RADIO.

A medium of mass communication with great immediacy, radio proved a major catalyst of social and political change in twentieth-century Europe. Radio grew from research pioneered by many European scientists, including the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), the German Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857–1894), the Russian Alexander Stepanovich Popov (1859–1906), and the Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), who patented a wireless telegraphy device in 1900. Rival claims to be the inventor of radio had some propaganda significance later in the century. The device was initially used for maritime communication. Experimental audio transmissions included a series of weekly live concerts broadcast from the Belgian royal palace at Laeken from March to 20 August 1914, over what was then known as TSF (télégraphie sans fil, or wireless telegraphy). A new medium was taking shape, only to be interrupted by the coming of World War I.

During the early 1920s entrepreneurs in many European countries founded radio stations. The first major station was that of the Nederlandse Radio Industrie, founded in Holland in 1919, a year before the Westinghouse station KDKA began broadcasting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Dutch company Philips also played a leading role in the mass production of radio equipment. Danmarks Radio began in Denmark in 1920 and had a monopoly from 1926. November 1922 brought inaugural broadcasts by both Radiola (later Radio Paris) in France and the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) from London. The first regular Czechoslovakian broadcasts began in May 1923, and Germany's first official radio station, Radiostunde Berlin (later Funkstunde Berlin), began broadcasting in October 1923. Belgian commercial broadcasts also began that year. In the mid to late 1920s many European countries founded state-run corporations to regulate and direct the new medium. Examples included the Yleisradio (General Broadcaster) in Finland in 1926 and the BBC in 1927. The Belgian government founded a public radio station in 1930.

In March 1927 Radio Netherlands began short-wave broadcasts to the Dutch East Indies and ushered in European external services. Major services included Radio Moscow and Deutscher Kurzwellensender (from Zeesen, near Berlin), both founded in 1929; Vatican Radio, founded in 1931; and BBC Empire Service in 1932. Swiss Radio International began in 1935 and Radio Prague's external services began in 1936. Some international services were purely commercial, such as the English-language broadcasts by Radio Normandy (1926–1939) or the multilingual Radio Luxembourg, launched in 1933.

Radio had an immense social impact on inter-war Europe, providing the cultural glue to cement national consciousness and bringing the outside world closer as never before. The medium soon acquired a political significance as the ideal platform for the demagogic leaders of the era, most notoriously Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Hitler, who much preferred speaking to live audiences, once remarked that without radio and other modern methods of communication there would have been "no victory for National Socialism." Following the Nazi conquest of Europe, the great radio stations of the region became channels of Nazi propaganda, while the BBC in London provided a home from which governments in exile could broadcast to their occupied countries. For most of the war the British government took care to avoid inciting armed rebellion that would merely lead to the futile loss of life. The British Political Warfare Executive created a number of "black" propaganda radio stations, including one that purported to be a station run by German soldiers hostile to Hitler, designed to sow division within the Nazi state.

During the postwar years radio was both a medium of Americanization within Western Europe and a route to challenge the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The United States government broadcast to all of Europe over the Voice of America, and sponsored politicized broadcasts to Eastern Europe over Radio Free Europe (founded in 1950) and its sister station aimed at Russia, Radio Liberty. In Berlin the Americans operated a station called Radio in the American Sector, and in Austria they established Radio Rot Weiss Rot (Red White Red). No less significantly, Europeans could tune in to hear American pop music on the stations of the Armed Forces Network, created to serve American servicemen garrisoned in Europe. European stations also played their role in the radio cold war, with Deutsche Welle (relaunched in 1953) and the BBC World Service attracting substantial audiences in the Eastern bloc. It is significant that the first target for Polish anticommunist rioters in 1956 was the government station that jammed Western broadcasts; however, the Hungarian rising of 1956 underlined the danger of encouraging open rebellion, as Radio Free Europe had done.

European state broadcasters, bound by regulations designed to protect live music from competition from recording, were slow to respond to audience interest in American and American-inspired music. This created a niche for pirate radio stations such as Radio Mercur, which broadcast from international waters off Denmark and Sweden from 1958 to 1962, or Radio Caroline, which broadcast from the North Sea to Britain from 1964 to 1967. In the 1960s many European countries modernized their domestic broadcasting to include more music but also to protect cultural and spoken-word programming. In 1965 the three French radio stations France I, II, and III rebranded as France Inter, France Musique, and France Culture, while in 1967 in Britain the BBC created its first pop music station, Radio One, and rebranded its light program, third program, and home service as Radios Two, Three, and Four. In 1981 the victorious candidate for the presidency of France, François Mitterrand, made the deregulation of French broadcasting a major campaign promise and swiftly delivered reform.

In the 1980s radio played a major role in the political changes between East and West, with Western radios challenging the communist control of the media and ensuring that each country in the region knew about the march of reform in its neighbors. The process reached its climax in 1989. Radio remained significant as Yugoslavia fragmented. Station RTS Belgrade became a mouthpiece for the nationalist dictator Slobodan Milosevic, while a youth-oriented rock music station founded in 1989 called B92 opposed the regime. B92 weathered intimidation and various bids to close it down, and in 2000 the station played a major role in rallying opposition to Milosevic in the election.

See alsoCinema; Radio Free Europe; Television.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Briggs, Asa. The BBC: The First Fifty Years. Oxford, U.K., 1985. A concise history of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Collin, Matthew. This Is Serbia Calling: Rock' n' Roll Radio and Belgrade's Underground Resistance. 2nd ed. London, 2004. A case study of radio in Yugoslavia.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (1981–)

Journal of Radio Studies (1992–).

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 American cultural propaganda in postwar Austria.

Nicholas J. Cull