“Unfinished Business” of U.S. Diplomacy & the Cultural Cold War (original) (raw)
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The legacies of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF, 1950-1967) and its ill-fated offspring, the International Association of Cultural Freedom (IACF, 1967-1978), remain contested territory in the fields of Cold War and cultural history to this day. Book reviews covering the subject in the Times Literary Supplement still generate debate anno 2016. The fact that the CIA would secretly fund a transnational organisation of intellectuals in the name of freedom of expression for over a decade has captivated many political, cultural and intelligence historians. For some, it represents the ultimate ‘treason of the intellectuals’ for being part of a clandestine cultural cold war disguised as a cause for liberty. For others, regardless of the CIA involvement, it signifies the acceptance of responsibility on the part of individuals prepared to speak out in favour of freedom of expression at a time when it was under threat. In journalism and academia, the cultural cold war that the CCF helped shape has been superceded by the cultural war between its advocates and its critics. This collection seeks to escape this binary by re-evaluating one of the most far-reaching and lasting legacies of the CCF, its stable of cultural-political journals. By investigating and comparing these publications, and setting them within the national, regional and transnational contexts that nurtured, sustained, and criticised them, the Congress for Cultural Freedom can be revisited from the fresh perspective of global intellectual history. This in no way disregards the CIA influence – instead, it shifts the starting point for historical investigation of the CCF phenomenon into new terrain. It examines the CCF phenomenon not from the inside out – focusing on the institutional history – but from the outside in – giving attention to its most influential cultural products scattered across the globe, operating in their own particular local settings. In doing so, it brings together different strands of cultural, political and social history to open a new chapter of research on the CCF and the cultural Cold War in general.
Not Only Foreign Affairs: U.S. Department of State’ Cultural Policy During Cold War
SUMY HISTORICAL AND ARCHIVAL JOURNAL, 2020
The article is devoted to the consideration of the existing activities of the US Department of State in matters of cultural policy. Attention is focused on the works of foreign and domestic researchers who devoted their work to the consideration of the essence of the cultural policy of the state, which is often called cultural or public diplomacy or soft power. It is indicated that these directions in the USA are carried out by the structural unit of the State Department – the Bureau of Education and Culture, and the history of its formation is described. The active period of cultural diplomacy in the USA falls at the end of World War II and the beginning of the ideological confrontation between the USA and the USSR, known as the Cold War. One of the active tools for cultural diplomacy has been the dissemination of television and radio broadcasting around the world. No less actively used exchange programs and visits of citizens of other countries, which were designed to promote mutu...
Marshalling American Art: Exhibiting Ideology in the Cold War
In 1948, under the economic recovery programme known as the Marshall Plan, Europe was the recipient of some $17 billion in aid from the United States. Ostensibly aimed at spurring economic growth, the initiative also sought to cement American political influence in the region, in line with the Truman administration’s wider policy of containment to prevent the spread of communism. In the decades ahead, and especially as the politics of the Cold War intensified, the cultural influence of the United States emerged as an increasingly visible and contested issue across Europe and the United Kingdom. Exhibitions provided one crucial medium for the advancement of this strategy and a forum to debate its legitimacy. Whether in response to large and high-profile touring shows, or to smaller displays at commercial galleries, the reception of post-war American art was frequently refracted through the prism of cultural imperialism and ‘Coca-colonisation’. Beyond art exhibitions, these were debates that found further visual expression in the wide range of fairs and trade events through which Cold War ideology was put on public display. This workshop brought together a range of papers that represent new research into exhibitions of American art and visual culture during the Cold War.
The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left. U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included