Slow Media Under Cross Pressures: US Educational Diplomacy in the Nordic Countries During the Cold War

This chapter examines the transatlantic educational exchange during the Cold War as the manifestation of American public diplomacy. It asks how American social sciences entered, through institutions and persons, the post-war Nordic countries. Secondly, the chapter investigates, as an example case, how one specific concept of American social sciences, namely “cross pressure”, was vernacularized in the everyday public sphere according to the Nordic newspapers. Mapping the studies conducted on educational diplomacy, particularly exchange programmes, this chapter shows how American scholarships were the central tool in mediating the ideas of American social sciences in the Nordic countries. Although they were the slow media of public diplomacy, American social sciences had a major impact on the processing of the Nordic welfare states during their fast-moving reformative years.