Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War

This book explores the lasting legacy of the controversial project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, to promote Western culture and liberal values in the battle of ideas with global Communism during the Cold War.  One of the most important elements of this campaign was a series of journals published around the world: Encounter, Preuves, Quest, Mundo Nuevo, and many others, involving many of the most famous intellectuals to promote a global intellectual community. Some of them, such as Minerva and China Quarterly, are still going to this day. This study examines when and why these journals were founded, who ran them, and how we should understand their cultural message in relation to the secret patron that paid the bills.

Giles Scott-Smith holds the Ernst van der Beugel Chair in the Diplomatic History of Transatlantic Relations since WWII at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His previous books include The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, and CIA, and Postwar American Hegemony (2002).
Charlotte A. Lerg teaches history at the Amerika Institut at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany. She also serves as managing director of the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies.

“For too long, scholars of the Cultural Cold War have seen the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journals as a centralized project, with all of its messages and projects emanating from its Paris headquarters (and ultimately from its funders in Washington and London). Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War provides a welcome corrective to this, and in looking at its many magazines not as mere mouthpieces for the Secretariat but also as expressions of their local cultural, political, and economic situations, this book shows that the CCF’s magazines were genuinely “glocal” publications. This will help us, as well, appreciate these many magazines—which published work by some of the most important writers of the day—as magazines, not just as weapons in a larger geopolitical campaign.” (Greg Barnhisel, Chair of the English Department, Duquesne University, USA)

“Transcending the binary debates of the past, this wonderfully well-conceived and executed collection combines transnational and local perspectives to provide a nuanced, fascinating, and indispensable account of the global Cultural Cold War.” (Hugh Wilford, Professor of U.S. History, California State University, Long Beach, USA)

“For too long, scholars of the Cultural Cold War have seen the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journals as a centralized project, with all of its messages and projects emanating from its Paris headquarters (and ultimately from its funders in Washington and London). [Title] provides a welcome corrective to this, and in looking at its many magazines not as mere mouthpieces for the Secretariat but also as expressions of their local cultural, political, and economic situations, this book shows that the CCF’s magazines were genuinely “glocal” publications. This will help us, as well, appreciate these many magazines—which published work by some of the most important writers of the day—as magazines, not just as weapons in a larger geopolitical campaign.” (Greg Barnhisel, Chair of the English Department, Duquesne University, USA)