreme Leader of Iran after the successful revolution that deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi, The revolution conflated political and religious ideologies, leading to che establishment of an Islamist theocracy. (Getty Images) poverty and without a political voice. For Palestinians, the dislocation was no: < just economic but spatial, because they had to settle in what started as temporal \ ' ^ and then turned into permanent refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt,.lord" n, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.330 The stakes in the conflict became, in M ty s words, "absolutist," and thus made compromise impossible. Despite the polarization of religious identity in the Middle East, efforts were under way to increase cross-denominational dialogue. In 1948, shortly after \\'rorid War II, the major Christian churches, with the notable exception of the Catholic Church, formed the World Council of Churches (WCC) in an effort to improve cooperation and communication on doctrinal, practical, and social issues. The Roman Catholic Church sent observers to the WCC meetings and gradually increased its dialogue with non-Christian religions over the next decades. The Second Vatican Council made some progress with its declaration, Nostra Aetate, which redefined the Church's relationship with non-Christian religions. Issued in 1965 under Pope Paul VI, the document promored both dialogue and understanding for non-Christian religions, particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism.331 Ecumenical and interfaith organizations proliferated in the postwar period in response to the increasing geographic proximity of different religious faiths in many parts of the world. They sought to contain the potential for conflict and hatred that came with this close proximity and to promote among them a greater understanding and acceptance of religious difference. The rise in interfaith movements was related to the general increase in popularity of non-Western religions among people in the industrial world. Beginning in the 1950s, interest in Zen Buddhism rose significantly in the United States and Western Europe.332 By the 1960s Hinduism and Zen Buddhism became for many adherents of the counterculture a spiritual retreat from the technocratic and materialist realities of modern society. According to a 1970 US survey, j percent of the population of San Francisco claimed to have tried Buddhist meditation and 5 percent had tried Transcendental Meditation. Nationwide the figure was similarly high, with 4 percent having tried Transcendental Meditation, suggesting that the practice had found supporters beyond the core areas of the counterculture. Transcendental Meditation, or TM, as its practitioners called it, was a method of meditation popularized by the Hindu spiritualist Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Traditional Hindu spiritual leaders looked with suspicion on the Maharishi's version of meditation because it was much shorter and less rigorous than the traditional process of Hindu religious meditation, which required weeks or months of discipleship and ascetic rituals. The Maharishi's method gained international fame when the Beatles went on a three-month retreat to his ■[ 64? ]• PETRA GOEDDE meditation center in Rishikesh, India, in 1968. They were joined by 1 thi lebrities, among them Mia Farrow and Shirley MacLaine. The M di, 1 s|, ■ appeal reached far beyond the celebrity level, however. He regularly il ,ilN, tual renewal.333 The search for alternative spirituality in the Western world coinn.iu] throughout the 1970s and 1980s with the proliferation of experimental 1 Jiir|(1l ^ communities, many of them inspired by Hinduism. Among the more lo- n„(l. sial groups was the Rajneeshpuram, which followed the leadership of B a»,i jii Shree Rajneesh, an Indian professor of philosophy. In the 1970s he csi allied an ashram in the Indian town of Puna, where he conducted meditation^ and lectured on spiritual matters. His liberal attitude toward sexuality and his cynicism of Gandhi earned him powerful enemies in India and prompted him to relocate to the United States in the early 1980s. By then most of his fol onus were American. Within a year of taking up residence in the small town of Ante-" lope in rural Oregon, the members of his group clashed with the local community and each other.334 In addition, the Rajneesh himself came under scrutiny from federal authorities for tax evasion and immigration violations. In a 1985 ^ka h.u gain he agreed to leave the United States, After extensive travels in Europe. in.-Asia, in 1987 he returned to India, where he died three years later at the agi or fifty-eight.335 His meditation center in Puna continued to attract interuaiiona1 visitors in search of spiritual renewal, meditation, and stress management. Interest in Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and other Eastern religions hf' 1111 part of the New Age movement, which spread throughout the Western world in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The addition of "movement" :o the term New Age might be somewhat misleading, because no central group o" eun cluster of groups existed to define or coordinate the practice of "New Ag-." Nonetheless, the phenomenon became significant enough to produce a large body of literature and an equally large number of workshops, commercial uitei prises, and a health industry. New Age ranged from interest in the occult ami astrology to psychotherapy, self-help, alternative medicine, and ecology. Ai forcing to one definition, "the New Age movement is characterized by a popular Western culture criticism expressed in terms of a secularized esotericism."3"'' Its GLOBAL CULTURES dherents were predominantly middle-class and white, unified in their unease about materialism and their attempts to seek spiritual, esoteric alternatives. Yet rather than rejecting modern consumer society altogether, New Age adherents developed an alternative consumer culture. By the late 1980s, New Age had become a major global enterprise with particularly strong followings in Germany, js'ew Zealand, Israel, Great Britain, and the United States, with a lucrative in-Justry to sustain it.337 At the same time, critics began to call into question some New Age practices, including interest in the occult, tarot cards, and efforts to communicate with spirits. Others began to see New Age less as a social or religious movement and more as a path toward personal fulfillment and spiritual • improvement. For New Age followers in the West who were in search of spiritual renewal, a major destination became India—including Puna, where the Rajneesh had set up a resort; Adyar, Madras, where the Theosophical Society, an early twentieth-century precursor of the New Age movement had its headquarters; and Puduch-crry, where the spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo and his collaborator Mirra Richards, known as "the Mother," had set up an ashram in the 1920s. Aurobindo s ashram attracted global attention when Richards, who became instrumental in sustaining and expanding it after Aurobindo's death in 1950, set up an experimental township called Auroville in 1968. The community, which won an official endorsement from UNESCO, included members from dozens of countries who sought to translate the spiritual precepts of Aurobindo's philosophy into practical living arrangements. Initially a Western adaptation of Indian religious ideas and practices, Auroville and other New Age communities gained new adherents among middle- and upper-class Indians, thus reconnecting the Westernized version of Hindu spiritualism with its indigenous Indian roots.338 Embrace of non-Western religious practices also merged with environmental concerns to create a new understanding of the relationship between the human body and its natural environment.339 Homeopathy, yoga, holistic medicine, aromatherapy, and the Chinese practice of acupuncture gained popularity among middle-class intellectuals in Europe and North America beginning in the 1970s.340 Practitioners increasingly stressed the links between physical and spiritual health. Western psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical scientists, too, began to study more systematically the relationship between the two. As a result, •[ 644 ]• •[ 645 ]• PETRA G OED DE GLOBAL CULTURES TABLE 4.2 Number of adherents of major religions, as a percentage of the global population Religion IpOO 1970 lOOO 2-OtO Agnostic 0.19% 14.68% 10.70% 9.Sl% Buddhist 7.84% 6.36% 7.31% ™i6% Chinese Traditional 13.46% 6.16% 6.99% 6-i0?ü Christian 34.46% 33.14% 31.43% Hindu 11.53% 11.5 3% 13.47% 1 i.76% Muslim 12.-34% 15.61% 11.08% Date source: World RcHgioi Database. medical experts gradually began to integrate non-Western methods into their approaches to healing, including the use of ancient herbs and other natural remedies. In many ways New Age was a response to the increasing dependence of humans on technology, but it was by no means an antimodern movement. Rather, it tried to channel the advances made in science and technology into projects toward the personal betterment of humanity. The objectives were distinctly pti-sonal rather than collective. The regeneration of body and soul was to be achieved through the attainment of harmony between modernism and tradition as well as between mind and matter. The global interest in this new spirituality w.is distinctly born from a life of affluence and comfort. As such it stood in maiked contrast to the spread of other religious movements, among them liberation th.