PROPAGANDA.

Propaganda and European history are indivisible. The modern concept of propaganda—in essence, mass persuasion—sprang from Europe's religious conflicts in the early seventeenth century. The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church coined the word at the time of the Reformation to describe the act of spreading, or propagating, the faith to unbelievers. It is a testament to the cultural politics of Protestant northern Europe that the term should have swiftly acquired an enduring negative connotation: in popular usage, propaganda is to communication as murder is to killing. European history, however, suggests that propaganda is not the monopoly of any one ideology and—like any tool—it can be used for good or evil.

WORLD WAR I

The practice of propaganda reached new heights in Europe during World War I and in the ideological struggles that followed it its wake. Europe and the world were changed as a result.

In 1914, Europe was awash with propaganda. The ideology of nationalism could be found everywhere, from school curricula to commercially produced ephemera. It permeated the print culture of the popular press and bound Europeans to their colonies overseas with talk of duty and ethnic destiny. The architects of that propaganda—the leaders who had profited from the cohesion that national missions and common enemies brought to their population—were trapped within their world of stereotyped friends and enemies by the events of August 1914. When a Serb extremist murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, Austria's rulers felt compelled to mobilize against Serbia, while the tsarist regime in Russia had traded so heavily on the rhetoric of pan-Slavism that it could not but intervene on Serbia's side. The web of rivalries, alliances, and reputations that had to be defended swiftly engulfed the Continent and its overseas colonies in war.

The outbreak of World War I presented the combatant nations with a major challenge: how to raise the armies and enroll the civilian support necessary to prosecute war on an unprecedented scale. Propaganda provided the mechanism for this. Britain led the way, recruiting publicists, artists, and writers for the cause, although it had no formal ministry of information until 1918. In Germany, propaganda remained largely in unskilled military hands and suffered accordingly.

A characteristic element in propaganda on both sides was the atrocity story, depicting horrors allegedly committed by the enemy. Famous stories, later proven false, included the report that the Germans had created a "corpse conversion" plant at Vimy Ridge in France to turn the war dead into industrial products. Other common themes in World War I propaganda included the claim that God was on one's side and the notion that one must fight to demonstrate masculinity. Common methods of propaganda included posters and the relatively new medium of film. States managed news coverage of the war through censorship and by managing the presence of war correspondents with the troops. Private enterprise also played its part as patriotic wartime themes emerged in postcards, songs, and plays across Europe.

Combatants deployed propaganda on the battlefield. Leaflets crafted to demoralize or appeal for surrender were dropped over enemy territory by aircraft, a technique pioneered by Italy in its colonial wars in Tunisia. The combatant powers also campaigned to win the sympathy of neutral nations, the most important of which was the United States. Peace activists operated on both sides throughout the war, sometimes funded by their nation's enemy.

THE INTERWAR PERIOD

In the aftermath of the war, propaganda provided a convenient explanation for such events as the collapse of morale in Austria and Germany. Apologists for the German defeat, including Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), exaggerated the impact of wartime propaganda. But Hitler then sought to make the weapon of propaganda his own. Other uses of propaganda in the immediate wake of the war included the French use of propaganda to rebuild the birthrate and propaganda in many nations in support of peace. Major initiatives to this end included the League of Nations Union and a succession of powerful antiwar novels, including Erich Maria Remarque's (1898–1970) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).

European governments were not the only practitioners of propaganda during World War I. The international socialist movement had long since adopted the methods of mass communication, and radical class-based propaganda was a feature of politics across Europe. In Soviet Russia, the Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) developed a two-tier concept of propaganda, drawing a distinction—first made by Georgi Plekhanov (1857–1918)—between propaganda, which he defined as giving many ideas to one person, and agitation, which he defined as giving one idea to many people. The Bolsheviks became masters of both. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power. Communist propaganda now had the additional impetus of a nation-state behind it. In 1919 Lenin established the Communist International (Comintern) to ferment international revolution and in the following decades the Soviet Union pioneered a number of important propaganda techniques at home and abroad, including international radio broadcasting in 1927, with regular Radio Moscow services beginning in 1929, and elaborate propaganda films, the best known being those created by Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Later Soviet techniques included disinformation—the spreading of rumors.

