Abstract
This thesis sets out to explore how Americanization of Europe has developed through the last century. How it has been an official goal of the United States to render Europe, making it more alike the United States, and how official, industrial, and cultural forces has played together to achieve the goal of Americanization. I set out at the end of the First World War, as President Wilson got involved in the peace process, and how American business and cultural industries began to understand the value of the new market. Although the American culture made itself present in the interwar era, the official emphasis was on economics and politics. The economic crash in the thirties was a set back for the process. From the end of the Second World War the United States was the premier agenda setter in European foreign policy. It was in this period that the United States managed to incorporate the power of culture into its European policy. The last period I go through is that from 1989 to 1999 where the United States stands alone as the world’s only superpower. However America’s cultural images had by then already been to a large degree either incorporated into European culture or discarded, thereby depleting it of its original meaning. On top of this, as the United States celebrated its unipolar moment it disregarded its sources of soft power, lost focus in its foreign policy thereby further lessening its importance in Europe.