-ol-ogy and Islamic fundamentalism. As the concurrent rise of religious fundamentalism and religious pluralism shows, the world's religions were not static entities immune to cultural or e\cn doctrinal change. Religious beliefs and religious practices evolved in tandem with and in reaction to larger social, cultural, and political forces. By the same token, evolving religious identities, practices, and belief systems contributed ru the cultural transformations of the second half of the twentieth century. Two factors in particular defined religion's role in these cultural transformations. The ■[ 646 ]■ 4-st was religion's relationship to modernism. By the beginning of the twenty-4fst century it had become increasingly clear that the traditional assumptions (bout the secularizing power of modernism no longer held true. In other words, economic, social, and political modernization did not inevitably lead to a decline religiosity. To be sure, certain functions traditionally fulfilled by religious be-jef systems and religious institutions had been taken over by other agencies—for ■'iistance, the spiritual function of explaining the mysteries of the natural world .Liid the origin of life was increasingly taken over by science, and religion's practical function of creating communities and engaging in charity was increasingly ■;aken over, at least in the Western world, by government agencies and secular humanitarian organizations. However, rather than rendering religious affiliation obsolete, both worshippers and religious organizations adapted to the changing functions of religion in the modern world. The more flexible religious organizations were in their adaptation to the changing spiritual and emotional needs of congregations, the better they survived or even prospered. Modernism thus affected religion in unanticipated ways. It encouraged a system of religious beliefs ind religious practice that became more flexible, more fragmented, and more diverse. Within all major religions, above all within Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam, a broad spectrum of subgroups emerged, ranging from liberal-progressive to fundamentalist-conservative. I Religions second major contribution to the cultural transformations of the past sixty years was the consolidation of the idea of religious pluralism. Since 1945 religious boundaries had at once multiplied and become more diffuse. They had multiplied because many religious subgroups erected spiritual, if not territorial, barriers to the secular world. The process of creating religious enclaves oc-:urred primarily within fundamentalist and conservative subgroups. However, boundaries also became more diffuse as fewer of them cohered with political or itate boundaries. Conservative and liberal variants of a single faith coexisted within a single locale, often sharing the same urban space when recruiting wor-ihippers. In all major metropolitan areas of the world, one can find representatives of every major faith, often subgroups within each faith as well. i Religious pluralism, as defined by Thomas Banchoff, is "the interaction among religious groups in society and politics." It emerged in the period after 1945, Banchoff argued, as a result of increased international migration, urbanization, •[ 647 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE and cultural globalization. "In the context of globalization and modernity, mj. viduals constitute and reconstitute religious groups on a more fluid basis ' 11 However, the idea of religious pluralism, in which individuals choose ór "um. sume" religion, like they would other products offered in a pluralistic sc.. tu does not translate easily into reality. Even in the United States, which has;-a lone tradition of religious tolerance, tensions arose between majority and niiii.n.> religious groups over the inscription of oppositional values into state and national laws. Those include questions of public religious display, abori ion rnju, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage. In Europe religious pluralism ckmhJ deep divisions, less about religious beliefs than about the outwardly visible cultural signs associated with religious practice. Other divisions have included the treatment of women within Muslim cultures or the practice of Shi i\ \\\iu.h could bring Muslims in direct conflict with Euro-American law. Even though pluralism is one of the core elements of any democratic system, religious pluralism has at times been seen as a threat to democracy. The root o£-this argument lies in the confrontation of Western religions, primarily Christiř anity and Judaism, with non-Western religions. How should a polirical svatem based on values forged in large part out of a Judeo-Christian heritage uKurb ar.d accommodate groups and individuals steeped in a religion and culture rhi: in many ways contradict that heritage? Or as the legal theorist and p!iilo.>ophei Martha Nussbaum asked: "How can a respectful pluralistic society sr.ar: i:p ic-fragile bases of toleration, especially in a time of increased domestic religious pluralism and in a world in which we need to cultivate toleration not only internally, but also between peoples and states?" According to Nussbaum, a secularized civil religion, as first postulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, offered i llawed solution, because its consequence was intolerance toward those who did not adhere to the fundamental precepts of that civil religion, which in turn created; even bigger problems in international relations. In fact, in 1762. Rousseau hid declared, "It is impossible to live in peace with those one believes to be damned.""' Nussbaum suggested another option, based on John Stuart Mill's niner.viirli-century elaboration on the idea of a "religion of humanity," first suggested by: Auguste Comte.343 This religion embraced "compassion as a moral sentiment; that can be cultivated by public institutions and public education." This new--. form of patriotism, as she called it, would contain within itself the idea of tolerance" GLOBAL CULTURES ind compassion toward others and thus create pride in universal humanity. She argued that "a liberal society, without offending against respect for pluralism, can still employ a moral ideal of this sort [compassion] and promote a moral education aimed at underwriting it. This ideal would serve as a basis for public political culture, in connection with public norms of equality and respect."344 Thus, rather than banning religious identity from public life, the tolerant state could embrace religious pluralism and tolerance as part of its national identity. Nussbaum's proposal returns us to the idea of embedding particularism within a larger framework of universality. By incorporating religious pluralism and the diversity of values within a larger project of public education and ultimately national identity, the state places diversity at the core of its unification process. This unification process, whether at the state, regional, or global level, presupposes an agreement on certain basic human values and morals that might ultimately be difficult to achieve. It requires religious leaders and their followers to focus their doctrines on the fundamentals of human dignity and well-being rather than on more specific doctrines and practices. Ironically, it was often the fundamentalist branches of the world's major religions that lost sight of these fundamental values, and created instead an elaborate system of doctrines, rules, and social practices that made them incompatible with others.343 At the turn of the twenty-first Century the challenge remained of how to curb the power of those who wanted to abolish pluralism without resorting to coercive measures such as curtailing free speech and free expression of religious and cultural difference. -[ 648 !■ •f 649 1- GLOBAL CULTURES 4. Human Rights and Globalization IN many ways the postwar rise of human rights in the international aiciu [,, came a secular religion of sorts for rational Enlightenment thinkers across Jic world. International legal experts, humanitarians, diplomats, and religious leaders could rally behind the idea of establishing a new world order in which the rights of individuals and states were guaranteed by a common set of laws. Pl"i n as an idealistic vision of universal values applicable to all of humanity, the debates about the definition and scope of human rights since World War II sli incased the major cultural dichotomies between particularism and universahvisi and between homogenization and heterogenization. Debates about rights had been part of state formation for centuries, rbcusin.' initially on concerns about citizenship and the rule of law within the state, However, as the world community suffered through two devastating wars 111 tin. first half of the twentieth century, the debate regarding rights shifted from ihi domestic to the international realm. The core question became whether human beings, despite cultural and political differences, could agree on a universal code of conduct that would guide their interactions and prevent future wars. Determining the substance of these values became part of an international dhtmi:-*. on rights: civil rights, women's rights, economic rights, minority rights. While participation in this discourse expanded, agreement on the nature «11 :d cxrcu: of these values remained elusive. The debates themselves illustrate the pdkk .1 constraints of reaching a global consensus on fundamental rights ar.corded .ill human beings and the practical constraints of enforcing a universal righss coJt around the globe. The United Nations helped define the international rights debate at its liisi conference in San Francisco in 1945. Emerging from a devastating conflict rli.it had claimed fifty to seventy million lives, most of them civilians, the delegates rallied around the core principles of international peace and justice.' ITic;, agri\ 1! on a fundamental set of rules to guide relations among its member states, mJuJ- •f 650 ]• nlg, enshrined in the preamble to the UN Charter, "faith in fundamental human rinhts, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men ind women and of nations large and small."3'16 The Charter deliberately neglected i t0 define the meaning and extent of those rights, leaving states, individuals, and human rights advocates to argue over those issues for the next six decades. It also %'i jL.]iberately neglected to provide mechanisms of enforcement, leaving states free to determine the reach of individual rights within their own jurisdiction. Even though scholars trace human rights discourses to early Enlightenment thinkers, concrete transnational manifestations of the realization of a human 'fights agenda remained rare.347 Rights campaigns surfaced in different political and social contexts throughout the nineteenth century, among them the cam- ■ paign against slavery, the women's