CONSUMPTION.

All human societies consume. What distinguished Europe in the twentieth century was the rapidly expanding meaning, scope, and significance of consumption in politics, economy, culture, and everyday life. At the beginning of the twentieth century, consumer advocates in France and England hoped a "century of the producer" would give way to a "century of the consumer," where civic-minded consumption would advance welfare and ethics. By the 1950s and 1960s Europeans, like Americans, began to wonder whether they were becoming a new social system: a consumer society. By the 1990s consumer culture and consumerism became widely used both to describe a hedonistic postmodern lifestyle and to support a politics of choice.

The growing political and academic as well as commercial recognition of consumption as a distinct, even hegemonic phenomenon resulted from four overlapping dynamics: the politics of needs; the transformation of material comfort; the unprecedented proliferation of new goods and technologies; and the expansion of dream worlds and lifestyle consumption. Instead of a model of successive paradigm shifts (from scarcity to affluence; or from collective consumption to individualistic hedonism), these four dynamics overlapped, unfolding alongside each other. What changed was the balance between them as the meanings, objects, and practices of consumption evolved.

MEANINGS

In the course of the twentieth century Europeans attached to "consumption" a growing range of goods, symbols, values, and practices. These included provisioning, using, wasting, and imagining consumption as well as shopping or the act of purchase. Consumption can take place in a number of sites and through different social systems (collective provisioning or market). The nineteenth-century association of the consumer with the literal using-up of essential foodstuffs (bread) and resources (gas and water) widened into more diverse forms and practices. In France in the 1920s, la cooperation nouvelle addressed "consumers of health" and marketed family holidays. In Britain already in the 1930s, it came to include "consumers of art" and "consumers of education." Keynesian demand management put consumption at the center of political economy. The consumer's new status was captured by the satirical magazine Punch in 1934 that made a boy proclaim: "I want to be a Consumer.… I've never had aims of a selfish sort.… I want to be a Consumer, and help to further Trade."

In socialist countries, critique of bourgeois consumption ushered in attempts to build a collective art of socialist consumption. In capitalist countries, concerns with private commercial forms of consumption increasingly marginalized earlier collective and business meanings (such as firms consuming coal), a trend reaching its peak in the "affluent" 1960s. Following American models, consumer advice bureaus now covered tourism and book clubs, car repair and fashion, and even marriage brokers. Since the 1990s, neoliberalism has exported the language of "choice" and the "sovereign consumer" from the market to the public sector. Most notably in Britain, public policy seeks to make patients, welfare recipients, and users of police demanding "citizen-consumers." The twentieth century closed with a similar project with which it began, although now proceeding from the domain of the market rather than civil society: the fusion of consumption and citizenship.

NEEDS AND CONSUMER POLITICS

Europeans entered World War I with an uneven and underdeveloped sense of being consumers. Notwithstanding the expansion of commercial culture in the modern period and economists' attention to consumer preferences, consumption was mainly considered a problematic, even unproductive, inferior activity. It was first in Victorian and Edwardian Britain that democratic ideas were mobilized by taxpayers to position themselves as public-minded consumers. Significantly, consumers first articulated a voice over articles that were considered necessaries and were being exhausted in the literal sense of consumption (bread, water, gas). Consumer cooperatives, including women's groups, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century into a European network. But mobilization and identity-formation was uneven. Powerful societies in Manchester and Glasgow stood in contrast to more particularist and labor-oriented groups on the Continent; the large Konsumverein in Hamburg was called "Produktion"; outside Denmark, consumer cooperatives barely touched rural people. Socialist politics and corporate traditions of land, labor, and nation retarded a similar equation of consumers with the public interest in France, Germany, and Italy; in battles over high food prices, consumer interests were easily portrayed as a mere sectional interest.

Battles over trade policy at the beginning of the twentieth century and World War I catapulted consumption to the center of European societies, producing an unprecedented mobilization of consumers that would shape consumer politics and sensibilities for the next half century. Some of this mobilization was initiated by the state. War committees of consumers were set up in German cities, Vienna and Budapest, with the aim of educating consumers and limiting inflation and scarcities. Planners, like Walther Rathenau, identified consumption as an instrument of collective welfare, ethics, and national development. Most mobilization, however, came from below. From Barcelona to Berlin and The Hague, cities became sites of food riots. Even in Britain, which escaped severe crises of provision, the war led to the political education of citizen-consumers. If most experiments with consumer representation did not survive the end of war, consumers across Europe were now increasingly looking toward the state (not the market) to regulate trade and provide secure access to healthy food at stable prices.

The politics of food security played itself out differently conditioned by ideological as well as material differences. Conditions in Berlin were worse than in Paris or London but they also revealed a fragmented, antagonistic view of consumer interests that fueled social conflict and the collapse of the state. In contrast to an organic, inclusive representation of the consumer as public interest in Britain, poor housewives in Berlin attacked pregnant mothers and soldiers' wives for their greater entitlements. In Soviet Russia, on the other hand, scarcities helped the legitimacy of the new Soviet state. In Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) people only ate half as much in 1920 as in 1913, hated the tasteless canteen food, and sought to evade the Bolshevik shutdown of shops. Yet, problems of provision here strengthened a belief that state intervention was necessary and that social justice required the rooting out of bourgeois elements.

