With the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, it seems a particularly opportune time in which to reconsider the relationship between public policy and mass culture in the Cold War, and reflect on new perspectives in these studies. Whilst it is true that culture in the Cold War has been widely explored by academics in different fields, the reception and actual impact of western public policies on mass cultures in European countries where Communism had to be contained and defeated is still to be investigated in a comparative context. This Workshop will examine the impact of Cold War cultural policies on the experience of people who received them, with particular reference to Italy, France and Germany. Although concepts such as ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘public/cultural diplomacy’ are frequently used by scholars, the effort to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of people still needs to be investigated in relation to the real contexts in which they lived, where the penetration and impact of these policies were sometimes lower than expected. This Workshop brings together cultural historians from Italy (Professor Luigi Bruti Liberati) and France (Professor Christian Delporte), with academics from the University of Reading (Prof. Hilary Footitt and Patrick Major, Dr. Linda Risso and Simona Tobia), and practitioners like the former BBC World Service’s Head of Audience Research, Dr. Graham Mytton, and the Head of Public Affairs at BBC Global News, Hugh Saxby, to focus on issues relating to radio and international broadcasting, film, and the reception of ‘Americanization’ in Europe.