rights movement, and the fight for workers' Irights. The first Geneva Convention, ratified by twelve nations in 1864, established an international set of rules for the treatment of captured and wounded enemy soldiers.348 The brutal colonial regimes of the late nineteenth century and the genocides and wars of the first half of the twentieth century, however, dispelled any illusion that these rights discourses led to a more just and humane f world.3'19 In the aftermath of World War I, Woodrow Wilson advocated a system "f of international laws to regulate relations among nations without recourse to war but he refrained from adding human rights to his Fourteen Points. Nongovernmental human rights advocacy groups, such as the Ligue des Droits de 1'Homme, which was founded in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair in France in 1898, and which pledged to protect minorities, struggled to gain political attention.350 A global human rights agenda emerged gradually between 1941 and 1948 under US and UN auspices. In January 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt included the defense of human rights in his State of the Union address and re- Ipeated the pledge as part of the Allied Powers' statement of war aims on New Years Day 1942., shortly after America's entry into the war.351 Though human 1 rights were not included in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, six months later the declaration of the United Nations, consisting of the countries at war with the Axis powers, pledged to "preserve human rights and justice in their own jfe lands as well as in other lands." There was no further elaboration on what these rights were or how they should be enforced.352 ■[ 651 ]• PETRA GOEDDE Because che UN Charters definition of human rights was so vague trier tional human rights advocates pushed for a separate Universal Bill n| ]{[ ,| The UN subsequently set up a human rights commission to draw m> ,, [, document under the leadership of the United States' former first hd\ I |, ^ t Roosevelt. The final product of the committee, the Universal Decinvaunr irf Hi man Rights (UDHR), included individual civil and political rights , nd loII ■■■ tive economic and social rights. The preamble laid out the general n.ini.:r,(.^ ,,f di gnity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood, and the reasons for the dcihi.it],,.. Then followed articles relating to individual rights (Articles 3—111, mi[ils ,/ individuals in relation to groups (Articles 11-17); spiritual, public, ai.d pf ,|llH j rights (Articles 18-2.1); and economic, social, and cultural rights (A 17). Articles 28-30 placed the rights within the broader context of limns di in, and order.353 Clean and orderly as the organization of the Declarnj ,11 wjs, iz could not mask the ambiguities in the wording, which led almost im rrdi. tth to contestations over the meaning of such concepts as freedom, the prope n.ia-tionship among individual, community, and states' rights, and the obvious ,nc most glaring gap in provisions for the enforcement of these rights. The docu 1 ^nt thus reflected idealistic aspiration rather than practical political app.icaiijn. ill,. UN General Assembly approved the Declaration on December 10,194s h\ ,\ vote of forty-eight states in favor, none opposed, and eight abstentions. :T1,l abstentions came from the Soviet Union and its satellite states Byeloru--.i-.\ Pi huu1, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine; from independent socialist Yugoslavia, nil from Saudi Arabia and South Africa. They reflected a fundamental unease h ait the potential infringement on the sovereignty of individual states, even th j-jgli the declaration included no provisions for the enforcement of the human 1 ^ its agenda. Cold War Human Rights Despite its claim of universality, the UDHR would be at the center of all the major global political and cultural divisions over the next half-century, bet; 111 ij, with the Cold War struggle between East and West. In fact, at the very ir.i-mcnr of the adoption of the declaration in New York, the United States brought accusa tions of human rights violations against the Soviet Union before the Unite*' J- - GLOBAL CULTURES Rations. Five months earlier, the Soviets had blocked all traffic between the Western-controlled parts of Berlin and the Western zones of Germany in protest over the currency reform implemented by the Western Allies. The Soviets feared that the introduction of a new currency in the Western sectors of the city ,vould destroy the old currency still in existence in the Soviet-controlled sector ' as well as the Soviet occupation zone surrounding Berlin. The US deputy repre-tentative to the United Nations, Philip C. Jessup, charged that the Soviet Union was depriving the citizens of Berlin of access to food, fuel, and health care, basic rights inscribed in Article 2.5 of the UDHR: the right to a "standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family."354 Ultimately the two parties resolved the crisis outside the venue of the United Nations, but not until the following May. Berlin marked the first of many Cold War clashes in which opposing definitions of human rights played a key role. Anticommunists in the United States and Western Europe were determined to press the human rights agenda into service for their ideological battle against the Soviet Union. They charged that communism itself violated human rights, because it deprived those under its rule of the fundamental rights of freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and religious and political freedoms. They drew selectively on the Universal Declaration to hail the Western liberal democratic system as its champion and vilify the Soviet-dominated system as its direct nemesis. They could draw on some hard facts in support of their claims, including the persecution of political dissidents under Stalin. However, human rights remained marginal to their rhetorical campaign against the Soviet system, because they did not want to open themselves up to potential charges, particularly during the ideologically repressive era of McCarthyism in the United States. Led by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, policy makers and law enforcement officials launched a fierce campaign against political leftists in public life, destroying careers and incarcerating many suspected of subversive activities, including spying for the Soviet Union. The government's obsession with anticommunism led to substantial violations of individuals' rights to free speech and due process, in the interest and under cover of national security.355 The Soviet Union, in turn, focused on America's dismal human rights record regarding its African American population. It provided active support to African Americans who brought cases of systematic racial discrimination to the attention •[ 65z ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES of the United Nations General Assembly. At a meeting of the UN si koin „ sion for minority rights in Geneva in the fall of 1947, the Soviet delegate, u,t j petition brought to the UN by W E. B. Du Bois to charge that US supp„rt p ' international minority rights was undermined by US treatment of its .iuM .n . norities. Du Bois and the African American civil rights association Ma.U p were at that time publicly lobbying for the inclusion of African Amn n. U\ 1, ,„ (|. ity in the UDHR. Du Bois had presented to the General Assembly hi App,. ,| to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in rhe-Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and ai \„. peal to the United Nations for Redress." His act met with strong di< ppu.v,,; from white liberal civil rights supporters, including Eleanor Roosevelt."6 US political leaders initially sought to deflect those criticisms by puiiuinj:(, the advances, albeit elusive, made in the United States since the end of World War II. Yet soon they took a more calculated approach that sought to a-o, au with communism the calls for some human rights, including the right to .-i) 1 il pay for equal work and the rights to housing and health care. The historian Carol Anderson has argued that the Cold War "blacklisting" of these human rights objectives seriously undermined African Americans' struggle for equality in the United States and forced them to settle for a much narrower tijjic to pu litical and legal equality. Even liberal supporters of black equality, Andeisin showed, refrained from championing social and economic rights on a national and global scale. By refusing to ensure the international enforcement o1'iIm.l two key rights enshrined in Articles 2,5 and 26, US human rights advocates severely compromised the declaration's potential to achieve universal equality." Divisions over the human rights agenda were also at the center of thcstrug-gle for decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. European powers went :o £ ^.u length in the 1940s to exclude the populations in their colonies from the run Ji ot universal human rights, particularly in the realm of civil and political rights.1 * Belgium, Great Britain, France, and other colonial powers, eager to hold - >ii w their overseas possessions, argued for an exemption clause for colonial tenim-ries. They justified this exemption in terms of cultural difference, yet these ■jiimi-fications were little more than thinly veiled expressions of racial discrimination. Giving colonial subjects the same rights, advocates of the exemption clause argued, would endanger the public order in those territories.3" •[ 654 ]■ Conversely, anticolonial activists saw in the human rights agenda a vital tool for their struggle for independence. At the 1955 Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations, where African and Asian nations—some of them newly ■ jndependenC—sought closer economic and political cooperation and a corner, strategy to fight colonialism and imperialism, participants defined self-Jctermi nation as the "first right." Though human rights scholars later contested whether self-determination was in fact a human right, the delegates at Bandung ** arly identified it as such and gave it aprivileged position.360 Self-determination, I|>hile not explicitly stated in the UDHR, clearly related to the