Consumer cooperatives emerged from the war stronger than ever, expanding their membership and share of the food sector, and, in Britain, forming a political party allied to Labour. Social democratic parties in the 1920s favored marketing boards, quotas, and other forms of regulation to stabilize agricultural production. Greater nutritional awareness prompted by the discovery of vitamins and biochemical knowledge emphasized the centrality of "essential foods" (especially milk) and led to popular demands on states to provide basic nutritional standards.

Western Europeans largely escaped the famines and chronic malnutrition haunting many other areas. Still, periodic scarcities and fear of hunger left a lasting imprint on people's identity as consumers. Daily rations in Essen, Germany, in 1918 for a "normal consumer" were almost half that later estimated by the League of Nations for inactive people. Barter, black markets, and home provisioning were as important as market systems of provision. Refugees, unemployed, children, elderly, and urban inhabitants without access to allotments were suffering most. This sense of vulnerability, revived after World War II by the extreme scarcities of 1944–1948, formed the mental background to the general support of agricultural protection and subsidies culminating in the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union.

Alongside economic nationalism and imperialism, food security also generated new transnational networks and global awareness. Much of the consumption in Central Europe after World War I was organized through intermediate organizations. In 1922 the American Relief Administration fed more than eight million people a day in the Soviet Union. Humanitarian aid after World War II meant survival for thousands in Western and Central Europe. Trade cycles, nutritional science, and the world depression (1929–1932) made internationalists turn to consumption as the vehicle for simultaneously advancing public health, absorbing excess production, and stabilizing international relations. "Freedom from Want" became a rallying cry for European social movements as well as a pillar of U.S.-Allied diplomacy. World War II left a new global awareness on the minds of many organized consumers. Scarcities were not just an Indian or Soviet problem: Europe was part of a global food problem.

Food security came late to Europe and overshadowed more spectacular, hedonistic aspects of consumption. Partly, this resulted from an expanding sense of needs and nutritional standards. Sugar, meat, and milk became necessities. The unemployed in the world depression were not starving, but nutritional knowledge highlighted a "hidden famine" caused by lack of vitamins and calcium. Consumption cemented a new democratic culture of social citizenship. In the West it only slowly became marginalized by a culture of choice, markets, and commodification during the Cold War. In the late 1940s, as many Britons supported rationing and fair shares as those wanting to abolish them.

The long preoccupation with food security also reflected the persisting vulnerability of many groups. Most Europeans in the 1950s were not part of a mass consumer society with leveled tastes. Social and regional contrasts remained significant. Until the late 1950s, West German workers lived frugally: real coffee was a luxury and chicory the main substitute. Only one-quarter of West Germans could afford to eat meat daily. By 1963 the typical working-class family still spent 35 percent of its budget on food. In Italy expenditure on food fell below 50 percent of the average household budget in the 1950s; for poor southerners it remained 75 percent. In 1959 the communal boards that operated the cucine popolari and provided food parcels and clothing still assisted over four million people in Italy. Regional gaps in Italy, Spain, and Portugal only narrowed in the 1960s to 1970s, facilitated by migration, industrial and service jobs, and a shrinking peasantry.

Attention to improvements in the standard of living conventionally focuses on the 1860s to 1890s, when the price of food fell rapidly thanks to declining costs of shipping. Europeans had to wait for the period from the 1960s to the 1990s for another significant improvement, following increased wages, the concentration of retailing, and the integration of food chains. In Greece the food share of household expenditure was still 30 percent in 1970 compared to 20 percent in Great Britain, Denmark, and Austria: by 1990 this figure had almost halved. An industrial worker in West Germany had to work over four hours for a pound of coffee in 1958, but only eighteen minutes in 1993. If for the majority of Europeans food security has became a distant concern, it remains alive for disadvantaged groups. The United Nations estimated that 1.5 million families in Britain could not afford an adequate diet in 1994.

MATERIAL CULTURE AT HOME

Underneath the ups and downs of the politics of food, the home was transformed into a primary site of consumption practices and technologies. Accident figures in the European Union in 2000 are telling: domestic products and faulty usage caused about twenty million accidents, more than were caused at work or leisure.

By the late twentieth century, the largest share of consumption was dedicated to the home; from 20 percent in Portugal to 28 percent in Nordic countries. Housing, the use of water and energy, household durables, home maintenance, and gardening dominated consumption routines and expenditure. The home was the main space accommodating an ever-increasing number of objects and technologies. Consumption practices moved into the home (bathing, listening to the radio, using the computer) while production vacated it. In interwar Slovenia, industrial workers raised their own vegetables and kept chickens and rabbits. By the 1980s self-provisioning had become the distinction of a privileged alternative lifestyle. Even farmers rarely consumed what they produced and instead relied on the market; an exception was Poland, where every second individual farm still worked primarily to feed its own family in 1998. Technologies like the sewing machine briefly prompted a countertrend—by 1983, 52 percent of West German households had an electric sewing maching, 18 percent still had a mechanical one. But in the long-term, the productionist evacuation of the home is clear. The obesity boom in the early twenty-first century partly reflects declining food preparation skills. New domestic skills are increasingly consumption skills (computer games, warming up prepared foods)—not production skills; cooking, gardening, and home improvement have moved from being everyday life skills to advertised forms of lifestyle entertainment.

