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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

From Policy to Potlatch: Cross-Cultural Exchanges around US Military Bases in France

Résumé

Our paper aims to address the issue of cross-cultural exchanges between the US armed forces and the French population on and around US military bases during the Cold War. In the 1950s, the US military establishment promoted intercultural contacts on bases in France, in order not to jeopardize the stability of the Atlantic alliance. Open-base operations seemed like a more efficient way of projecting a positive image of both the United States and its army abroad, but also of addressing the issue of national security in an informal and culturally relevant manner. While “trying to imagine the history of the United States as fundamentally shaped and driven by American communities abroad may seem counterintuitive”, Brooke Blower aptly wrote, military outposts tied the local French population into US national interests through a variety of means, especially through the media and other communications channels. As the French and American civilian and military archives show, the US armed forces complemented the work of public diplomacy agencies against the backdrop of Cold War international tensions, and contributed to the improvement of local French-American relations by allowing the propagation of cultural items beyond the border wall of the base – through the Armed Forces Network radio programs or the respective base newspapers, for example. However, military base papers – increasingly published in both English and French languages – and open-base operations illustrated how networks worked along the lines of structural homologies, they also demonstrated the way in which Americans emphasized their otherness outside of the base. In fact, not only did French employees play an important role on US military bases, offering an interpretation of American culture through special pages in French language in base newspapers, but they also constituted the missing link with the coming of age of an idealized bottom-up image of the US armed forces in France, resting on the ceremonial distribution of a gift: the promise of a return to prosperity and long-lasting security.

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Dates et versions

hal-03345908 , version 1 (15-09-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03345908 , version 1

Citer

François Doppler-Speranza. From Policy to Potlatch: Cross-Cultural Exchanges around US Military Bases in France. Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Conference, Arlington, USA, Jun 2019, Arlington, United States. ⟨hal-03345908⟩

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