collective rights iof individuals to freely choose their form of government and to participate in the ..a,. p.ncess of political governance, y The Bandung delegates debated individual human rights as well. For in- lltance, the Egyptian journalist and publisher Mahmoud Aboul Fath, who had Jfbeen forced into exile for his open criticism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, admonished Ifelegates not to lose sight of individual human rights, among them the right to jjfree speech. In an open letter to conference participants he implored delegates to lldhere to the standards laid out in the UDHR. "The violation of human rights," |he warned, "is certainly bad and intolerable when committed by imperialists Sagainst peoples on whom they force their authority, but it is also worse and more obnoxious [when] committed by a few nationals against their own people."361 liFath's statement put into sharp relief the tension between individual and collec->:tive rights. The right to self-determination applied primarily to states, not to ^individuals. It harked back to the post-World War I focus on minority rights, rather than the United Nations formulation of the righrs of individuals.362 Fath warned against establishing a hierarchy of human rights that replaced one cate-Igory of rights with another, arguing instead that adherence to both collective and individual rights was a necessary prerequisite for the creation of a just post-| colonial world. The universal language of human rights served Asian and African polirical demands for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. They claimed for themselves the same rights afforded the original signers of the Declaration. At the Bandung Conference, African and Asian states rejected not only the traditional political regime of colonial governance, but also the cultural system of human rights relativism. Their understanding of the interconnection between universal human •[ 655 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES rights and the anticolonial struggle found expression in declaration; dence across Asia and Africa. The African National Congress, for in ,t,in ' * same year drew heavily on the language of human rights in its form'uk iu, 11. „i Freedom Charter.363 Individual rights, the Freedom Charter argued, l.jn„ „| prerogative of the white minority population in South Africa, should hi L * tl„, i to all citizens of South Africa, regardless of skin color. Some of the debates over the meaning and scope of human rielits pressed in rhe language of cultural difference. In fact, cultural <:if ui j, i already been a source of contention during the drafting of the dec] | , the mostly white Euro-American commission quickly dispensed wirl- anv .iivu-ment in favor of interpreting or enforcing human rights differently in Jiffttcrt parts of the world. The commission did, in fact, solicit the views offew p tyiu-nent non-Western intellectuals before it finalized the wording of 1 he PiJ.iu-tion. Gandhi, who at the time was leading India's struggle for in ■ declared that he preferred an emphasis on duties rather than rights. He L-.\pl ur.jj that "the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world." Instead of a universal declaration of rights, he proposed "to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some correspor.linr; duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usuip-iiun hardly worth fighting for." The Chinese philosopher Chung-Shu Lo con -m iLd-in Chinese social and political discourse, rights were enshrined within iluj Li i-guage of duties to one's neighbor.564 These critiques did not amount to a miction of the concept of human rights, but instead challenged the way in .vlinh these rights were framed. Most importantly, however, they affirmed die i1 n\i.r-sality of rights and duties across cultural divides. In the 1960s the parameters of the human rights debates shifted fmni il.c international arena of intergovernmental agencies to grassroots activism nn tin local and transnational level. As student protesters in the industrial world challenged, the Cold War order and charged their own governments with vio at rt; the principles of democratic governance, new organizations emerged that made the defense of human rights on a global scale their main objective. Most prominent among them was Amnesty International, founded in 1961 by the fli rivi lawyer and labor activist Peter Benenson.365 Amnesty International's i.uss.o'i I t0 draw public attention to individuals who were incarcerated for political I ^ns, Benenson encouraged letter-writing campaigns to put public pressure ■ jaw enforcement agencies and governments to release political prisoners. If ' '| iough its record was sketchy over the next decade, the organization grew rap-. ■ inro an international network and expanded its advocacy to women's rights, children's rights, and rights of refugees and torture victims. Its significance in 1960s and 1970s lay in expanding human rights advocacy from a high-level irgovernmental diplomatic endeavor to a grassroots-level transnational movement. In the atmosphere of mass political activism of the 1960s, the organiza-jL, ti'Hi's idealistic objectives appealed to many who had grown frustrated with the ^ k\ of complacency among their own political leaders.366 Amnesty International focused on the plight of individuals. It tried to remain politically neutral in the public sphere, much to the dismay of those who felt that the human rights abuses in some regimes could not and should not be . separated from their political context.36' The organization went so far as to ad-' » vise local branches to "adopt" political prisoners in equal proportion from Western countries, the communist world, and the Third World.368 Furthermore it |p - showed a marked preference for cases with sensationalist potential, in order to uise public awareness about Amnesty International's work. Critics charged that this method privileged publicity over the actual cases and possibly detracred .from human rights violations that deserved equal or more attention. Amnesty International's work epitomized the shift toward individual rights in the global human rights agenda of the 1970s. Their radius of operation also extended into the global South, where, despite Fath's earlier warnings, human srighrs violations mounted. Many postcolonial leaders resorted to political oppression and physical violence to consolidate their power. Throughout much of the Cold War these regimes justified political repression as a legitimate means to ensure public order and political stability, often receiving political cover from one or the other superpower. Even when US president Jimmy Carter pledged in 1977 to make human rights one of the core policy principles of his administration, geopolitical considerations interfered.369 Carter put pressure on Chile and used human rights as political leverage in his dealings with the Soviet Union, yet he tailed to follow through with countries that were important economic and •[ 656 ]■ •[ 657 ]• PETRA GOEDDE political allies, including South Africa, whose apartheid regime was a rla violation of human rights but whose anticommunist policies made it a'ci Ptial Cold War ally of the United States.3'0 Even though the Carter administration's human rights policies remain I burdened by Cold War considerations, progress occurred on the European with the multiyear Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CM 1 > attended by Western and Eastern European states as well as Canada .in.l tj1( United States. Eastern Europeans had convened the conference in an eill gain Western acceptance of the existing system of postwar state bound Western European states signaled their willingness to agree to the pernia , of those boundaries, with the proviso that a series of human rights cl.ii:> added to the final accords.3'1 Those clauses included "respect [for] human i iul,ts and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience gion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,' |)ur also a section on "equal rights and self-determination of peoples."372 The Helsinki Accords of 1975 led to the creation of the Helsinki Watch group, a nun«o\-ernmental organization that monitored compliance with the accords in Hast.-rn Europe and the Soviet Union.373 The Accords also encouraged Eastern European dissidents, among them prominent Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, to cavie movements that challenged their own governments and ultimately helper! bring down the communist regimes in 1989.37'1 The signing of the Accords established, at least on paper, a common understanding of the inviolability of human ri*»hf. across the Cold War divide. Despite those efforts, repression in Eastern Europe persisted, demonstrating that the human rights regime would remain an kcJ rather than a reality for years to come. Defining Human Rights after the Cold War The year 1989 offered new hope for the triumph of human rights in interna rionr.l relations. As communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fell, the United Nations seemed poised to take a much more active role in guaranteeing peace, justice, and universal rights around the world. Funding for repicshe leaders in the world dried up. South Africa released its most prominent political •[ 658 ]• GLOBAL CULTURES prisoner, Nelson Mandela, within two months of the fall of the Berlin Wall; Hi Latin American insurgents and dictators lost financial backing. Nicaragua held multiparty democratic elections in 1990, which deposed the Soviet-backed Sandinistas. The end of the Cold War also coincided with the emergence and expansion of global communication networks, including the advent of the Internet ind the launching of new communication satellites into space. Together, these developments filled people with optimism that the post-Cold War years could break down cultural barriers and foster a new era of global peace. The global surge in optimism dissipated soon after 1989. The end of the Cold War did as much to expose ethnic, cultural, and political divisions as it did to forge new connections across ideological and cultural divides. An example of the former was the ethnic conflict emerging in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians, who