Material and cultural dynamics converged in this consumerist revalorization of the home. Modern German kitchens in the 1920s were initially advertised through the language of productivity, but by the 1950s, through representations of comfort and beauty: hard-working housewives were replaced by images of leisurely women. Clearly, work did not disappear from the home with the washing machine. Rather, technologies have rearranged the time and significance attached to different practices in the process of laundry: ironing, drying, and sorting have expanded even as washing itself has become less labor-intensive. A study of British couples in 1999 found that women spent four hours per day on household tasks, men three hours; women did more washing and cooking, men more pet care. The expansion of domestic consumption alongside increased female labor participation has arguably advanced gender inequalities: working women in two-income families continue to shoulder most chores.

The modernization of the home facilitated the erosion of class and regional consumption communities. This came in two stages. First, the expansion of a common culture of ordinary consumption. Gas and water had been early sites of Victorian consumer protests, and it was the expansion of domestic utilities that initiated the second stage: the democratization of consumption routines following the expansion of consumer durables. Cultures of consumption did not so much progress from needs to wants. Rather, they produced an ever-expanding conception of needs. Previous luxuries, like a hot bath or refrigeration, became standardized conveniences. The expansion of the domestic consumption of water, gas, and electricity was stunning. In Berlin only 4 percent of all households had electricity in 1910, but 76 percent did in 1933.

In Western Europe, many urban dwellers had access to a common toilet by 1900 but the convenience of a private toilet inside one's flat only became normal in the interwar years and after. Semidetached housing made bath, toilet, and running hot water first accessible to some working class-families in Britain in the 1930s. Most Europeans had to wait for another generation; in West Germany only every other home had a bath as late as 1960. Smaller towns and rural areas lagged behind large cities. Even in France and Germany the outhouse and lack of running water was not unknown in rural areas in the 1960s. Central heating spread rapidly in the postwar years. In Western Europe, by 1996, 81 percent of households had central heating, 97 percent had hot running water; Central-Eastern Europeans are only slightly behind, with the exception of Bulgaria and Romania.

The connection of homes to utilities helped privatize consumption practices—the personal bath replaced the public bath. It also intensified practices. In early twentieth-century France even schoolteachers, those evangelizers of personal hygiene, still only washed their hair once a month. In the 1980s to 1990s daily showers rapidly became the norm for ever more Europeans. More frequent and intensive cleaning of the body revolutionized water consumption. Households today consume the largest share of public water supply: 35–40 percent of all domestic water consumption is used for bathing and showering. Changing lifestyles have had major consequences for the environment and urban infrastructures.

New communication technologies and household durables reinforced the importance of the domestic sphere. The car functioned as an extension of family life—the weekend outing, the holiday in Spain or Italy. Radio and television created new familial consumption experiences. These undermined commercial forms of public entertainment (the cinema) as well as collective leisure activities sponsored by church, towns, or social movements. By 1936 there were twenty-eight million radios in Europe—compared to twenty-three million in the United States. In the 1960s Western Europe picked up with the American expansion of television; 66 percent of British households had a television at the beginning of that decade, 90 percent at the end.

Washing machines have likewise privatized services. Since the 1960s, most clothes have been washed at home, not sent away or washed in a communal washhouse. The electrical industry in the interwar years promoted a cult of cleanliness to sell timesaving appliances. Class structures and the low income of working-class women meant that the diffusion of washing machines in Europe lagged behind the United States by one or two generations; before the 1950s they were limited to some middle-class households. In the long run, the rise of appliances and the decline of domestic services narrowed the gulf of consumer culture between classes. By the early 1960s, every other household in the United Kingdom and every third in Germany had a washing machine; by 1995, 88 percent of EU households did; dryers and dishwashers, by comparison, were still found in only every fifth household.

New technologies had contradictory effects on how people spent their time and money. In 1955, European cinemas attracted four billion visits. Attendance fell steadily to six hundred million by 1990 (a mere two visits per person per year), while TV viewing steadily increased; by 1974 Britons spent half their free time in front of the "telly."

New technologies and the new needs they foster have had important cultural spillovers for older consumption routines. The TV dinner promoted prepared food and altered the rhythm of the family meal. In 1960s Italy, the program Carosello, which mixed commercials with cartoons, meant children began to go to bed after this nine o'clock show. New consumption practices can coexist, interpenetrate, or compete with each other. The rise of TV, for example, has not meant the decline of the radio. In the 1990s, Europeans continued to listen to as many minutes of radio as they watched TV. What has changed was the social context—most listening was in the morning. Nor has TV been impregnable to new technologies, such as personal computing. People who spend less time on other leisure activities because of Internet use primarily reduced their time watching television and reading books, much less the time spent with family, friends, or sport.

Especially since the 1960s, advances in chemistry, engineering, design, and information technologies have resulted in an unprecedented expansion and thickening of the material world consumption, from Tupperware to electric kitchen tools, pocketsized music-players to computing toys. A "craze for novelties" already attracted attention in the eighteenth century. What was new in the second half of the twentieth century was the accelerating speed and scope of product innovation. Cycles of acquisition, use, and disposal quickened—the "throwaway society" was coined in 1955. Within a few years computers replaced typewriters, and CD and DVD marginalized the vinyl record. The shifting balance between objects and humans had contradictory effects for the domestic world of consumption. Some consumer durables like the dishwasher free up time for sociability. The multiplication of the same object, however, can also dissolve the familial into more lonely forms of consumption. With the purchase of a new television, the second set frequently moved into the children's room. In the former East Germany in 2003, 55 percent of six-to-thirteen year olds had their own set: they watched an hour more TV than friends without a set and suffered from a decline in social skills.

