ABSTRACT
What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
Fear of economic dominance has played a fair part in the way Europeans view America and Americans view Europe, and not only in present times. At the end of the nineteenth century, with British investments accounting for one-fifth of American GDP, polemical pamphlets stated that what Britain had failed to accomplish with military means, it was now achieving with economic ones. Just a few years later, similar fears emerged in Europe, where American factories were making their appearance at a rapid pace. Britain counted seventy-five American factories in 1900, and up to the First World War, five more new ones were built every year. The occasional fears of an America that would beat Britain in business were exemplified by F.A. McKenzie, who published the pamphlet The American Invaders in 1902. In the same year, a campaign was started against the invasion of American cigarettes (Emmott 1989: 5-8; 1992).