had kept in check their historic animosities as long as they lived under communist control, now lashed out against one another with brutal force unseen on the European continent since World War II. Serbia's ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia in the early 1990s was a painful reminder of past atrocities in the region and revealed the inability or unwillingness of the international community to act on behalf of victims of human rights abuses. Around z.z million civilians in the region were displaced, some of : them to refugee camps within the former Yugoslavia, others to European Union countries and North America. Only about half of them returned, according to a ; 2.006 UN report.37S European Union countries, which absorbed many of the Balkan refugees as well as migrants from other Eastern European countries, struggled socially, economically, and culturally to integrate the newcomers. In Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, ultraconservative political parties garnered votes through anti-immigrant and ultranationalist positions. For a while it seemed that the opening of the borders to the former communist bloc created a nationalist backlash rather than a rush to global integration. Western Europeans debated questions of citizenship, responsibility for language education, tolerance of nonindigenous cultural practices, women's rights, and access to social services like health care. Most of the governments developed a dual approach: they tightened restrictions on immigration and political asylum while simultaneously redoubling efforts to integrate and provide basic services for those they •[ 659 ]■ GLOBAL CULTURES In 1987, protesters in Johannesburg marched for the release of Nelson Mandela, who had been im prisoned by the South African apartheid regime since 1964. International pressure on South Afrfcj to end its human rights abuses and discriminatory practices against black citizens increased in .the 1980s. In 1994, four years after his release from prison, Mandela became the country's first democratically elected post-apartheid leader. (Getty Images) * 1 micted to enter. Even if international migration did not always translate into % rr -iter cultural understanding, it nonetheless led to greater cultural and ethnic jiicrsity in all major European countries by the beginning of the twenty-first ! i.ntury. Ethnic tension erupted into mass murder in Rwanda in 1994. The killing of the Rwandan and Burundi presidents in an attack on their airplane as it ap- * pioached the Rwandan capital, Kigali, unleashed the genocide. Both men belonged E0 the Hutu ethnic group, which had for years agitated against the Tutsi riinority in Rwanda. Over the course of three months Hutus murdered between five hundred thousand and one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, while UN j tioops, who had been deployed to the region in a peacekeeping mission in 1993, stood idly by. As they explained later, they had no official UN mandate to intervene and thus were powerless to prevent the massacres.37*5 Tensions also continued regarding the integration of Muslim populations into Western, primarily Christian societies. In France the controversy over the wearing ■| of the veil in schools and public venues intensified, creating a strange coalition between conservative anti-immigration advocates, who wanted to force cultural and social assimilation within the immigrant population, and liberal, leftist, and feminist politicians who saw the veil as an infringement on the secular traditions of the French state and an expression of women's degradation in the public sphere. The long-standing controversy resulted in a 2.004 national law prohibiting the wearing of "ostentatious signs of religious affiliation in public schools," followed in zoio by ; a parliamentary vote to ban veils "designed to hide the face."377 The ban took effect in April ion. Belgium followed suit with a similar ban that went into effect three : months later. Concern over the integration of Muslim populations were magnified after : the end of the Cold War by the rise of political Islamism in the Middle East and more specifically the creation of informal regional and transnational groups of varying militant persuasions. These groups established bases in states with siz-t able Muslim populations—tolerated and supported by some, such as Sudan and : Pakistan for much of the 1990s, and opposed by others, including Iraq, whose ! secular dictator, Saddam Hussein, saw political Islamists as a threat to his au-: thority. The groups' militant wings engaged in acts of terrorism in the Middle ft East and beyond. Islam experts warned against conflating the religious practice of T •[ 661 ]• PETRA GOEDDE N WĚĚĚĚĚKĚĚsĚm— Grim evidence of genocide: three hundred skulis sir outside a chape) in Rwanda on November It, 1994, as authorities determine rhe extent of the killings. Over the course of three months in 1994 Hums murdered between five hundred thousand and one million Tutsis and moderate Hut us. (Getty Images) Islam and fundamentalist political tenets. They also warned against conflating religious fundamentalist Islam with militant-political Islam.378 Those nuances; however, escaped most Western popular commentators, who fueled anti-Muslim sentiment, particularly in the United States. Samuel Huntington's controversial 1993 thesis of a "clash of civilizations" articulated a new kind of cultural pessimism.379 Huntington argued that "the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." He divided the world into seven or eight civilizations and saw evidence that current and future violent conflicts occurred primarily among different civilizations. He defined civilizations as cultural entities sharing a common "history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have their own particular views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents ■* GLOBAL CULTURES ■ ind children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierar-chy-"3S° ^oC onty ne deem religion as the most important foundation of those entities, but more importantly he predicted that religio-cultural differences were too deeply ingrained in each of these civilizations to allow for an accommodation across boundaries. Conflict, in his estimation, was inevitable. Huntington rejected warnings about the homogenizing effects of cultural Globalization. He acknowledged that there were more interactions among peo-pies from different religious and cultural backgrounds. But instead of producing greater understanding and tolerance for difference, Huntington argued, they produced the opposite: a higher potential for conflict, at times violent in nature. "As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to ;see an us' versus 'them' relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion."381 Huntington could indeed point to several conflicts in the second half of the twentieth century in which religion became the focal point of what essentially were ethnic conflicts—Protestants versus Catholics in Northern Ireland, Orthodox Christians versus Muslims in Serbia, Croa-. tia, and Bosnia, and Arabs versus Israelis in the Middle East.381 According to Steve Bruce, religious identity "can acquire a new significance and call forth a new loyalty" when two cultures of different religion are in conflict or if a culture of one religion dominates another. Critics accused Huntington of exhibiting a kind of cultural determinism reminiscent of the economic determinism advanced by Marxists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.383 They also charged him with creating a stereo-typically negative image of Islam and conversely an equally stereotypically positive image of the "West."384 Particularly worrisome in their eyes was his idea chat the political manifestation of Islam was incompatible with democracy, a belief he shared with several leading conservative intellectuals, among them Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes.3SS Huntington's monocausal religio-cultural explanation for global relations and global conflict left little room to explore in earnest the extent and limits of cultural influence on relations between peoples and among people. It also demonstrated that despite international pronouncements of an increasingly connected and unified global society, evidence of cultural differences and cultural conflict remained strong. •[ 66z ]■ •[ 663 ]• PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES Huntington's thesis gained new momentum in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, ix' on September n, 2.001. Planned and executed by the Islamist terrorist organi/,^.,, al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, the attacks claimed almost-three thousand lives. Vowing to hunt down bin Laden anywhere in the world the US government launched a military campaign against Afghanistan, ih,-country believed to be harboring leading al-Qaeda operatives. It followed wicii an invasion of Iraq in 2:003, even though Saddam Hussein was a known enany of al-Qaeda. The administration of US president George W. Bush justified its pursuit of Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq in part by po::r:inr; 10 i\K Taliban's and Saddam Hussein's human rights violations. But with revelations of torture and physical abuse of prisoners in American custody at the Abu Chr.iib Prison in Iraq in 1004, the United States itself came under fire for human rinfin. abuses.386 Legal advisers' attempts to justify abusive interrogation techniques such as water-boarding caused a domestic and international uproar. The incident gravely damaged the reputation of the United States as a champion ofu.1ivers.1l human rights and undermined hopes for enforcing global standards of human rights.387 If the United States reserved for itself the right to define torture in contradiction to international conventions, it effectively undermined any cfkVf, to arrive at an internationally recognized system of human rights enforcement. Those efforts had been under way since the founding of the United Nation-, in 1945, but had stalled largely because of the ideological conflicts of the Cold War. Yet new opportunities for international cooperation in enforcing hunun rights on a global scale