Cultural Cold War at the Izmir International Fair: 1950s–60s

Abstract

The world fairs are political as well as cultural spaces for confrontation, propaganda, and persuasion.¹ During the Cold War, the international fairs proved to be significant arenas of propaganda, which reflected an ‘ideological geopolitics’² that demarcated the ‘free’ West from the communist Eastern bloc. Therefore, the fairs during the Cold War period were used by the superpowers to upstage each other by showing their latest innovations in space science, industrial design, as well as agricultural technologies. Hence, one of the important aspects of Cold War fairs lies in the fact that they shrank the bipolar constellation of world politics into a spectacle, where ‘consumer goods work better than the explosives’.³ This essay focuses on the Cold War themes of the Izmir International Fair, which was an important location for ideological confrontation and propaganda. Through the examination of local newspapers, I will present a depiction of how the two superpowers utilized the Izmir International Fair during the 1950s and 1960s.