Is the World Becoming American? Examining Americanization

Introduction: The Anxiety of Americanization

Is the world becoming ineluctably American? This anxious thought has gained traction and occasioned substantial discussion in the twenty-first century. In some sense, however, asking the question already betrays a species of anti-Americanism. By examining the arguments of three writers who claim that Americanization is rampant and unstoppable — Mark Rice-Oxley, Vicente Verdu, and Brendon O'Connor — this essay aims to show that their anxiety is overstated. Their concerns about America's present military and cultural ubiquity deserve to be contextualized within the broader sweep of history.

Rice-Oxley and Cultural Dominance

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 closer examination.

For a start, does being the "unrivaled global superpower" automatically make American culture attractive to far-flung global populations? If anything, it might increase the level of resistance in certain quarters. When Alexander the Great conquered the whole of the Near East and made classical Greek language and culture into the unifying imperial standard, there was a double effect on certain subject populations. Best documented from that period are the Jews, some of whom were willingly Hellenized while others resisted this foreign culture and maintained their own traditions despite prevailing cultural norms. Over two thousand years later, the Hebrew language still preserves a word for heretical thinking — apikoros — derived from 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 to believe that all cultures today are somehow more susceptible to the charms of an imperial hegemony?

O'Connor, Military Power, and Anti-Americanism

Rice-Oxley's claim of an "unrivaled global superpower" forms 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). This suggests that American cultural influence proceeds, as it were, from the barrel of a gun, and that the pace and scope of that influence are determined by the absence of any comparable military rival.

Yet the proper response to O'Connor is to consider what was happening during the Cold War, before the fall of the Soviet Union. In that period, there was certainly 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 — France or Sweden, for example — filmmakers such as Godard or Bergman did not abandon their artistic visions to embrace Socialist Realism and devote themselves to melodramas about the introduction of a combine harvester to a remote kolkhoz. The cultural alternative during the Cold War was clearly not appealing. It does not follow, therefore, that the absence of military rivals renders American culture irresistible; the presence of a former military rival left little cultural trace on the very countries now most likely to complain of encroaching Americanism.

Conclusion: Empires Rise and Fall

Rice-Oxley, O'Connor, and Verdu are all making valid critiques of the world, but where their arguments fall apart is in assuming there is something inherently American about the process they describe. In point of fact, "American" culture is as readily disposable in this dynamic as those subaltern cultures that Americanization supposedly effaces and replaces. The lessons of history are vastly more complex: Jewish culture survived Alexander the Great and later survived the Caesars. Soviet culture barely registered even in those countries that might have been thought most willing to welcome an alternative to American military and cultural dominance.

The real lesson is that empires rise and fall — the process remains the same, but the specifics differ each time. It is not difficult to imagine that, in a hundred years' time, the next Mark Rice-Oxley or Vicente Verdu will be writing anxiously about the insidious global ubiquity of Chinese culture.

Works Cited

O'Connor, Brendon. "A Brief History of Anti-Americanism: From Cultural History to Terrorism." Australasian Journal of American Studies 23:1 (July 2004): 77–92.

Rice-Oxley, M. "In 2,000 Years, Will the World Remember Disney or Plato?" Christian Science Monitor, 15 Jan. 2004.

Verdu, Vicente. "We Are All Americans." El País, 27 April 2002.