emerged in 1990. The United States had been a staunch supporter of the creation of international tribunals to bring to justice perpetrators of war crimes. The UN Security Council established the first of these in 1993 to deal with human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia. The I11.cn National Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) tried individuals accused of human rights violations in that territory since 1991. The most prominent defendants to stand trial were the former Serbian prime minister Slobodan Milosevic; former president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Radovan Karadzic; and former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic."18 A year later the Security Council set up a second tribunal to deal with the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis in Rwanda, again with support from the United States- The new spirit of post-Cold War cooperation in the UN allowed the Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the violence and set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). As in the former Yugoslavia, the international community failed to prevent the massacre. Yet it acted quickly to bring the perpetrators to justice. Beginning in 1996 the ICTR heard several dozen cases. Among its most prominent defendants were Rwanda's interim prime minister, Jean Kambanda, and Jean-Paul Akayesu, who at the time of the killings was mayor of the town of Taba, where Tutsis were systematically rounded up and killed. Both Kambanda and Akayesu received life sentences.389 The Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals showed that although the United Nations did not have the power to intervene directly in regional conflicts to prevent or stop human rights violations on a massive scale, it was gradually developing the mechanisms to bring to justice those who had committed crimes against humanity. In Z002,, UN member states went a step further toward an international criminal justice system by establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, the United States under the presidency of George W. Bush refused to ratify the Statute and withdrew its support for the ICC. Despite US rejection the court thrived and gained new signatories. By the end of 2.011 there were 119 state members of the ICC. The Court's jurisdiction, while broad in geographical scope, remained limited to the prosecution of nationals whose governments belonged to the Court and in cases where "the investigating or prosecuting state is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution." Most of the cases brought before the Court in its first decade of operation involved nationals from African states.390 The tribunals as well as the ICC operated on the assumption that a single set of laws should govern the national and international conduct of states and individuals. The success of these legal institutions rested on the willingness of member states to subscribe to and enforce those laws.3" However, in the last decade of the twentieth century the global community was still far from united on what constituted human rights and which laws should be applicable to all of humanity. In fact, the very idea of the universality of rights was challenged anew at the United Nations in the early 1990s when the heirs of those who had fought for self-determination at the Bandung Conference thirty-five years earlier claimed for themselves a particularist interpretation of human rights. •[ 664 ]• •[ 665 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE GLOBAL CULTURES The controversy emerged in 1991 in response to the publication of tin; Unit Nations Development Program's second annual report ranking (on ;lt ,.jt.s cording to a newly developed Human Freedom Index. The index took for- v 0.-teria of human freedom and ranked countries accordingly. UN ambassador R()f Awoonor of Ghana, spokesperson for the Group of 77, objected to the Ij^ , criteria. "Freedom is a value-laden concept that finds expression in tsilll rcn shapes and forms from society to society," he protested. "To take the work ;r particular scholar representing a particular culture seen by many in recent hi tory as linked to the oppression and exploitation of a vast part of our wo:-M -.|iil develop an index that should be applicable to all societies and cultures, is to slum-a lack of sensitivity hardly acceptable in a universal body like the UNDP.'""' 1 Group of 77 objected in particular to the inclusion in the index of the I' irtiiu n accorded to homosexuals. In several of the seventy-seven member states, include ingmuch of Africa and the Middle East, homosexuality continued to he punishable by law. Even in countries that no longer criminalized homosexuality, tin it was still spirited debate ovet issues concerning sexual and women's riiditi -including the right of homosexuals to serve in the military or to marry, aswi.ll .•, a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. A challenge of broader import emerged at the World Conference on Hum.ui Rights in Vienna in 1993, as several non-Western countries, including China, Iran, Syria, Singapore, Malaysia, and Cuba, questioned the universal applicability of the UDHR, dismissing it as an instrument of Western imperialism and demanding instead the primacy of the right to national sovereignty over univer-. sal claims of human rights.393 Those spearheading the critique, among them Singapore and Indonesia, faced charges of human rights violations and therefore had a vested interest in redefining the parameters of the human rights agenda.'"1 The battle over cultural relativism had taken shape three months cnilicr :i Bangkok, Thailand, where Asian countries had convened in preparation for the Vienna conference.395 At the Bangkok conference, Asian countries stressed the culturally specific regional application of individual rights. Article 8 of the Bangkok Declaration stated that "while human rights are universal in nature, they must be considered in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of inttm.-.-tional norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds."3'"' ^lus line of argument represented a significant departure from the Bandung Conference four decades earlier, which had endorsed the universal applicability uf human rights to claim for Asians and Africans the right to self-determination. At Bangkok, in contrast, the particulars of cultural differences trumped the universality of human rights. Asian human rights organizations and leading intellectuals immediately /challenged the official Bangkok position. Meeting at the same time as their governments, they rejected the cultural relativism argument and reaffirmed their ^commitment to the universality, inalienability, and indivisibility of human rights in Asia. The NGO meeting concluded with a counterdeclaration stating that "universal human rights are rooted in many cultures," and that because "human rights are of universal concern and are universal in value, the advocacy of human rights cannot be considered to be an encroachment upon national ■sovereignty."39' Asian human rights organizations were very much aware of the vvays in which their governments were exploiting the debates over cultural relativism to justify human rights violations. While they acknowledged that cultural differences existed, they argued that universal human rights as defined in the 1948 UDHR applied to all cultures. Their view ultimately prevailed in Vienna. Not only did the conference conclude with a strong statement in favor of the universal applicability of human rights, it also succeeded in creating the office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, a move opposed by the government delegates and supported by Asian NGOs.398 Human rights advocates had to reconcile their belief in the universal applicability of human rights based on shared cultural values with an equally strong support for the preservation of cultural diversity. The Indian economist Am-artya Sen provided the most articulate argument for the integration of particularism and universalism. He charged that the idea that all of Asia shared a particular value system different from "the West" repeated and reinforced an old Eurocentric vision. He embraced the existence of cultural diversity, because diversity existed within Asia as on every other continent. That diversity, Sen continued, did not preclude the existence of shared values. He particularly dismissed the argument made by Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and China's Li Peng that Asian cultures had more appreciation for authoritarian rule and less appreciation for individual freedoms and civil rights and that Asia owed its economic •[ 666 ]- •[ 667 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE success to that embrace of authoritarianism.3551 Because the regimes l:ad hevi authoritarian long before economic progress occurred, Sen countered, ihe ~v:. sons for their success had to lie elsewhere. In addition, he pointed to specific Asian religious and cultural ideas, including Buddhism, that promoted ci^. ic an leading economic powers. Protesters charged that the policies advocaiei. [<\ i\ n economic powers, particularly free trade and economic deregulation, gav „ unfair advantage to the world's richest economies. They pointed to a sen.