In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but actively internalized American paradigms of power, political economy, and culture. According to Vogel, this process was largely voluntary: Europe abandoned the ambition to act as an autonomous civilizational pole and instead embraced American norms as universal, thereby aligning its institutions, cultural production, and strategic imagination with those of the United States rather than resisting or selectively adapting them.
A comparative glance at China sharpens this argument by contrast. Without endorsing China’s model, its cultural practices illustrate an alternative trajectory that Europe largely declined to pursue. China has consistently filtered, redirected, or resisted American cultural paradigms—through mechanisms such as quotas on foreign-made films, state oversight of cultural industries, and the sustained privileging of collectivist values over liberal individualism. These practices demonstrate that engagement with American power need not entail wholesale cultural convergence. Read against this foil, Vogel’s argument gains clarity: Europe’s Americanization was not an inevitable outcome of globalization, but a distinct choice—one defined less by coercion than by acquiescence to American cultural and ideological leadership.
From Inheritance to Consumption: Culture in the Age of Americanization
Hans Vogel’s How Europe Became American identifies a profound transformation in the meaning and function of culture in postwar Europe. At the center of his argument is not merely the diffusion of American influence, but a deeper civilizational shift: culture ceased to be understood primarily as a transmitted inheritance and came instead to be treated as a form of mass consumption. This redefinition, Vogel argues, marks one of the most consequential yet least scrutinized aspects of Europe’s voluntary Americanization.
In Vogel’s account, traditional European culture was historically rooted and locally embedded. It was sustained through language, education, ritual, and the canon of high culture—music, literature, philosophy, and the arts—whose purpose extended beyond entertainment to the formation of character, memory, and collective identity. Culture functioned as a vessel of civilizational continuity, binding generations through shared reference points and normative horizons.
The American cultural paradigm, by contrast, reconceptualizes culture as a largely market-driven phenomenon. Cultural production is mass-produced, commercially oriented, and disseminated through media industries optimized for scale and profit. Crucially, this paradigm presents culture as ideologically neutral—an arena of personal preference rather than moral or historical obligation. Entertainment replaces inheritance, and consumption displaces transmission as the dominant mode through which individuals encounter culture.
Vogel contends that after 1945 Europe did not resist this shift but actively embraced it. In aligning itself with American economic and media structures, Europe allowed cultural life to be subordinated to market logic and transnational entertainment industries dominated by the United States. Over time, this acceptance hollowed out older understandings of culture as a formative and civilizational force, reducing it instead to a lifestyle accessory compatible with consumer capitalism.
A comparative look at China clarifies the specificity of Europe’s choice. Despite extensive engagement with global mass culture, China has not accepted the premise that culture is merely ideologically neutral consumption. The Chinese state continues to treat culture as a civilizational inheritance spanning millennia, and as a moral, social, and political instrument. Cultural production is understood as a matter of public responsibility rather than market autonomy.
Even China’s commercial cultural forms—television dramas, cinema, and popular music—are expected to reinforce historical continuity, collective identity, and national narratives. While these forms adopt modern media techniques, they remain anchored to the idea that culture must transmit civilization. In contrast to Europe’s postwar trajectory, China’s approach demonstrates that modernization and global engagement need not require abandoning culture’s role as a carrier of historical meaning. This contrast does not endorse China’s model, but it sharpens Vogel’s central claim: Europe’s redefinition of culture was not inevitable, but chosen.
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Hollywood and the Remaking of Europe’s Historical Imagination
In How Europe Became American, Hans Vogel identifies Hollywood’s dominance of visual storytelling as one of the most powerful instruments of cultural Americanization. Film and television, he argues, do not merely entertain; they structure collective memory. In a media-saturated age, visual narratives increasingly determine how societies remember their past, assign moral responsibility, and interpret historical meaning.
Vogel emphasizes that European audiences overwhelmingly consume American-produced films and television series. This asymmetry in cultural production means that when major historical events are dramatized—particularly the Second World War, the Cold War, or Vietnam—they are filtered through a distinctly American moral and political framework. These narratives privilege American perspectives, ethical judgments, and heroic archetypes, even when the subject matter is European history itself.
Over time, such representations do more than shape external perceptions; they become internalized as historical memory. Vogel argues that for many Europeans, Hollywood’s portrayals increasingly function as the default account of their own past. This process subtly displaces indigenous narratives, replacing European self-understanding with stories authored elsewhere. What is lost is not factual accuracy alone, but narrative sovereignty—the ability of a civilization to interpret its own historical experience.