The rising leaders of interwar Europe hurried to deploy the ideological weapons of World War I. In Italy Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), a former newspaper editor who had once taken money to print French wartime propaganda, now led the fascist movement. Fascist propaganda looked back to the golden age of ancient Rome. The fascists used propaganda to make their members feel as though they were a part of a great movement. Uniforms, banners, and songs all played a part, with the image of the leader at the fore. In Germany Hitler used similar techniques and themes to energize his National Socialist Party. Hitler believed that without modern communications the Nazi party would not have come to power in 1933. Similar, although smaller, movements could be found across Europe, including Belgium's Rexists, Norway's Nasjonal Samlung, and Britain's British Union of Fascists. Many of these parties used Europe's well established vein of anti-Semitism as a key element in their propaganda.

The dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini and of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) in the Soviet Union shared an approach to propaganda that included rigid censorship and direction of the mass media and education; a love of spectacle, whether as parade or monumental architecture; and a cult of the leader. Film propaganda in all three societies emphasized escapist fantasy musicals and romances rather than heavily ideological fare such as the famous Nazi film Triumph of the Will (1935). All three states were involved in major efforts to project their influence internationally through both political and cultural propaganda. Examples included an emphasis on international sporting events, most famously the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

The totalitarian propaganda effort overseas led to a counter campaign by the democratic nations to both consolidate their own empires and display their culture to others. France had been investing in the projection of its language and culture around the world through the Alliance Française, an organization of private citizens who taught the French language, since the 1880s. The French Foreign Ministry founded a cultural department in the early 1920s. Britain did nothing until the 1930s when, in 1932 it inaugurated the empire service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and then created the British Council in 1934. Other major efforts included the launch of Radio Netherlands in 1927. Although noble in intent, such work could not stave off the coming of war in 1939.

WORLD WAR II

World War II saw a marked divergence in propaganda techniques between the totalitarian and democratic countries. Nazi propaganda, coordinated by the Reichministerium für Volksauflärung und Propaganda (State ministry for popular enlightenment and propaganda) under Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) emphasized the dynamism of the regime and concealed its setbacks, whereas the British Ministry of Information, which eventually found stable leadership under Brendan Bracken (1901–1958) sought to work as far as possible with facts. The British government was so shy of ideology as to avoid defining its war aims until the summer of 1941. During the war, the BBC developed a reputation for telling the truth, whether the news was good or bad, and provided a platform for governments-in-exile to address their home countries.

As had happened in World War I, the combatants in World War II competed for American opinion. Although the Germans had the advantage of merely needing to sustain America's neutrality, Britain won the struggle for American opinion mainly by helping American journalists report the Blitz on London at first hand. Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill (1874–1965) did much to capture the American imagination in the same way that he had earlier rallied his own population. Britain also coordinated propaganda from the European governments-in-exile through a United Nations Information Organization. On the battlefield, the Nazis used propaganda as a variation on the artillery barrage to soften up their enemies. The populations that folded before the Nazi onslaught in 1940 had seen German military might in news-reels and heard broadcasts from Berlin. They knew exactly what was coming. But propaganda also played a key role in the Allied counteroffensive after D-Day, with the successful use of appeals to surrender. The Allies learned that the most effective psychological warfare used truth and flattered its listeners that they had done enough to enable them to lay down their weapons without loss of honor.