--, 0!" international agreements in the early 1990s designed to facilitate intcrn.11 usual trade, which instead threatened local businesses who could not compete n ihr international marketplace. Those agreements included the North An.11 ltl Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the latest General Agreement mi 11, ,||^ and Trade (GATT), which took effect in 1994. The free trade agreements did indeed produce uneven results foi n ui-n ., economies. They helped make the international exchange of goods cheap ier, and faster in the last decade of the twentieth century. Together with technn logical advances in international shipping, the pace of trade accelerated ar.c t k cost of moving goods from their point of production to the point of (.oi-.sump-tion decreased, a development that also enabled communist China to become 1 leading producer of consumer goods for the American market. More inn- infantry, the production process itself became globalized, with pat ts manufactured in several countries and assembled in places far removed from the design . rd marketing centers. The multinational production process cut down on z'.:e emi of consumer goods in the international market. But there were also negative effects, among them an overall decrease in wages in the manufacturing sector, as producers moved from high-cost labor markets, such as the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, to low-cost labor markets in Southeast Asia and Latin America.401 According to the economist Jeff Faux, the winners and losers of this process were now separated not by nationality but rather by class. The worldwide decline in wages reduced workers' share in international wealth, whereas multinational corporate elites benefited disproport 01:-ately. It also pitted consumers against labor in the industrialized world. Consumers benefited by having berter access to lower-priced goods, including evei \ Ja\ items like clothes and shoes, while workers suffered from stagnant or declining wages, or worse, lost their jobs altogether. Because they were also consumers, workers found themselves at once on the winning and losing sides of the equation. •The conflicts over NAFTA and GATT not only divided workers, consumers, and producers in each of the participating countries, they also created new solidarities across national and cultural divides. The protests led to the formation of ctansnational social movements such as the World Social Forum, whose goal it was to make globalization work toward global justice instead of economic stratification. As globalization magnified difference in the economic realm through increasing social and economic stratification, it appeared to accomplish the exact opposite in the cultural realm, namely, the leveling of cultural difference. But evidence to the contrary can be found in the increasing multiculturalism in most major urban areas of the world, in the proliferation of international food everywhere, and particularly in the increase in travel to areas outside of Europe and ■North America. In fact, the experience of difference became a major selling point in the post-Cold War expansion of global tourism, as rich Western investors sought new opportunities for development in the global South and Far East. Many former political hot spots in Africa and East Asia, including Vietnam and Indonesia, became prime targets for tourist developments. Particularly in the 1990s there emerged a new wave of ecotourism, which required the controlled "cultivation" of areas previously inaccessible to outside visitors. The somewhat contradictory goal of ecotourism was to leave those newly cultivated areas as pristine as possible while at the same time introducing Western travelers to the region. Ecotourism became so popular in the 1990s that the United Nations declared the year zooi the International Year of Ecotourism.403 At a World Ecotourism summit in Quebec that same year, the participants issued a declaration, known as the "Quebec Declaration on Ecotourism," in which they pledged their commitment to preserving the "natural and cultural heritage" of tourist destinations, as well as a host of other commitments designed to achieve what the participants called "sustainable tourism." The summit, as well as the International Year of Ecotourism, signified new post-Cold War environmental concerns as well as concerns over sustainable development. The summit organizers recognized that global travel provided a major source of income for parts of the world that had seen very little economic development. More importantly, however, the meeting exposed the deep paradox of tourism at the turn of the twenty-first century. Eco-tourists were both rejecting and driving cultural and economic globalization. •[ 670 ]• •[ 671 > PETRA GOEDDE They sought authentic cultural experiences in ever more remote ar< as i ,| tn, world, but their expanding collective desires coupled with economic p j.u i n variably altered the cultural and economic dynamics of their destination In their search for difference, ecotourists linked the local to the global. lh v u ated hybridity at the very moment they celebrated authenticity. Even though ecotourism was primarily a commercial phenomc:mr i t\. pressed a deep-seated desire to incorporate cultural difference into one's own ].£. experience. The embrace of difference combined with a sense of inteiconnitt-edness across cultural and geographical divides found expression in ihe J ,[t twentieth-century philosophy of cosmopolitanism. One of its primary ad' uean., was the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who thought it a uscl ul r tna-tive to the overused and ill-defined concept of globalization, "a term" he arm ed "that once referred to a marketing strategy, and then came to designate i ... economic thesis, and now can seem to encompass everything, and nothing."Wl Appiah borrowed his idea of cosmopolitanism from Immanuel Kant's 179s essay Toward Perpetual Peace, which expressed not so much the material intercon-nectedness of the world but "the idea we have obligations to others, obligar 11 s that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, m even more formal ties of shared citizenship." In addition, cosmopolitanism fostered an engagement with human existences beyond one's own cultural orbir, ro "learn from our differences."405 Cosmopolitans, according to Appiah, beluvi both in universally shared values that bind them to strangers outside theii own familiar environment, and in the idea of cultural pluralism. In his own writing Appiah often stresses his own multicultural roots, which sensitized him to both cultural universalism and pluralism. His English mother and Ghanaian tathi r raised their family in Kumasi, the provincial capital of the Ashanti region or Ghana, but Appiah felt equally at home in British and Ghanaian culture ind eventually moved to the United States. Cosmopolitanism, just like globalization, was not without controversy as a philosophical concept. The political theorist Seyla Benhabib identified ilnei. strands of thinking about the concept: as an "attitude of enlightened morality that does not place 'love of country' ahead of'love of mankind'"; as a sigiuliei ol "hybridity, fluidity, and recognizing the fractured and internally riven charrcrei of human selves and citizens, whose complex aspirations" move beyond 1 lie .1.1- GLOBAL CULTURES tional community; and thirdly as a "normative philosophy for carrying the uni-versaliscic norms of discourse ethics beyond the confines of the nation-state."41"' Benhabib associated herself most closely with the third variant. Her interest in cosmopolitanism lay in the concrete and normative manifestations of the concept in international laws and institutions. Those included definitions of human tights, humanitarian aid, refugee and asylum status, transnational definitions of citizenship, international criminal courts, tribunals, transnational human rights organizations, and, of course, the United Nations. Cosmopolitanism, in her view, provided the moral and ethical foundation for the ordering of the state's relationship with its people (the rights of individuals vis-a-vis the state) and the ordering of the relationship among people across state boundaries. Despite their different approaches, Appiah and Benhabib ultimately came to similar conclusions about the importance of cosmopolitanism in the globalized environment of the twenty-first century. While their variants of cosmopolitanism do not offer a solution to the continued struggle between the forces of universalism and particularism, they offer a clear idea of the challenges ahead. Universalizing Difference Difference provides the key to understanding the cultural conflicts at the turn of the twenty-first century. Difference also provides the key to a possible resolution to those conflicts. Integrating cultural difference into the process of nation building has become the biggest challenge of the post-Cold War period. It might be the project of nation building itself that will become a casualty of the inexorable advance of cultural globalization. Transnational economic conglomerates, political organizations, and cultural institutions are challenging the primacy of the nation-state. To be sure, sovereign states are nowhere near to relinquishing power to higher political institutions. But those same states are recognizing the increasing dependence of national economies and societies on global networks. While they are willing to facilitate the transfer of goods, people, and information across national boundaries, they remain uneasy about accepting the cultural consequences of that transfer. The uneasiness stems from a peculiar understanding of cultural identity as fixed in time and place that is itself a product of early nineteenth-century -Í 673 1- PETRA G OED D E Enlightenment thinking about the centrality of the nation-state. Prim L1|] 1(r> capitalism, and imperialism contributed to the emergence and strmgiliunii^of a national consciousness in Europe and the United States.40' The uhjk j, i^,., tive and explicitly denned nationalism became, the more it relied on a liJlca myth of historical continuity. The past was reinvented to fit the identic . .11|,. present state. And the more the state relied on a linear myth, the more iivo >](.■, ,,„.. of difference it became. Two world wars in the first half of the twentieth ce:-.tt! rv showed the terrible consequences of an ideology of extremist national]'in ih.i: defined itself in opposition to other cultures and, in the case of N;=z (jL insisted on the eradication of entire segments of its population deemed .1-' i >| ttt ■ The second half of the twentieth century was characterized, at least in tin. i u|. tural realm, by the negotiation between the forces of nationalism a,«l i ansii.i-tionalism. Embracing difference was as much part of the process as finding tl,r,i-monalities. "Difference is reproduced locally," the historians Michael Gev-i and Charles Bright postulated in 2002, "not as an assertion of traditional me.miiiA or practices, but as a product of engagement with the global processes of dunce that are played out in everyday life."408 This does not render the idea of nationalism or national identity obsolete in the twenty-first century, but it assumes,-. new understanding of that identity as being forged and reproduced in continu.