The expansion of domestic consumption was not an inevitable, market-driven process but shaped by politics and ideologies. In Nazi Germany, the radio had the full backing of the propagandist Josef Goebbels for providing relaxing entertainment and strengthening a depoliticized private sphere. In the 1950s traditional elites, especially the Catholic Church, initially opposed consumerism, fearing it would destroy the family. Christian Democratic ministers like Ezio Vanoni in Italy and Ludwig Erhard in Germany won with an alternative prescription: consumerism cemented the family by liberating people from basic material drives and freeing mothers from housework, thus enabling families to spend more time with each other. Conservative women's groups spread the gospel of domestic happiness through consumerism. Governments provided tax credits to assist families' purchase of new consumer durables. The family was an indirect beneficiary of export-led growth policies during the economic miracle. Low investment in collective consumption, transport, and services made the family and private forms of consumption like the car, kitchen, and entertainment at home more vital than ever.

The most self-conscious and aggressive experiment seeking to reverse the long-term expansion of domestic consumer culture was socialism. After the Russian revolution, Soviets targeted the private home and commercial markets as twin expressions of bourgeois capitalism. Communes and housing cooperatives tried to reform the byt or daily life. Soft furnishings were condemned as hazardous to health, dangerous remnants of prerevolutionary culture, household objects attacked as oppressive. New cities like Magnitogorsk promoted communal living, public baths, and collective leisure activities. In the end, socialist attempts to transform consumption routines were as impressive for the resistance they caused as for their ambition. The replacement of Christian with socialist objects in the home was greeted with grumbling or opposition. Individuals in collective living quarters often resorted to consuming food in the last corner of privacy remaining: their bed. In Magnitogorsk, many preferred to live in mud huts, which may have been primitive but afforded domestic privacy, than in the new collective barracks. In the early 1930s, the Communist Party took a U-turn in the program of domestic transformation: people's private objects and consumption practices were accepted. The primary role of women was to support the male worker and industrial productivity by managing a clean and comfortable private home.

In the 1950s and 1960s, consumption became a symbolic site of mutual observation and competition between rival social systems. Tellingly, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev conducted a "kitchen debate." In 1958 Walter Ulbricht pinned the superiority of socialism on the promise that East Germany would overtake its Western neighbor in per capita consumption of food and consumer goods. Socialist consumers were to benefit from a new "selling culture," new industrial inventions, and domestic comfort. Initially, in the mid-1950s the campaign to mechanize housework considered public spaces (such as launderettes at work) as well as private households, and the East German state sought the advice of female consumers. By the early 1960s, however, the growing competitive orientation toward the West led to a producer-oriented fixation on appliances in the home; in 1958 only 1.6 percent of East German households had a washing machine, by 1967 this had risen to 38 percent. Department store combines (Konsument) and mail-order catalogs were also introduced. Yet, investment in consumer industries was too limited and price reform too cautious to allow for an expansion of consumption akin to that in West Germany. From the early 1960s the share of consumption in GNP declined. The two-tier system between rationed goods and more expensive goods eroded popular trust in the socialist ideal of more equitable consumption. Engagement with consumer culture was stopgap. In the late 1960s the regime initiated a youth fashion plan that sought to engage with teenage culture, only to divert resources once bottlenecks in other textile branches emerged. Planning directives and political personalities, not consumers and their changing tastes, directed policy. Increased imports of consumer goods in the 1980s were financed through ever-advancing debt. Ultimately, the East German state was overwhelmed by the desires it had helped to unleash.

"MASS CULTURES"

The interwar years initiated an unprecedented commercialization of film, music, and other spheres of culture that transformed the mental and sociological nature of consumption. New forms of media consumption like cinema and radio and their expanding audiences were tied to anxieties of "mass consumption" and to the erosion of European culture by American commercial civilization. Already in late nineteenth century France, Gustave Le Bon argued that mass markets created dangerous new means of manipulating the gullible masses. From right to left, interwar commentators warned of the ephemeral nature of mass consumption and the power and commercial rationale of the culture industries that uprooted the uneducated, suggestible masses from their traditional values only to leave them in the grip of cheap pleasures, easy preys for authoritarian regimes; critics ranged from F. R. Leavis in England to José Ortega y Gasset in Spain, to Frankfurt School scholars in American exile. Just as industrial society shifted toward mass production, so consumption too appeared to shift from individual to standardized mass practices and desires.

Certainly, film and phonograph expanded the virtual stimuli and behavior introduced in the late nineteenth century by the department store, the flaneur, and window shopping, allowing ordinary Europeans to escape into readily available dream-worlds. The political uses of consumption were not lost on the Nazi state. Mass entertainment was partly distraction, partly promoted as a collective experience of joy designed to strengthen a national community: the most successful years for German film and dance were the early years of World War II. Yet, "mass consumption" was not intrinsically connected to manipulation, nor to the creation of soulless individuals in a lonely crowd. Cinemas, like department stores, opened public spaces for isolated groups, especially women. Commercial music was successful because it was linked to dance halls and clubs that offered new forms of sociability and feelings of liberation.

