Economics: Rumours of Europe's demise at the hands of America have long been greatly exaggerated. In 1851 the Crystal Palace Exhibition drew the attention of visitors and media alike to "Yankee ingenuity", as personified by Samuel Colt with his repeating pistol and by Cyrus McCormick and his mechanical reaper.
The ingenuity of Colt, McCormick, and a few other compatriots was not limited to the mechanical: it also included a flair for salesmanship. After a slow start, the Americans stole the show at the Crystal Palace and shook the self-confidence of some British manufacturers. By 1902 curiosity about Uncle Sam had given way to unease in WT Stead's The Americanization of the World, and in Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber's The American Challenge (1967) unease gave way to fear that US multinationals were routing all before them. Of course, the sense that the US was outperforming Europe is confirmed by historical macro-data. In 1870 the US economy was only one-third the size of Western Europe's; by 1950 it comfortably exceeded it. Whether this was cause for fear and loathing is another matter.
Irresistible Empire describes how "cleverly marketed and advertised brand-goods" from across the Atlantic knocked down the fortresses of a more hierarchical and craft-based 20th-century European culture. The book is full of elegant case studies and erudite anecdotes. Thomas Mann, author of Buddenbrooks, appears as an enthusiastic member of Rotary International in Munich; Boston's Edward Filene (who defined a store as "a machine for selling") offers an ex-premier of France $10,000 a year "for occasional advice on his European projects"; the Gillette razor blade company prevails on Il Duce to declare fascism anti-whiskers; Nelson Rockefeller's tall Stetsoned representative snoops around vacant lots in Milan in 1957 for a site for Supermarkets Italiani Inc. When Corriere della Serra carried an item comparing Supermarkets Italiani prices to the Milanese average, housewives in nearby cities brandished the page in front of their own shopkeepers, demanding reductions.
The American "invasion" was already well under way when the Depression and Nazism intervened. Then tariffs slowed the pace of merchandise trade, while Mussolini responded to Hollywood with Cinecittà and Goebbels commissioned the lavish Baron Münchhausen in Agfacolor. After the war the Americans offered Europe self-service supermarkets and mass consumption as an antidote to communism. Corporate America was particularly bullish about the Common Market, which prompted it to invest directly in Europe on a grand scale for the first time. Banned by the Nazis, by 1949 Rotary International was up and running in Germany again, and by 1964 advertising giant J Walter Thompson was employing nearly 500 staff in its European headquarters in Frankfurt.
Victoria de Grazia's implicit metaphors here are invasion and submission: hers is a story of European entrepreneurial failure. Yet in truth there was more give-and-take in these "Atlantic crossings" (to borrow a phrase from Princeton's Dan Rodgers) than de Grazia concedes. In the realm of merchandise trade, Europe's share of total US exports has fallen from 28 to 23 per cent since the late 1960s while its share of US imports has risen from 21 to 26 per cent. Nor was the trade in culture all one-way. Much of what inspired and sustained FDR's New Deal was European in origin, the balance of trade in sports was in favour of Europe. Soccer moms have entered American folklore - yielding nearly 1.4 million results on Google - but American field sports, with the possible exception of basketball, have signally failed to make it big in Europe. Moreover, as de Grazia concedes, Europe often moulded what it imported to its own specifications. Italian housewives forced self-service stores to carry small cuts of fresh meat; German Rotarians operated more formal clubs than their American counterparts; and European cars and kitchen appliances also differed. European culture remains distinctive too in its much greater propensity for leisure; in Ireland today the work year may be only one-tenth shorter than in the US, but in France it is one fifth less, in Norway one-quarter less. And for all the American emphasis on mass consumption, the gap between rich and poor in Europe remains much narrower.
The Rebel Sell (already available in paperback as A Nation of Rebels in North America) is also about consumerism as cultural imperialism. The authors (two philosophers who write in the first person singular) target fashionable prophets of counter-culturalism such as Naomi Klein of No Logo fame, economist Juliet Schor who counsels trading gym membership for evening walks with one's "spousal equivalent", and Adbusters, the anti-corporatist producers of shoes made of "100 per cent organic hemp uppers, recycled tire soles, and vegetarian heel and toe". Such "culture jamming" merely promotes an alternative consumerism, claim Heath and Potter, because it fails to grasp that consumerism is about being different or distinctive. In their critique, "no logo" becomes a kind a form of inverse snobbery, an anti-brand brand. And it doesn't work. Counter-culturalism is a labour of Sisyphus, because once it becomes its own establishment and ceases to be hip, some inevitably rebel against it. Meanwhile there is a lot of money to be made out of catering for the aspiration to be countercultural.
For Messrs Heath and Potter - trendily attired on a dustjacket which also features a Che Guevara mug - it is axiomatic that virtually everything we buy is what economists call a Veblen good (after American economist Thorstein Veblen). My demand for a Veblen good falls as others consume more of it. That is because consuming is about showing off, or displaying moral superiority. The Rebel Sell instances Naomi Klein's loft in a fast-gentrifying district of Toronto and the expensive kit that accompanies "virtuous" outdoor pursuits.
Economics, however, has thrown up relatively few examples of proven Veblen goods. The demand for BMWs and for memberships of the K-Club, like the demand for apples, falls as their price rises. The Heath-Potter premise that virtually everything is a Veblen good amounts to asserting that the act of spurning Nikes and "power tourism" leaves you no choice but to consume some other status good instead. Yet one of the strong messages of de Grazia's research is the power of conformity: most people follow the herd (think of Ikea). Moreover, what is the problem if the counter-culture can make simple food, a house in Arbour Hill, or sean nós dancing "cool" for a while - before they are considered "so 20th-century"?
Heath and Potter plead for a different, more pragmatic politics that would make advertisers and polluters pay, and that would increase the cost of "anti-social" competition. But after all the invective against Naomi Klein and the ad-busters, the sensible pleas for school uniforms as a means of reducing brand competition between teenagers and for a 35-hour week as a way of reducing rivalry for positional goods between adults seem anti-climactic.
Both these books arrive in the wake of that defining moment in Irish consumerism, the opening of the Dundrum Town Centre. Significantly, its main players - Tesco, H & M, Lacoste, Zara, the House of Fraser, etc - are European rather than American: and Starbucks is now on the way to Dublin. Meanwhile, neither of these books has shaken my determination to stay away from the Dundrum Town Centre for as long as I can. To borrow a phrase, just don't do it!
Cormac Ó Gráda's Black '47 and Beyond: the Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory was published by Princeton University Press in 1999. He has just completed an economic-historic study of Irish Jewry and is writing a global history of famine
Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe By Victoria de Grazia. Harvard University Press, 585pp. £19.95.
The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Capstone, 353pp. £16.90