The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Coca-Colonization

VANDER CASAQUI

Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, Brazil

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs043

The term “coca-colonization” has no well-defined origin; it became visible with the publication of Reinhold Wagnleitner's book Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (1994). Without a precise definition, the term refers to the process of the Americanization of culture, carried out mainly through the process of reconstruction of Europe after the destruction of World War II. As a major funder of this reconstruction, the United States expanded its influence in Europe, through the presence of military force, large corporations, consumer goods, and a diversity of cultural products, thus building hegemony adjusted to the new postwar times. In his book Wagnleitner elaborates a view of these phenomena through the evidence of the American presence in Austria, his home country.

The period post-World War II was the time of polarization of global power into two major blocs, under the leadership of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The dispute between these two great powers, which remained until the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s, was marked by threats of nuclear attack from both sides, the space race, rivalry in sports competitions like the Olympic Games, and – especially in relation to consumer studies – by the cultural influence of these great ...