Centralization, standardization, and mass production created pressures for greater uniformity. At the same time these released opportunities for creativity and more pluralistic tastes. Music is an example. Regional leisure cultures gave way to more uniform national practices in the interwar years. Radio raised expectations across class and region about the acceptable standards of musical performance, assisting in the creation of shared national cultures. The velocity of cultural production and consumption accelerated with the rapidly changing number of hits and musical fashions. The phonograph made a greater variety of music available to working and middle classes. Popular music dominated commercial radio, a trend that public radio was unable to ignore; 56 percent of minutes broadcast during an average Sunday on Radio Luxembourg in 1935 was popular song and dance music, another 35 percent comedy songs and light orchestra; only 0.5 percent was classical music, and only 9 percent nonmusic related.

In the interwar years, amateur music gave way to professional, organized musical production; one British agency in 1938 controlled three hundred bands playing in two thousand halls. In the 1960s to 1980s, with the growing availability of cheap, electrical instruments (the guitar, then the synthesizer), the divide between producers and consumers of culture became once again more porous, as listeners learned they could make music too. Punk in the late 1970s emerged from a simple if sometimes violently staged belief that musical production had ceased to be the monopoly of commercial producers and trained musicians. Music became part of a lifestyle, a shift that minimized established traditions of musical training and reinforced a performative and rebellious aspect of consumer culture. As continuous cycles in the evolution and commercialization of popular and subcultures have shown, "mass culture" always creates opportunities for transgression and resistance that undercut a logic of standardized uniformity. What was new in the 1980s and 1990s in music, fashion, and other parts of youth culture was the accelerating speed in the cycle of style creation, commercial marketing, transgression and, again, creation.

From a long-term perspective, critics may have overestimated the passive gullibility of consumers and underestimated the creative, diversifying dynamic of "mass consumption"; the potential for resistance, self-discovery, or the pursuit of new identities, such as in subcultures, gay communities, or the designing of one's own personality through a creative or ironic appropriation of brands and fashions. The expansion of cultural consumption has not only created new genres (video art, rock, culture jamming) but also widened access to older genres like opera and museums. But critics were correct in fearing the erosion of cultural authority, not least their own: there is perhaps no other area in twentieth-century Europe where the democratization of consumption has done more to erode class hierarchies of taste and expertise than music.

Tourism and the pursuit of luxury emerged as key phenomena in more democratic forms of consumption since the mid-1950s. Their development reflects the dialectic between commercialized standardization and playful, hedonistic, and ephemeral aspects of contemporary consumption. Tourism has grown by over 7 percent per year since the 1950s to become the world's largest industry. The 1950s to the 1970s saw the rise and fall of standardized mass tourism; the first charter flight from Berlin to Mallorca took off in 1956. Spain received 1.5 million tourists in 1952, 43 million by 1984. Standardization has since been overshadowed by more personalized forms of cultural consumption and orchestrated encounters with difference: the personalized, exotic trip; short-term luxury breaks; cultural city breaks; and sustainable tourism. Tourism in particular is about consumption as pleasure, self-expression, and the transcendence of new wants. If consumption has become about identity, tourism has played an integral part in socializing people into sensual consumers yearning for fantasy and authenticity, self-discovery, and enchantment. The growing significance of this commodified form of hedonism and fantasy has also, however, reinforced social inequalities and exploitation. Forty-six percent of Europeans were not able to go on holiday at all in the late 1990s—especially unemployed, retired persons, and manual workers. Abroad, the hedonistic pursuit of self and pleasure has boosted sex tourism; in Thailand, popular with Europeans, an estimated 800,000 children are in prostitution.

One powerful engine behind mass consumption was the influence of the American model of a classless consumer society. American products, ideas, and tastes became a prominent part of Europeans' lives—the most popular TV series in the 1970s and 1980s were American (Bonanza, Dallas, Dynasty); in 2002, U.S. movies were responsible for 70–80 percent of all box office receipts; American-style malls have risen up outside many European cities; EU consumer protection in the 1970s initially borrowed from John F. Kennedy's speech of 1962. Still, Americanization amounted less to a wholesale imposition of American taste and objects than to a creative dialogue, admittedly on an uneven politico-economic playing field. This dialogue could result in imitation, fusion, or rejection. Images of a classless, consumerist American way of life were a central branch of anticommunist cultural diplomacy after World War II in the Marshall Plan, America Houses, traveling exhibits, and the Voice of America. One-half million Italians passed in awe through an "American Way" supermarket exhibit in Rome in 1956. In practice, however, European consuming cultures retained significant differences. A supermarket opening in Florence in 1961 was greeted by demonstrations and boycotts from shopkeepers and some residents. As late as the early 1980s, Italians and the French bought only 2 percent and 14 percent of their food in supermarkets; compared to 32 percent in Germany and 70 percent in the United States. One-quarter of French people in the early twenty-first century shop at least once a week in a local market.