Vogel regards this development as especially corrosive because it operates invisibly. Hollywood’s narratives arrive packaged as entertainment rather than instruction, masking their role in myth-making. The result is a gradual erosion of Europe’s capacity to frame its history on its own terms, as American cinematic conventions redefine who were the protagonists, who bore moral responsibility, and what lessons history is meant to teach.
A comparative glance at China highlights the contingency of Europe’s choice. China has systematically prevented Hollywood from becoming the principal author of its historical imagination. Through strict quotas on foreign films, preferential support for domestic historical epics, and active state involvement in narrative framing, China insists on retaining control over how its past is represented.
Chinese historical cinema is frequently criticized for nationalism, simplification, or political instrumentalization. Yet within Vogel’s analytical framework, the crucial point is not aesthetic quality but authorship. China accepts the economic and reputational costs of limiting Hollywood’s reach in order to preserve narrative control. Europe, by contrast, ceded this terrain. In doing so, it allowed Hollywood to narrate not only America’s story, but Europe’s own—reshaping historical consciousness through a foreign lens that now feels natural, even inevitable.
Popular Music and the Dissolution of Europe’s Vernacular Soundscape
In How Europe Became American, Hans Vogel treats popular music not as a peripheral cultural artifact but as a central medium of civilizational influence. Music, he argues, shapes emotional habits, linguistic comfort, and collective belonging. For this reason, the postwar transformation of Europe’s musical environment occupies a crucial place in his account of cultural Americanization.
Since the end of the Second World War, American-origin or American-inspired popular music has come to dominate Europe’s public soundscape. U.S. styles saturate cafés, shops, radio stations, and later digital platforms, establishing a shared auditory environment that transcends national borders. This dominance has not merely added to existing musical traditions; it has redefined what counts as contemporary, desirable, and culturally legitimate.
As a consequence, indigenous European musical forms have been pushed to the margins. Folk traditions and vernacular styles increasingly survive as curated heritage or festival artifacts rather than as living modes of expression. Even more significantly, English-language lyrics have become culturally normative, particularly among younger generations. Vogel views this linguistic shift as a profound loss, as language in music carries emotional resonance and historical memory that cannot be easily translated.
For Vogel, the erosion of vernacular music matters because music is civilizationally formative rather than ornamental. It binds individuals to place, history, and communal experience at a pre-reflective level. When local musical idioms are displaced by imported forms, emotional ties to local identity weaken, and continuity with the past is subtly eroded. Cultural homogenization thus operates not through explicit coercion, but through habituation.
A comparison with China again illuminates the specificity of Europe’s trajectory. China has absorbed Western musical genres, including pop, rock, and hip-hop, but has resisted the displacement of its vernacular foundations. Mandarin remains dominant in mainstream popular music, ensuring that emotional expression continues to operate in a shared national language.
Western styles in China are typically localized rather than imported wholesale, and traditional musical motifs are periodically reintegrated into popular culture. English-language music exists, but it has not become the default emotional language of everyday life. Through this contrast, Vogel’s point becomes sharper: Europe permitted American popular music to redefine what sounded normal and modern, whereas China insisted that participation in global modernity need not come at the expense of vernacular continuity.
Language as the Hidden Infrastructure of Cultural Power
In How Europe Became American, Hans Vogel treats language not as a neutral medium of communication but as a subtle and powerful carrier of cultural dominance. Although he does not frame his analysis in strictly linguistic terms, English repeatedly emerges in his account as a silent infrastructure through which American influence permeates European societies. Its spread is neither imposed nor overtly contested, which makes its effects all the more profound.
Vogel observes that English has come to dominate high-prestige domains across Europe, including film and television, popular music, business, academia, and military coordination. Even within non-Anglophone societies, English increasingly functions as the default language of authority, professionalism, and global relevance. This represents a sharp departure from pre-1914 Europe, where multiple major languages coexisted without a single hegemonic tongue claiming universal status.
The consequences of this shift extend far beyond communicative convenience. As English becomes habitual, Europeans increasingly absorb American idioms, conceptual frameworks, and social norms embedded within the language itself. Ways of thinking about politics, identity, efficiency, and success are subtly reshaped, as language carries with it assumptions and categories formed in a distinct historical and cultural context. Vogel’s concern is not bilingualism or multilingual exchange, but the gradual erosion of conceptual autonomy.
Over time, this linguistic realignment encourages Europeans to interpret their own realities through borrowed vocabularies. When public discourse, scholarship, and elite coordination take place primarily in English, indigenous languages risk being confined to informal or private domains. The result is a hierarchy of meaning in which American-derived categories feel natural and universal, while local linguistic traditions appear parochial or obsolete.
