Convergence and Cold War

Convergence and Cold War: Strategic Consumerism at RFE/RL vs at the United States Information Agency

by Austin Jersild, Professor of History, Old Dominion University

Western travel writers, journalists, and social scientists optimistically explored similarities and examples of “convergence” among modern industrial societies, while skeptics of reform in the socialist world and the Chinese viewed the matter very differently. Different views of convergence are explored through attention to a series of international relationships (US-Soviet, Sino-Soviet, East-South), culminating in 1959. The debate informed the contrasting approaches to the socialist world characteristic of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in the early 1950s, and the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the late 1950s.