-.l infraction with—and not in opposition to—transnational impulses. Even though cultural globalization is seen as a consequence of economic and political globalization, producers of culture—artists, writers, musicians—have been at the forefronr of cultural hybridization. Some of these are well known, like Picasso and his works of art during his "African period." Others have only recently gained international attention, among them the conceptual .u-ti-t YinLi Shonibare, whose installations epitomize both postcolonial and post-Cold \\. t cultural hybridization. As an artist and an individual he defies easy categorization. His art installations build on cultural stereotypes in ways that demonstrate their absurdity. His preferred medium has been African batik print fabric, which, he discovered, was not really African in origin but imported fiom the Netherlands. The Dutch, in turn, had made these fabrics based on batiks-din themselves had imported from Java, colonized by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. What whites, and many Africans for that matter, regarded as "authenti- GLOBAL CULTURES : ca|ly African" thus turned out to be a product of multiple layers of colonial conquest and interaction within the Dutch imperial system. The story of how Shonibare came to these hybrid "African" fabrics illusrrares the complex processes of postcolonial and ultimately post-Cold War cultural globalization. It also helps give practical meaning to what Appiah understands as cosmopolitanism. Shonibare was born in 1962 in England, where his Nigerian father was studying law. The family returned to Nigeria three years later, but "Shonibare continued to spend summers in England, growing up in two worlds, bilingual and bicultural. At age eighteen he fell ill with transverse myelitis, which left him partially paralyzed. He later reflected on the peculiar circumstances of his evolution as an artist: "All of the things that are supposed to be wrong with me have actually become a huge asset. I'm talking about race and disability. They're meant to be negatives within our society, but they have liberated me."41" His disability led him to depart from more conventional arristic expressions and focus instead on conceptual art, which allowed him to explore new media. The racial aspect of his liberation emerged from an exchange with one of his white tutors at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, where he had enrolled in the mid-1980s. At the time he was interested in making "art about perestroika," but struggled to find the right approach. His tutor challenged the wisdom of his project and suggested instead that as an African he should focus on making "authentic African art." Once he overcame the affront not only of being racially stereotyped, but also having thrust upon him the artistic expression of an entire continent, Shonibare began to explore the question of what white imperialists (as well as postimperialists) might consider as "authentic African Art." That led him to the discovery of the Javanese-Dutch origins of the African fabrics and eventually the realization of the superficiality of the notion of authenticity in art and culture in general. "My tutor wanted me to be pure African," Shonibare later reflected. "I wanted to show I live in a world which is vast and take in other influences, in the way that any white artist has been able to do for centuries."410 Through his art Shonibare refused to accept Euro-American projections of African identity or to engage in ethnic self-identification. Instead he inserted colonial themes into the repertoire of European representations of ethnic identity.411 •f 674 1- ■[ Ö7S ]■ PETRA GOEDDE His arc plays with common stereotypes by turning them on their j 'Ml Ii <>ne ' "Him photographic installation with the title "Diary of a Victorian Dandy "h. i- ^ a comfortable bed in a Victorian-style room, surrounded by four white r i n j a white butler, all of them apparently tending to his every whim. T he \< u-j. i, plete with classic landscape paintings of the English countryside on tin. w ,,1^ p r has also created elaborate Victorian dresses out of his Dutch-Java n ',l Alncin fabrics, integrating the themes of colonialism, race, and class. Th< di.,^ tl. often worn by headless mannequins whose skin color defies easy racial i attgij'-1-zation, located somewhere on the spectrum between white and black. \\ nh [1( installations, Shonibare interrogates cultural stereotypes, but also :hc to h ui: tlf cultural authenticity. His artistic creations mix and at times inverr c ultural dcii-tities. This practice allows him to create a new cultural space that is authentic u itt own right, by not adhering to any established national or continental "authenticity." He produces difference locally, in Bright and Geyer's words, U < paging "with the global processes of change that are played out in everyday !ife.' Shonibare belongs to a group of artists from non-Western countries uno have rejected the role, given to them by the international white art establishment, as representatives of an imagined ethnic art. Others include l.ie Zan ,ui artist Cheri Samba, Ghanaian Godfried Donkor, and Georges Ac.tagbo iW.i Benin.413 These artists provide a window through which to explore the possibilities and challenges of cultural globalization in the postcolonial and post Gold War period. Their art exemplifies the lived experience of cultural hybridization by showing that it is more than a theoretical concept. It reflects, in concrete ways, the lives of those who have migrated between places and come in conr.it t with more than one culture or draw on the cultural heritage of more than t nt country or region. According to the Dutch-born anthropologist Jan Nedervecn Pieterse, that experience is "quite common: one way or another, we are-alhmi-grants."414 Pieterse himself was born in the Netherlands after World War II, eleven days after his family arrived there from Java, where his ancestors h id i.-t tied in the early seventeenth century as part of the Dutch East Indies Compam He described his heritage as mixed with "Javanese, Portuguese, French, G-i mans, and others, and steeped in Indo-Dutch mestizo-culture."415 Pieterse's own transnational biography was not as unusual by the end of the twentieth century as it would have been a few decades earlier. Nonetheless the .1 GLOBAL CULTURES "Vist majority of the world's population during their lifetime did not venture j^r from where they were born. The multinational experience had always been "jiiuch more common among those engaged in cultural producrion and cultural analys's: inrellectuals, scientists, missionaries, artists, musicians, writers, and even noliticians. More importantly, the number of individuals combining Western with non-Western biographies has increased at a faster rate than at any time before. Their voices have grown in tandem with non-Western voices within international organizations, politics, art, and literature. One indicator of the cultural shift toward greater inclusion of non-Western voices in the production of global cultures lies in a survey of the Nobel laureates in literature in recent decades. Between 1980 and zoiz, the Nobel Institute awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to writers from Asia, Africa, and South America twelve times. In the first eighty years of its existence, it had done so only five times. Moreover, in recent years the committee was more likely to choose authors who wrote about intercultural and interracial themes. Those included apartheid in South Africa (Nadine Gordimer, 1991), race relations in the United States (Toni Morrison, 1993), and colonialism and postcolonialism (Derek Walton, 1991; V. S. Naipaul, 1001).416 These authors reflect a broader transformation in the international literary landscape that included best-selling authors such i as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Jhumpa Lahiri. The Indian-born Rushdie ■received his education in England and has since resided there. Desai was born in India to a German mother and a Bengali father. She was educated in India and has worked both in India and the United States, Lahiri, the 2.000 winner of the American Pulitzer Prize in Literature for her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was born in London to Bengali parents and moved to the United States when she was three 417 The increasing presence on the international literary stage of writers wirh non-Western or transnational personal histories, as well as works that address multicultural themes, is a barometer of rhe growing intercultural networks. They have become part of a cosmopolitan cohort communicating in a common global language. This language is not only multicultural but multifocal. It is by no means a new language, because cultural exchange and cultural borrowing have existed for centuries, if not millennia. However, since the 1990s its radius has extended from the elites to the middle classes and from the global North to the South. ■[ 676 ]- ■[ 677 ]■ PETRA GOEDDE Tliis broadening lias created greater diversity and increased the common t1. tural radius. But it has also created friction and cultural fragmentation as diilu ent cultural groups vie for dominance in local, national, and global settings. The emergence and evolution of global cultures since 1945 thus followed centripCi;!j as well as centrifugal trajectories. Global cultures were marked by hoi.-.o^n./,, tion as well as heterogenization in the major urban centers of the world. Gi'l tural interaction produced universal standards of conduct, rights, arid v.ihy, while at the same time they revealed the particular local interpretations of those values. And finally those engaged in cultural exchange negotiated and continue-to negotiate between the demand for conformity and desire for difference. Despite an ever tighter network of global exchange of people, goods, and ideas, the c ukui ,il landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century might be more rnultifaceiui than it has ever been. I -I FIVE • t The Making of a I Transnational World Akira Iriye •[ 678 ]•