ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the European experiences and cultural habits are imbricated with patterns of American mass culture, particularly in the post-World War II era. The history of the European encounter with an American culture cast in this mould is one of European audiences, mostly the younger generations, appropriating these seductive dreams and making them their own, against parental strictures. Regional communities, historically rooted, see their cohesion threatened by restless migration movements or more generally by the wider horizons brought by modernization and globalization. In Europe's lasting encounter with American mass culture, many have been the voices expressing concern about its negative impact. Cultural guardians in Europe saw European standards of taste and cultural appreciation eroded by an American way with culture that aimed at a mass market, elevating the lowest common denominator of mass preferences to the main vector of cultural production. The cosmopolitan Europe generates a genuinely European inner contradiction, legally, morally, and politically.
