Globalization is not Americanization

Globalization arguably began even before Marco Polo’s expeditions, possibly being traceable to Alexander the Great’s establishment of overland routes between Eastern Europe and India. The assumption that globalization equals Americanization is profoundly arrogant, and is also ignorant of the history, meaning, and implications of globalization. Globalization implies integration and interdependence of the world. Predating the United States of America, globalization nevertheless reached a peak in the 20th century, when a globalized economic, political, and cultural landscape became inevitable and entrenched.

While it seemed that McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Shell, and other proudly American companies have dominated the corporate landscape of a globalized international economy, a wealth of non-American companies have likewise participated in the dissemination and distribution of ideas and neoliberal policies that characterize postmodern globalization. In some ways, globalization is the antithesis of Americanization. As Collins (2015) points out, globalization “has led to the continuing deindustrialization of America,” as labor markets have become transnational (p. 1).

Whereas the United States became a 20th century superpower because of its industrial edge, the nation has since ceded that edge to countries that now provide the world’s manufacturing and industrial labor forces: China, India, and Brazil. Globalization is not the supremacy of American ideals, American values, or American democracy. Rather, globalization is the economic integration of marketplaces. Globalization tends to encourage free trade agreements, and free trade facilitates globalization. Yet globalization has not impeded or undermined national sovereignty and regional coalitions.

Globalization is not Americanization because Americans—and the nation of the United States—are as dependent on other countries as they are on it. When Dyreson (2013) points out that the “promotion of American visions of affluence” has led to the popularity of Olympic sports like beach volleyball and snowboarding, he ignores the equal and even more transnational and enduring popularity of other sports on the Olympic roster like martial arts and wrestling (p. 256).

Therefore, Americans in particular need to be careful to claim that globalization is Americanization. The Olympics originated in ancient Greece, long before the United States was conceived. Globalization is not Americanization also because power has been distributed far more evenly throughout the world over the last several decades and will continue to be dispersed through market forces. “Instead of compartmentalized power sectors,” globalization is enabling, if not necessitating, the emergence of trans-national and trans-geographic coalitions with mutual political and economic interest (Collins, 2015).

Not all policy analysts and cultural critics view globalization in the same way. Owolabi (2001), for example, claims that globalization was “orchestrated by America,” and is “essentially aimed at the promotion of the imperialistic interests of Western society,” (p. 71). The view that globalization is orchestrated by America is understandable given the predominance of American political and economic power throughout the world. In French political and academic discourse, Americanization and globalization are used interchangeably (Meunier, 2010).

Yet Meunier (2010) argues that since Sarcozy’s presidency, even France has learned how to divorce the true meaning of globalization from the true meaning of Americanization: “the past couple of years have shown that globalization no longer equals Americanization,” (p. 213). It is neither correct, nor fruitful, to frame globalization as being equal to Americanization. Globalization is not solely about economics, free markets, and trade agreements. Other elements of globalization include the sharing of ideas, art forms, attitudes, and worldviews.

Globalization has led to an unprecedented level of cultural convergence and “cultural intermingling,” (Collins, 2015). Evident especially in specific sectors like food culture, music, and the arts, cultural comingling is not American. The only thing that is remotely American about cultural intermingling is the fact that the United States was one of the first modern nation-states to popularize the practice of an immigrant society.

Immigration and migration have been perpetual patterns throughout human history, but the settlement of the New World led to the unique phenomenon of immigrant-dominant societies: Canada and the United States. The native people of both Canada and the United States lack sufficient market, cultural, or political power to participate in the globalization process. Immigrants to the United States and Canada created an amalgamated society in which language, heritage, religion, race, and even gender were and continue to be sublimated in the interests of globalization.

Globalization can only be considered Americanization if Americanization is defined as the state of cultural mingling. Yet what most people mean when they imply globalization equals Americanization is something nefarious, something hegemonic. The British empire, and the Ottomans, and the Mughals before them, also spread their own cultural, political, and economic hegemony throughout the world and especially the territories that they ruled over for centuries.

Therefore, globalization has never been and never will be Americanization because prior to the creation of the United States, there were already in place patterns by which imperialistic powers could penetrate new and weaker markets to gain traction and influence. An “anti-American movement has been developing throughout the twenty first century,” leading to the widespread misperception that globalization is Americanization (Bigot, 2013, p. 1).

Yet this attitude is misinformed, based in part on conspiracy theories about America’s conscious desire to take over the world through CIA coups and the spreading of McDonalds restaurants throughout the solar system. The United States has acted in ways that reinforce its military, political, and economic dominance. It is also true that globalization has given rise to the proliferation of neoliberal policies that support and enable globalization.

Yet globalization is not equal to Americanization; globalization is globalization of ideas, politics, attitudes, worldviews, and beliefs that are not restricted to one culture, one historical period, or one society. If anything, the cultural elements that are considered uniquely “American” are in part pan-European, in part international: such as the belief in secularism, the belief in the supremacy of democratic forms of government, and the belief in gender equity.

The American character of globalization is sometimes misconstrued as arrogance, partly because so many American corporations have spearheaded the economic backbone of the global market economy. American companies are not the only building blocks of the global market economy, but there are a disproportionate number of American companies that dominate the marketplace, its discourse, and its influence on international and domestic policy. Because of the influence American firms have over the global market and its political stakeholders, American corporate values, corporate culture, and politics have become standardized.