POSTWAR EUROPE

In the aftermath of World War II, propaganda played a major part in the reconstruction of Europe, but the period also saw a new propaganda struggle as the wartime tensions between Stalin and the western Allies widened into the Cold War. To begin with, the Allied Powers worked on reeducation in Germany and were much helped in this by a small army of returning exiles and memories of the liberal Weimar era of the 1920s. Key institutions of re-education included a string of newspapers such as Die Welt and Neue Zeitung, radio stations, and a special newsreel called Welt im Film (The world in film). The wider U.S. effort to rebuild Western Europe through the Marshall Plan (announced in 1947) also included a major propaganda component. Each national Marshall Plan office included an information bureau to publicize American investment in that country and promote associated ideas, from an awareness of U.S. products to a detailed understanding of American management techniques. Funding for this came from the host nations, hence Europe has been said to have subsidized its own indoctrination.

The Soviet Union saw the Marshall Plan as part of an American plan for economic domination and insisted on the nations in its sphere remaining outside the plan, and it increased both Soviet propaganda and real political power within that sphere. A succession of rigged elections brought Communist governments to power in Poland and Hungary (both 1947), Czechoslovakia (1948), and elsewhere. In 1947 Moscow created Cominform, an umbrella organization for Communist Party propaganda around the world. Set-piece struggles between communist and capitalist propaganda early in the Cold War included the Italian election campaign of 1948. The U.S. government secretly subsidized the Christian Democratic Party, which won the election. Communist propaganda gambits included a powerful drive for peace at the time of the Korean War (1950–1953), which was undermined by the brutality of Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. In 1949 the nations of Western Europe joined the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which included a small public relations section and regular talks to coordinate member states' propaganda policies.

Europe became a cultural battleground for the Cold War. Both the Soviets and the United States sought to draw intellectuals to their cause. Particular elements in the American agenda for Europe included greater political unification, although there was no shortage of Europeans campaigning for the same goal. European intellectuals from the noncommunist left benefited from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency money filtered through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but America's commercial culture had much more impact. In both Western and Eastern Europe, American popular culture, and most especially films and music, spoke of a certain freedom. In contrast, Soviet culture produced under the deadening hand of state censorship seemed rigid and unattractive. France in particular attempted to place restraint on the penetration of American popular culture, restricting the number of American films that could be released and policing the entry of English words into the French language.

European nations continued to invest in cultural propaganda around the world. Germany created a new international cultural apparatus called the Goethe Institute and began new multi-lingual international radio broadcasts on Deutsche Welle. Austria excelled at the art of what advertising people later came to call re-branding, using tourist publicity to make the world think—as one U.S. observer put it—that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. France and Germany instituted a wide range of cultural exchanges that facilitated their unprecedented rapprochement. Belgium used the 1958 Brussels World's Fair to showcase its postwar recovery.

During these years, Europe decolonized. Its empires had rested on a great deal of propaganda, not least about white supremacy, and their demolition required ideologies of equal weight. Anticolonial propaganda mixed local influences with the appropriation of European nationalism and its trappings of anthems, banners, uniforms and ideologies. Anticolonial propagandists included Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) in India and the Caribbean-born Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) in North Africa. In places where the European exodus was marked by a local insurgency, the retreating imperial nations deployed the techniques of psychological warfare as part of their counterinsurgency tactics with varying degrees of success.

Postwar Western Europe was characterized, for the most part, by its free media. Exceptions included the right-wing dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, but these too had liberalized by the 1980s. Political movements flourished, including the women's movements; a lively antinuclear and peace movement (especially strong in Scandinavia); environmental movements; and movements both in support of and in opposition to the emerging presence of ethnic minorities within European populations. Each deployed propaganda. The movement for European integration moved forward with elite rather than mass support, although the accession of individual states first to the European Economic Community and then to the European Union, and later the adoption of the common European currency, saw a succession of referenda with attendant propaganda campaigns.