The American convergence of consumption and citizenship met with different responses. If in the 1920s German experts had been skeptical of American mass consumption, they embraced American marketing and its fusion of opinion polling and commerce after World War II. In France, by contrast, there was resistance to the conflation of political and consumer culture. Postwar Britain was divided between supporters of fair shares and those embracing choice and consumerism; some championed advertising as the friend of democracy and freedom, others criticized it for undermining civic culture with selfish materialism. Europe, moreover, was not only the recipient of American models, but an active contributor through multilateral global relations, including a Japanese/British strand promoting savings.

New national idioms emerged where American and indigenous styles became fused. This was true for music, but also for fashion and advertising. British menswear stores combined more egalitarian American marketing with an indigenous appeal to the gentleman. Many European advertisers remained skeptical of American methods as out of tune with the taste regimes of their own imperial cultures. Into the 1950s, empires provided alternative cultural systems, with their own genres (Empire film) and purchasing promotion (Empire advertising). Immigration and postcolonial developments have helped diversify many areas of consumption from food to fashion that are as important as trends of Americanization. "Mass consumption" and "Konsumterror" have been continuous targets for new social movements and terrorists since the 1960s. At a popular level, Europeans have responded with different sensibilities to the relative decline of their cultural industries and regional traditions. Seventy-five to seventy-eight percent of young people in Italy, Ireland, and Portugal were interested in the screening of European films in 2000, but only just over 40 percent in Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Popular resistance to "McDonaldization" and the preservation of local food culture has been greatest in France and in Italy, the hub of the "slow food" movement.

CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE

A comparison of European consumers in the early twenty-first century with their grandparents or great-grandparents points to significant trends of convergence. Most Europeans enjoy unprecedented affluence and comfort. Like most citizens of the "developed world," they share a material culture involving television, stereo, telephone, automobile, and, increasingly, virtual modes of communication. Most live in private homes with hot water, central heating, electricity, refrigerator, and washing machine. Even in Eastern Europe by the late 1990s, 90 percent of households had refrigerators, 75 percent color televisions, over 50 percent automatic washing machines, and almost every other person used a computer and had a car; only Romania significantly lagged behind. In 2003 Estonia had as many mobile-phone users as France. Working time has declined, consumption time has increased; working hours in Western Europe fell by over one-third in the twentieth century. Differences within as well as between societies have become less pronounced compared to the situation on the eve of World War I, where, for example, the average Milanese ate fifty-three kilograms of meat per year, but those in Trapani (Sicily) only three kilograms. Meat, fresh fruit, and vegetable consumption has increased across Europe since the mid-1970s; outside France, 40 percent or more of Europeans are overweight or obese.

Whereas consumption tended to reinforce class and status communities in the first half of the twentieth century, more recently it has helped to dissolve these into more fluid and pluralistic relationships. Gender and generational hierarchies have become looser. The recognition of the elderly and children as "active consumers" and the sexualization of childhood are twin features of this trend. Young Europeans have a shared image of the body: 50 percent of fifteen-year-old girls either diet or think they ought to. Consumer desires transcend income differences: Romanians are even more concerned with consumption than affluent Western Europeans.

With the collapse of socialism, markets and retail concentration have become the defining modes of provision for Eastern as well as Western Europeans. Outside Italy and Spain, the small retailer has become a marginal presence; in Sweden 80 percent of local dairies and distribution centers closed between 1960 and 1994. While the variety of manufactured and synthetic products has increased, biodiversity for apples and potatoes has diminished. Street festivals like the love parades record a shared transnational hedonism. The consumer has also shot to the fore within the European Union (EU). The Treaty of Rome (1958) only mentioned the consumer in passing in relation to the common agricultural policy, but since 1975 the European Commission has sought to establish a market-based citizen-consumer. Consumption is a vital source of income for European states; most Europeans do not realize that they pay as much tax on consumption as on their income. In the 1980s and 1990s several governments began to export choice and consumerism from market into public services, especially the United Kingdom.

Nonetheless, visitors touring Europe in the early twenty-first century would find it difficult to square their experiences with ideas of globalization or postmodernity. Instead of a common material culture or a symbolic totality of objects and meanings, different groups and countries continue to have distinct cultures of consumption. In addition to "glocalization" or creolization, remarkable contrasts remain between and within societies. In proportion of their household budget, Greeks and Spaniards spent twice as much on restaurants and hotels than Scandinavians. Britons, Danes, Dutch, and Germans spent twice the share on recreation and culture as their Mediterranean neighbors. Austrians and Britons spent twice as much money on their pets as do Germans and Italians. In many societies, eating remains a crucial source of sociability, but in Austria 50 percent of consumers eat alone. Italians and Finns consume twice as much water as people in France or Flanders. Advertising spending (as percentage of GDP) is twice as high in Holland, the United Kingdom, and Greece as in Italy, Ireland, and France.

How (and how much) people consume remains in part determined by income and national welfare systems. In France, health-related consumption has shot up dramatically since the 1960s. Athenians spend twice as much on leisure as their rural neighbors. Pensioners significantly improved their standard of living in France in the 1970s to the 1990s and now consume as much as younger cohorts, whereas in Britain they experienced impoverishment and consume 25 percent less. More than half of Germans rent their home, while 80 percent own theirs in Spain, Ireland, and Italy; this has implications for related aspects of domestic consumption (home improvement, gardening). Scandinavians are well ahead in consuming new communication technologies (mobile phone, Internet).