American cultural norms have become the global norms for doing business around the world. As a result, workers at the management tier find themselves having to adapt to American—as well as British—standards of behavior and comportment in business. As Kopp (2011) points out, the assumption that all companies around the world do business the same way, communicate the same way, and reach agreements using the same ethical and philosophical frameworks, is why some people believe globalization equals Americanization.

The reverse case can also be made, in that when American firms enter foreign markets, the onus is on the leaders of those American firms to learn how to communicate and do business in their new target markets. If American companies fail their cultural competency tests, their business ventures in foreign markets will also fail. Key to resolving the question of whether globalization in its current and recognizable form is equal to Americanization is whether globalization is equal to imperialism.

The assumption that globalization is Americanization is in fact parallel the assumption that globalization is imperialism, even if historians might consider Alexander’s empire, the Roman Empire, the Mughal or Ottoman empires as being engines of both globalization and imperialism. It is true that globalization can be driven by singular hegemons like the United States; yet globalization far too dynamic. Imperialism is usually self-assertive, as when the British Crown occupied India. Globalization can be an effect of imperialism, but the two are not the same.

Globalization is distinguished from imperialism mainly in that with globalization, “interconnection and interdependency of all global areas...happens in a far less purposeful way,” (Houlihan, 1994, p. 359). Imperialism, on the other hand, implies purposeful encroachment and deliberate subordination and subjugation. Globalization can and often does occur as a mutually beneficial, albeit complex, set of relationships between various players in the global marketplace.

The fact that the current face of globalization has a somewhat American appearance is owed to the fact that the global market economy had been driven by the United States in the middle to late 20th century. American political and economic policy proved highly effective, encouraging other nation-states to invest and follow suit. According to Owolabi (2001), American “ hegemony is sustained by propagating the philosophy of liberalism,” (p. 71).

It is liberalism, and neo-liberalism to be more precise, that allows the globalization of corporate and government stakeholders to wield the level of power they currently do. If the result for the masses of laborers around the world is ongoing exploitation, the cause is not Americanization but unbridled capitalism. In fact, Owolabi (2001) offers as a remedy to American hegemony the “jettisoning the individualism of liberalism for the altruism and sense of community of communitarianism,” (p. 71).

If and when the current model of globalization is tempered with humanitarian policies that promote social justice, then neither globalization nor Americanization will be viewed as negatively as they are now. Globalization is not Americanization because globalization does not preclude national sovereignty. However, American iconography, language, and semiotics have permeated global forms of advertising and communications.

In one study of the framing of national identity in both “low” cultural forms like advertising as well as “high” or “official” culture in the Middle East, First & Avraham (2007) found “a new real estate discourse in which Americanicity is an integral part of the neo-liberal discourse,” (p. 223).

In the same way that Californiazation has been accused of dominating American popular discourse, as well as global conceptualizations of popular culture, Americanization has been seen as shaping global arts and culture as through hip-hop and rock and roll. Yet just as much as American art and language have shaped cultures elsewhere, foreign and decisively non-American arts and society have in turn informed the evolution of American identity and society.

As Ritzer & Stillman (2004) put it, globalization is a “macro-phenomenology,” which refers more to the “blending of cultures in the global marketplace and in the transnational media,” (p. 30). Resistance to Americanization is as integral to globalization, if not more so, than McDonalds. One of the core features of the postmodern globalization discourse is self-awareness, consciousness that imperialism in any shape or form has detrimental consequences.

When globalization and Americanization were initially presented as being potentially synonymous, the implications were linked to hegemony and neoliberalism (Antonino & Bonanno, 2000). The now-famous protests at the WTO conference in Seattle in 1999 drew attention to the critics of globalization.

Critics of globalization were occasionally anti-American, but more often were “unions worried about competition from cheap foreign labor, environmentalists worried about the outsourcing of polluting activities, consumer protection groups worried about unsafe imports,” and cultural critics concerned about the implications of a globalized economy that was unbalanced, skewed toward preserving and protecting American interests (Smith, 2014, p. 1).

Any tacit historical analysis of patterns of globalization prior to the 20th century make it clear that hegemony is not a uniquely American phenomenon, and neither for that matter is neoliberalism, the tenets of which can be traced back to the Enlightenment (Kagan, 2007). In fact, the recent brand of globalization that takes on a neoliberal form can be framed in a far more positive light than simply reverting to accusations of American imperialism.

From the middle of the 1980s until now, the world has witnessed “the greatest reshuffle of personal incomes since the Industrial Revolution,” from Western Europe and the United States towards both West and East Asia (Milanovic, 2016, p. 1). Furthermore, this may be “the first time that global inequality has declined in the past two hundred years,” (Milanovic, 2016, p. 1).

The redistribution of wealth and power across the world alone proves that globalization is not Americanization, American hegemony, or American imperialism but a transnational, transcultural, and dynamic interplay of political and economic realities. As Kagan (2007) also points out, globalization has led to the revamping of crystallized judicial and political structures, improving democratic institutions around the world without the need for American interventionism.

This is not to say that American legal, political, and economic systems are inherently better than the systems in place elsewhere, but an affirmation that those are the types of systems that foster global.