Who's Afraid of Americanization?

Americanized Cultures Is the world becoming ineluctably American? This anxious thought has taken off and occasioned substantial discussion in the twenty-first century. But in some sense, asking the question betrays a species of anti-Americanism already. I hope by examining the arguments of three writers who claim that Americanization is rampant and unstoppable -- Mark Rice-Oxley, Vicente Verdu, and Brendon O'Connor -- to show that their anxiety is overstated. Their concerns about America's present military and cultural ubiquity should be contextualized within history itself.

Mark Rice-Oxley's view of Americanization is largely cultural. He notes that "as the unrivaled global superpower, America exports its culture on an unprecedented scale. From music to media, film to fast food, language to literature and sport, the American idea is spreading inexorably, not unlike the influence of empires that preceded it" (Rice-Oxley 2004). Yet there are a number of assumptions underlying this view of encroaching Americanization that deserve to be examined more closely.

For a start, does being the "unrivaled global superpower" automatically make American culture attractive to the far-flung global subalterns? If anything, it might increase the level of resistance in certain quarters.

We might note that when Alexander the Great conquered the whole of the near east, and essentially made classical Greek language and culture into the unifying imperial standard that would remain in his wake, there was a double effect on certain of the subject populations: best documented in this time period are the Jews, some of whom were willingly "Hellenized" but others of whom resisted this foreign culture and maintained their own traditions despite the prevailing cultural norms.

Over two thousand years later, the end result is that the Hebrew language still records a word for heretical thinking ("apikoros") that derives from the mainstream Greek thought of the Hellenistic world (i.e., Epicurus). In other words, Jewish religion and culture was sufficiently adversarial to resist one empire -- are we really intended to believe that all cultures today are somehow more susceptible to the charms of an imperial hegemony? Rice-Oxley's claims of an "unrivaled global superpower" form the centerpiece of Brendon O'Connor's examination of anti-Americanism.

For O'Connor, "criticisms of America's use of its military and political power have continued beyond the end of the Cold War and remain a major source of what is often labeled anti-Americanism. The key difference in these current foreign policy debates and conflicts is that the Soviet Union no longer exists as an alternative pole or source of support" (O'Connor 84).

In other words, this suggests that American cultural influence proceeds, as it were, from the barrel of a gun, and that the pace and scope of it are determined by the lack of any military rivals to America on a similar scale.

Yet the proper response to O'Connor would be to consider what was happening during the Cold War before the fall of the Soviet Union: in that time period, there certainly was plenty of principled European opposition to America's military actions in Vietnam, but it was not accompanied by a wholehearted embrace of Soviet culture.

In cultures that produced sharp critiques of American militarism, like France or Sweden, there were not also filmmakers like Godard or Bergman who wholeheartedly embraced Socialist Realism in their filmmaking, and devoted themselves to lengthy melodramas about the introduction of a combine harvester to a remote kolkhoz.

The cultural alternative during the Cold War was clearly not appealing either: it does not follow that the lack of military rivals to America renders its culture irresistible, as the presence of a former military rival left little cultural trace on those countries which now complain of encroaching Americanism. Vicente Verdu is at least honest enough to admit that, when he complains about Americanization, he is actually complaining about something else.

He concludes his screed by asking "Is this Americanization sufficiently appreciated? Probably not, because how can it be distinguished from globalization? And how can we distinguish it from ourselves?" (Verdu 2002).

In other words, Verdu thinks it impossible to distinguish Americanization from globalization, just as earlier he had made it clear that what he is objecting to is not a cultural but an economic system, or rather an economic system so all-encompassing that it replaces cultural systems: "the final phase of capitalism, of which the United States is decidedly in charge, has ceased to be a system of material production.

It has become a civilization, and sooner or later all of us will be caught up in it, for better or worse." (Verdu 2002). It does not seem to follow, however, that capitalism and globalization are inherently American -- indeed, the most terrifying aspect of capitalism (as Marx noted) is its ability overnight to cause everything seemingly solid to melt into air. In other words, the global capitalist economy that Verdu conflates with Americanization could overnight become Chineseification with no alteration to globalized capitalism itself.

If Verdu has identified a valid process happening in the world, his willingness to pin it to America rather than see it as fundamentally transnational and amoral is a flaw in his argument. Rice-Oxley, O'Connor, and Verdu are all making valid critiques of the world, but where their.