The uneven advance of consumerism is captured in contrasting approaches to credit and saving. National legislation and financial institutions have shaped the availability and use of consumer credit. In the United Kingdom, consumer credit rose from 50 percent to 70 percent of the national income (1988–2001); Britons were twice as likely to have a credit card as Germans, while 22 percent of Italians did not even have a bank account. Between 1970 and 2000 the household saving rate (percentage of disposable income) fell dramatically in Italy (from 32 percent to 11 percent), Portugal (15 percent; 9 percent), and the United Kingdom (5 percent; 3 percent), but was stable in France (15 percent; 14 percent) and Germany (12 percent; 10 percent)—in the United States it declined from 8 percent to 0 percent.

And Europeans continue to spend their time differently. The average Finn and Swede spend seventeen minutes on the phone per day, whereas Danes and Belgians are concise with only four to five minutes. Reading remains a popular pastime in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scandinavia, much less so in Portugal. Mediterranean people spend one hour more per day in front of the TV than Nordic people. Germans, Dutch, and Austrians predominantly listen to international music, while national music continues to amount to half the music sales in Italy, France, Finland, and Greece. Regional trends remain pronounced in cultural consumption. In 1996 average residents in Lyon and Manchester went nine times to the cinema, three times more than those in Seville, Marseille, Vienna, and Berlin. There are three times as many visits to the theater per resident in Copenhagen than in Berlin or Rome. Danes visit amusement parks twice as often as Italians. The Irish and Danes are compulsive renters of video; not so Italians, Germans, Swedes, and Portuguese.

Cultural patterns shape tourist desire as much as income or climate. Mediterranean people spent over 80 percent and Scandinavians half their holidays in their home country, while over two-thirds of Irish, Germans, and Austrians prefer to go abroad. Greeks like hotels, Dutch prefer campsites or rented apartments, Swedes and Finns touroperated holidays. The Irish in 1999 spent more on their holidays than any other Europeans (except Luxembourgers)—three times as much as Swedes and Portuguese.

In general, the democratization of taste appears to have proceeded in two different directions. Britain is close to American dynamics of cultural specialization: activities like listening to the radio, reading, and sport became the preference of smaller groups of people who pursued them, however, more intensely. Countries like Norway and Holland, by contrast, displayed a trend toward greater cultural homogeneity: the rise or fall of consumption practices is more inclusive, a shared social trend. Thus in the United Kingdom and United States people listened less to the radio in 2000 than in 1975, but those who especially liked the radio intensified their habits, whereas in Norway and Holland both groups reduced their listening time.

Consumers' expectations of retailers, governments, and consumer movements also continue to differ. Sixty percent of Finns and Swedes think price one of the three most important factors when buying food, but only 18 percent of Greeks, who privilege quality, taste, and family preference. Trust in supermarkets is very high in the United Kingdom and Holland, whereas Scandinavians, French, and Germans place it in small producers and farmers. Risk sensibilities and perceptions of "the consumer interest" continue to differ, partly reflecting different national regimes of regulation and consumer politics. In Norway, there is a low sense of a distinct consumer interest, and the state is expected to act on people's behalf. In France, consumer groups have been more populist and confrontational, whereas in Germany they tended to be more technocratic and corporatist. In Britain, a more pluralist vein emerged, with consumer movements stressing the diversity of consumer interests to be protected and consulted. In contrast to British and German consumers, it is Danish and Dutch consumers who see the representation of consumer interests as a principal task of consumer movements, rather than just issuing practical advice. With the decline of the cooperative movement since the 1950s, membership in consumer organizations differs more than ever—25 percent in Holland and Sweden, but only 2 to 3 percent elsewhere. Nor has the democratization of the European market meant an equally "free" play of consumption. In Sweden, advertising aimed at children is banned, in Ireland smoking in public. Privatization and regulatory policies affecting the consumption of utilities continue to differ in spite of general directives by the European Union on liberalization and the consumer interest. In an oligopolistic setting like Germany, where four conglomerates dominate the market for electricity, consumers pay twice as much as in the British market.

APPROACHES TO CONSUMPTION

Outside the dominant branch of neoclassical economics, consumption mainly attracted negative scholarly readings until the late twentieth century. It was viewed either as a source of class division and inequality or as a source of manipulation by which capitalists and dictators sought to pacify citizens into passive "masses." Thorstein Veblen in 1899 focused on the "conspicuous" consumption of a parasitic "leisure class": the display of consumer goods served to buttress superior status. In the 1960s Pierre Bourdieu presented consumption as a "structuring structure," a classifying as well as classified system, which re-created social distinction and class cultures. The Frankfurt School and American scholars such as Vance Packard and Stuart Ewen emphasized the power of advertising, mass media, and producers in manipulating people through dreamworlds and material objects. With the declining importance of class, the democratization of taste, and the expansion of consumerist discourse and practices came more diverse and positive appreciations of consumption in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of a "passive dupe," fields as diverse as cultural studies, anthropology, and management highlighted the consumer as an "active" coproducer of meaning, taste, and self-identity. The pleasures, creativity, and benefits of consumption were re-appreciated, their aesthetic and emancipatory potential for individuals, outsiders, and subcultures celebrated. The triumph of markets and the political language of choice have been mirrored in the more positive scholarly readings of consumers as agents and of the opportunities available in commercial culture for the creation of personal and collective identities. Early twenty-first-century sociologists of ordinary consumption have dug beneath the spectacular or conspicuous landscape of consumption to retrieve more mundane, routine practices (washing, eating) and their relation to changing technological systems. After the initial reaction against a productivist bias, scholars are also reintegrating production into their analysis. Social scientists are discussing consumption in areas well beyond the sphere of shopping, ranging from media consumption and tourism to social services.