During the postwar period, television rapidly became the major medium of political communication, although for most Europeans television tended to be an alternative to rather than an energizing element in political realm. European television was marked by a strong state presence and much regulation in matters of content. European governments restricted the political use of television and attempted to limit political ownership of commercial channels, although the most obvious exception to this has been in Italy, where in the 1990s the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936) rose to the premiership. During the 1990s, the Internet became a major channel of propaganda on the Continent. Some political parties also experimented with the use of Short Message Service (SMS) text messages on mobile phones.

During the 1970s, the Cold War underwent a marked thaw and West Germany in particular pressed for reconciliation with the East. The thaw culminated in the Helsinki Accords of August 1975, which included provisions for the free exchange of cultural materials. During the 1980s, old themes re-emerged and such figures as the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925) and the Polish-born Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) were relentless in their criticism of the Soviet empire. The deployment of American cruise missiles in Europe sparked a revival of the antinuclear movement and a fresh wave of propaganda for peace.

Propaganda played a key role in the dramatic political changes that swept across Eastern Europe in 1989. The populations of the East knew about the material and political benefits of Western European life from decades spent watching Western television and listening to Western radio. The bankruptcy of a communist system that feigned love for its people while repressing news of events such as the Chernobyl accident of 1986 was not in doubt. As the Soviet Union lost its ability to repress its neighbors, the collapse of the communist system in Europe became inevitable. All it took was news of unpunished defiance in one country—East Germany—and people across the region pushed for change. The borders opened and the barriers fell. On the night of 9 November 1989, the citizens of Berlin began to demolish the wall that had divided their city since 1961. In some places, the mass media repeated stories that later proved to be untrue or exaggerated. In December 1989 reports of a massacre of ten thousand people in Timisoara, Romania, stoked revolution in that country, although in fact only ninety-seven had died. The collapse of communism brought the fragmentation of Yugoslavia into warring states. The conflict, which lasted through out the 1990s, included claims and counterclaims of atrocities. Both Serbs and Muslims alleged that the other side had fed their babies to zoo animals. Such stories helped fuel real atrocities.

Despite the triumph of democracy in postwar Europe, the political fringe has engaged in an undercurrent of political violence. Terrorism must be considered a form of propaganda in which the event is planned as much for its value as political communication as for its economic impact on bricks, mortar, blood, or bone. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) spoke of "le propaganda par le fait"—propaganda by means of action. Terrorism has been a particular feature of movements for regional autonomy in Europe, such as the campaigns for Irish and Basque independence. There have also been shorter-lived political campaigns, such as the extreme left terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in 1970s West Germany or Brigatte Rossi (Red Brigades) in 1980s Italy. At the start of the twenty-first century, the threat of Islamic terrorism loomed large across Europe. The debate over the correct response to Islamic terrorism, and specifically the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, deeply divided European opinion, with much propaganda on both sides.

In the early twenty-first century European propaganda stood at a crossroads. Although the European Union already had many of the trappings of a super-state, it had seldom exercised a political voice on the world stage. In the absence of a European international cultural program, Britain's British Council and Germany's Goethe Institute began a basic program of cooperation, sharing office locations in the former Soviet Union. It is a small beginning but one that would have been utterly unimaginable in 1914.

See alsoCinema; Communism; Nazism; 1989; Radio; Radio Free Europe; Television; World War I; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cole, Robert. Propaganda in Twentieth Century War and Politics: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, Md., 1996.

Cull, Nicholas J., David Culbert, and David Welch. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2003. A single volume that acts as a guide to the subject and includes country-specific entries for most European nations.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York, 1965. A classic study of the rise of propaganda in twentieth-century life.

Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era. 3rd ed. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2003. A concise overview of the subject of propaganda, with emphasis on its role in war.

Taylor, Richard. Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. 2nd rev. ed. London, 1998. A valuable comparative treatment of the Nazi and Soviet use of a particularly powerful medium of propaganda.

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Translated by Diana M. Wolf. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994. A seminal study of U.S. cultural propaganda in postwar Austria.

Welch, David, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. New York, 2002. A comprehensive introduction to Nazi propaganda.

Nicholas J. Cull