A comparison with China highlights an alternative path. China has aggressively resisted linguistic subordination by maintaining Mandarin as the sole language of governance, education, and bureaucratic prestige. English is widely taught and pragmatically employed, but it remains instrumental rather than identity-forming. Mastery of English does not confer cultural authority independent of competence in Chinese.
Where Europe increasingly thinks in English-derived categories, China treats English as a tool rather than a worldview. Within Vogel’s analytical framework, this distinction is decisive. His concern is not the presence of a global lingua franca, but the surrender of conceptual sovereignty. In this respect, China’s linguistic strategy underscores what Europe relinquished: control over the language through which it names, interprets, and ultimately understands itself.
Daily Habits and the Quiet Remaking of Cultural Life
In How Europe Became American, Hans Vogel assigns particular importance to the transformation of everyday practices as evidence of cultural Americanization. Rather than focusing solely on ideology, institutions, or elite discourse, he directs attention to the ordinary routines through which culture is lived. It is at this mundane level, Vogel argues, that American influence becomes most deeply entrenched.
Vogel points to the ubiquity of American fast food chains—most notably McDonald’s—across European cities as a telling example. Alongside these establishments came a broader adoption of American eating habits: the normalization of soft drinks, packaged snacks, and popcorn as part of leisure activities such as cinema-going. These practices reshaped not only consumption patterns but also the tempo and social meaning of meals.
For Vogel, such changes are not trivial or merely culinary. Everyday habits operate beneath conscious reflection, forming instinctive behaviors and social rhythms. When these routines are imported wholesale, they subtly recalibrate norms of convenience, efficiency, and individual consumption. Vogel links these shifts to broader consequences, including changes in public health and bodily norms, as well as the erosion of traditional forms of social interaction centered on shared meals.
The significance of these transformations lies in their invisibility. Unlike political or ideological change, alterations in daily life rarely provoke resistance. Yet precisely because they are habitual, they exert a durable influence on how people move through time and space. In Vogel’s view, Europe’s acceptance of American daily practices signals a deeper cultural realignment, one in which foreign norms come to feel natural and self-evident.
A comparison with China again clarifies the point. China permitted American consumer habits to enter its society, but under conditions of selective containment. Fast food exists, yet traditional cuisine remains dominant, and communal eating practices continue to structure social life. American habits function as supplements rather than replacements.
Vogel’s underlying insight is not that China preserved cultural purity, but that it maintained hierarchy. Europe, by contrast, allowed American patterns of daily life to become the default. China permitted access without surrendering rhythm. The difference lies in whether imported practices remain marginal or come to organize the ordinary fabric of life itself.
Education and the Unraveling of Intellectual Inheritance
In How Europe Became American, Hans Vogel connects cultural Americanization to deep transformations in education and academic life. For Vogel, schools and universities are not neutral training grounds but institutions responsible for transmitting civilizational memory. When their orientation changes, the effects extend far beyond pedagogy, reshaping how societies understand knowledge, authority, and tradition itself.
Vogel argues that traditional European educational models—once rooted in classical learning, national literatures, philosophy, and historical depth—have been steadily undermined. In their place, American-inspired approaches increasingly emphasize transferable skills, utility, and present-oriented relevance. Education becomes less about initiation into an inherited intellectual world and more about functional adaptability within a globalized economy.
This shift, Vogel suggests, is accompanied by a flattening of intellectual hierarchy. Canonical texts and enduring questions lose their privileged status, replaced by a tabula-rasa mentality that treats all traditions as equally provisional or suspect. Critical inquiry, once grounded in deep familiarity with inherited frameworks, risks devolving into ideological conformity, as students are encouraged to critique traditions they no longer meaningfully know.
The cultural consequence is generational. As European students become less anchored in their own intellectual lineages, they grow more receptive to imported conceptual frameworks and normative assumptions. Education no longer reinforces continuity with the past, but subtly conditions openness to external cultural authority, particularly that emanating from the American academic world.
A comparison with China again illuminates the contingency of Europe’s path. China has modernized its educational system without fully severing canonical continuity. Classical texts retain symbolic centrality, national history is mandatory and heavily emphasized, and Western theories are taught as external systems rather than universal defaults.
Where Europe increasingly questions the legitimacy of its own canon, China enforces one—sometimes rigidly, but consistently. Within Vogel’s framework, the contrast is telling. Europe dismantled its intellectual inheritance not under direct compulsion, but through self-critique and adaptation, eroding traditions faster than American influence alone ever required.