Historians have broadly followed these trends, but only part of the way. Consumption was initially approached through an interest in retailing or mass-production, critical of the shift from collective leisure to commercial consumer culture. Social historians looked at consumption through the lens of "social distinction," emphasising the reproduction of habitus and structures of inequalities. The influence of cultural studies in the United Kingdom and United States was to highlight transgressive, creative, or emancipatory features. Attention to gender highlighted the liberating aspects of cinemas, department stores, and boutiques in providing women with access to the public sphere. Generational shifts have received far less attention. More recently, scholars have highlighted the contribution of consumers to democratic politics and civil society. How political and commercial domains interact remains underexplored, although new work on consumer identity and knowledge is a starting point. Unlike medieval and early modern colleagues, most modern historians writing on consumption still say little about routine practices, technologies, and the environment.

IMPLICATIONS

The implications of consumption for public life and environment remain dominant tropes and moral dilemmas of political debate and social mobilization. For much of the twentieth century, cultural and political elites as well as intellectuals attacked "consumerism" as a shallow and alienating form of individualist materialism that dissolved communal solidarities, political commitment, and critical thought. Twentieth-century European history shows the problems with such a zero-sum equation of consumption and citizenship. As well as allowing for apolitical escapism, consumption has given excluded groups access to public spaces. In the early twentieth century, consumer mobilization shaped civic sensibilities. Since the interwar years commercial and political domains have become more interactive and mutually constitutive, but alongside trends of depoliticizing individualization, consumption, and market research have also been mobilized for progressive purposes, such as the use of opinion polls to highlight the political centrality of family, identity, and personal well-being. Formal political engagement may have declined, but the expansion of consumption-oriented lifestyles also helped to broaden the terrain of political culture, including environmental, generational, and gender politics. The increase of consumption has not merely amounted to more goods but to new facilities of symbolic expression. As a source of identity, consumption has been the main beneficiary from the collapse of more totalizing ideological projects (fascism, nationalism, socialism) and the loosening of class and gender hierarchies. Feeding into more pluralistic forms of public life, consumption may not bundle the collective energies of previous larger collective projects, but from a democratic point of view this may not be a bad thing. Cultural consumption has fostered civil society, and new information technologies have introduced new spaces of mutuality. In former socialist societies, like East Germany, the goods and symbols of consumption are being fashioned into in a new politics of identity.

Much of the critique of "consumerism" originates in a critique of neoliberal "choice." The rise of "choice" in political discourse, however, must not be conflated with the experience and practices of consumption in everyday life. A British study in 2004 found that the majority of people did not experience "choice" in their weekly shopping, but frustration. Shopping involves forms of sociality, not just self-centered hedonism. Consumption, moreover, is broader than shopping. The ongoing intensity of recurrent moralistic debates about the death of the public may in itself be good evidence against the thesis that consumption has eroded politics.

The environment shows a less ambiguous picture of the public costs and benefits of convenience and affluence. Europe has played an important part in the causal connection between consumption in the developed North and global environmental problems. Eighty percent of resources are now consumed by the 10 percent of people living in the North. Since 1950 the richest one-fifth on the planet has doubled its consumption of energy and meat and quadrupled car ownership while the poorest fifth has barely changed at all. However, it is the lack of recycling and sustainable consumption in the affluent North rather than consumption as such that has carried global costs. Some European societies have been at the forefront of addressing this problem, as well as causing it. Europe's carbon dioxide emissions declined with the shift from coal; in 1995 it was 8.5 tons per person (21 in the United States). In many continental European cities car-sharing and public transport policy has reduced car use. Dutch people have a high car ownership but take 30 percent of their urban trips by bicycle. A major environmental culprit has been energy consumption in the home, which increased by 9 percent in the 1990s while industrial and agricultural use declined. The gains from increased efficiency of many products (washing machines use four times less water in 2000 than in the early 1970s) has been outweighed, however, by increasing ownership numbers, the rise of single-person households, and new wasteful technologies; in Holland 13 percent of all energy consumption in the home feeds the stand-by function of appliances. Most Europeans continue to be oblivious to how much water and energy they consume and pay for. Household waste in Holland increased by 55 percent between 1985 and 1998. Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries have led sustainability initiatives, increasingly relying on civil society as well as on state initiatives, such as tax policies, eco-labeling, recycling, and pay-as-you-throw-away schemes; in 2002 Holland, 9,210 households participated in a nongovernmental organization initiative and achieved a 26 percent reduction in their household waste. More neoliberal countries, like Britain, with less homogenous cultures of consumption and policies of privatizing public services have lagged behind in sustainable consumption. In spite of the revival of alternative politics of consumption among the young, it is disproportionally those over over sixty-five who separate waste. How to decouple consumption and growth from environmental damage is becoming a central concern of formal politics as well as social movements and "alternative" consumers.

See alsoAmericanization; European Commission; European Union; Globalization; Leisure; Public Health; Tourism.

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Frank Trentmann