Voluntary Surrender and the Crisis of Civilizational Confidence
A central and controversial claim in How Europe Became American is Hans Vogel’s insistence that Europe’s cultural transformation was voluntary rather than coerced. He rejects explanations that portray Europeans as passive victims of overwhelming American power. Instead, Vogel locates the origins of cultural surrender within Europe itself, particularly in the attitudes and choices of its elites and postwar generations.
Vogel argues that European political, economic, and cultural elites actively welcomed American cultural influence. American models were embraced as symbols of modernity, liberation from tradition, and commercial opportunity. Rather than defending inherited cultural forms, elites frequently presented American culture as progressive and inevitable, framing resistance as parochial or reactionary.
This receptivity extended beyond elites to broader society. Vogel emphasizes that post-1960s generations often preferred comfort, consumption, and participation in global fashion over cultural self-assertion. American music, film, lifestyles, and political idioms were adopted not under pressure but out of attraction. Even movements that defined themselves as oppositional frequently drew on American symbols, rhetoric, and imaginaries, reinforcing rather than challenging cultural dependence.
In Vogel’s interpretation, American dominance succeeded because Europe ceased to believe in the legitimacy of its own civilization. Cultural inheritance came to be viewed as burden rather than resource, while external models appeared morally and aesthetically superior. The decisive shift, therefore, was psychological and normative: Europe no longer felt justified in defending itself culturally.
A comparison with China sharpens this conclusion. Chinese elites have consistently framed American culture as powerful yet dangerous, attractive yet destabilizing. Engagement was treated as strategic rather than aspirational, with clear limits imposed on what could be adopted and what must remain sovereign.
Even countercultural movements in China rarely adopt American symbolism wholesale. Within Vogel’s framework, this contrast is decisive. Europe surrendered not because resistance was impossible, but because belief in its own civilizational authority had eroded. Cultural Americanization was thus not the result of inevitability, but of disbelief in oneself.
Vogel’s Cultural Diagnosis: The Loss of Self-Understanding
At the core of How Europe Became American, Hans Vogel advances a cultural diagnosis that ties together the various domains of American influence he examines. For Vogel, the adoption of American cultural paradigms signifies not merely stylistic change but a fundamental alteration in how Europe understands itself. Culture ceases to function as a means of self-interpretation and becomes instead a medium for consumption and external recognition.
According to Vogel, Europe no longer produces culture primarily for its own internal coherence or civilizational continuity. The transmission of a shared narrative—historical, moral, or symbolic—has weakened, replaced by fragmented expressions oriented toward entertainment and market appeal. External validation and imitation increasingly appear normal, even desirable, while indigenous frameworks for meaning lose authority.
This transformation reshapes the substance of cultural life. Culture becomes entertainment rather than inheritance, identity is recast as lifestyle choice, and collective memory is reduced to spectacle. In Vogel’s view, these shifts hollow out the deeper functions culture once served, leaving societies fluent in consumption but uncertain about purpose or direction.
Vogel situates this cultural transformation within a broader pattern of economic and military Americanization. Once cultural autonomy is relinquished, he argues, resistance in other domains becomes difficult to imagine. Cultural surrender conditions political and strategic acquiescence by eroding the confidence required to assert independent paths.
A comparative synthesis with China reinforces the analytical force of Vogel’s claim. China demonstrates that engagement with global modernity need not entail surrendering narrative authority. It has commercialized culture without declaring it ideologically empty and consumed American forms without internalizing American myths.
Whether one approves of China’s methods is secondary to the lesson Vogel implies. Americanization is not fate but choice. Europe chose accommodation and imitation, while China chose management and filtration. Vogel’s core diagnosis, therefore, is not simply about American power, but about Europe’s decision to relinquish the cultural conditions of autonomy.
Summary & Implications
Vogel’s argument is not a critique of American culture’s intrinsic value, but a diagnosis of Europe’s loss of confidence in culture as a vehicle of civilizational purpose rather than mere diversion. In contrast, China’s approach—though imperfect, coercive, and strategic—illustrates that societies that retain faith in their own cultural authority act differently from those that have ceded it. As a concluding insight, Vogel underscores that the trajectory of cultural Americanization was not inevitable: it was shaped by Europe’s willingness to substitute external models for internal conviction, reminding us that the survival of a civilization’s self-understanding depends on its capacity to believe in its own cultural destiny.
References
- How Europe Became American. Hans Vogel. 2021