‘Caution: objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear.’ This warning appears at the beginning of Jean Baudrillard’s bookAmerica(1988: 1) – in its way, a type of travel journal, in which Baudrillard defines the USA as the centre of the world. In his opinion, the USA represents the first truly modern society, which, through radicalness and indifference, has become a model for the rest of the world, as it is for Europe. He analyses the shaping of everyday life by film and television, the central importance of surface and speed, the inspirational experience of the American landscape,...

US presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, tend to declare that the USA is the guiding light of the world. All draw on a long tradition, since Abraham Lincoln once described America as ‘the last best hope of the earth’. There are, however, many people, even in the USA, who would take the opposite stance. Whereas Clinton saw America as a vector for expansion of the free market and democracy throughout the world, others see corporate globalism dotting the landscape with McDonalds and filling the airwaves with Disney. Recently, protesters have been massing in the streets every few...

New or changing cultural phenomena ignite competition among traditions of social theory. These contests often result in a plurality of descriptions of the defining characteristics of the contemporary scene. Most recently, contending perspectives on the globalization debate have emerged and seem unresolvable. The macro-phenomenology of globalization has had tremendous contemporary resonance.¹Globalizationis a fully fledged buzzword, referring, as often as not, to the blending of cultures in the global marketplace and in the transnational media.² The idea ofMcDonaldizationhas also had a profound cultural resonance. Students, activists and the general public (not to mention social thinkers: see Smart...

In what follows I shall try to depart quite radically from a form of discourse that has, I believe, become a constricting way of talking and thinking about the cultural implications of globalization. This discourse is elaborated around the assumption, baldly stated, that cultural globalization inevitably takes the form of a spread of cultural practices – and habits, values, products, experiences, ways of life – from certain dominantplacesto others. We might call this general pattern of critical thought the ‘geopolitical conception of cultural influence’. It appears in particular forms in the ideas of Americanization or Westernization – ideas that are frequently...

In international affairs the USA displays growing unilateralism. International development policies have been constrained by the Washington consensus. The United States fails to sign on to major greening protocols. Until recently the USA was perennially in arrears in United Nations dues. On several occasions (such as Nicaragua and Panama) the USA has not followed international legal standards and it ignores the International Court if its verdict goes against it. American policies contribute to the enduring stalemate in the Middle East. Take any global problem and the United States is both the major player and major bottleneck. It is a reasonable...

The notion of a ‘Global America’ invites application. It asks to be tested at the national level. How might ‘Global America’, for example, apply to France? The question might be posed this way: has France been Americanized? There is considerable evidence, some quantifiable, that this proud nation has succumbed to Americanization.

Language is a place to begin. English, or more precisely, American-English, is the second most popular language among the French. In a recent survey, two out of three French people polled agreed with the statement that ‘everyone should learn to speak English’.¹ American-English is so ubiquitous in popular music,...

The case of Japan suggests an intriguing alternative to the dominant conception of Americanization. With its implicit connection with a globalizing consumer culture, Americanization has become synonymous with commodification, the rationalizing and material power of modernity, and Westernization. The question is, how valid is this understanding of globalization as a project of cultural imperialism spearheaded by a Western nation state, in particular in the context of those developments that go under the rubric of postmodernity/multiple modernities/alternative modernities which have become more visible in the post-Cold War era?

Because of the non-essentialist ontology on which it is based, Japanese culture defies...

China has long embraced the golden mean of the Middle Way, yet, since the beginning of the twentieth century, extremism has prevailed. The Cultural Revolution is a typical example of extremism that was a catastrophe for China. The reform promoted by Deng Xiaoping as of the early 1980s was not only significant on the socio-economic level, but also for politics and ideology, since his attempt to stress both the anti-left and the anti-right was a way of avoiding both extremes. Twenty years of reform have shown that Deng basically succeeded, in the sense that extremist ideology no longer dominates Chinese...

Every autumn, wealthy Chinese resident-aliens of Vancouver leave for Hong Kong, like Canada geese departing for warmer climes. Thousands of Indian techno-migrants employed in Silicon Valley firms also make many trips across the Pacific, some of them to set up high-tech businesses in Bangalore. Less wellheeled migrants – Chinese waiters, Hispanic janitors and Cambodian electronic homeworkers – supply the open labour markets that service the feverish centres of the new economy driving the American West. What can these new mobile figures tell us about citizenship, its cosmopolitan and local dimensions, and the political implications of neo-liberal governance?

‘Liberalism’ is fundamentally concerned with...

Almost 300 years ago, John Locke began his political investigation into the nature of modernity with the statement, ‘Once, all the world was America’. At the turn of the millennium, I would like to ask if we are returning to the point at which all the world is becoming America again. The purpose of this chapter is to present the distinctive form that collective memories take in the age of globalization. My focus will be on the American case and the particular significance of Holocaust memory, or what is often called ‘the Americanization of the Holocaust’.

Over the 1990s the...

On 1 November 1755, an earthquake shook the city of Lisbon. The news of the disaster quickly reached the Frenchphilosophesand sparked one of the most famous philosophical and theological controversies of French intellectual history. As tens of thousands of people had perished in the disaster, philosophers frantically debated on the role of Providence in human affairs. Voltaire, who responded to the disaster most swiftly, wrote in hisPoéme sur le Désastre de Lisbonne:

Misled philosophers who shout ‘all is well’, come here, run and contemplate these horrible ruins, the wrecks, these carcasses, the pitiful ashes, the women, the...

The US-dominated mass culture is mainly viewed in a negative light. From time to time, it is even damned apocalyptically as one of the principal threats to modern society. Looking at it in this way, mass culture can cause conformity, passivity, political apathy, racism and violence. The globalization of products, coming primarily from the USA, is said to bring about the creation of a standardized and stereotyped culture by spreading the same ideas and myths across the world. This is emphasized by the process within the culture industry of focusing on American lifestyles, which are offered as a model for...

This chapter argues that a large part of the popular music produced and consumed in the world today is made under the influence and inspiration of Anglo-American pop/rock – or, to be more precise, it is based on the adoption and implementation of what I call therock aesthetic. Popular music thus epitomizes the new forms of cultural diversity associated with the globalization of culture – diversities based on cores of shared practices and technologies, and on logics of eclecticism and hybridity. The chapter traces the cultural logic of the process that made the rock aesthetic the core practice of popular music...

Once a year the Netherlands celebrates the Week of the Book. Every year an author is commissioned to write a book, usually a novelette or short story, as a gift to everyone buying books during the week. So far, for obvious reasons, the authors have been Dutch. In 2000, however, the theme for the week was ‘Writing between Cultures’, and the author invited was an avatar of intercultural writing, Salman Rushdie. The book he wrote was translated and came out under the Dutch titleWoede(Fury). It is the story of a man haunted by his private version of the...

The problems involved in analysing the degree to which the world is being Americanized are much more complex than we are frequently led to think by many intellectuals, politicians and journalists around the world. This applies also to those whom they influence and who are then strongly disposed to blame virtually every feature of the world of which they disapprove on ‘America’. The latter word, of course, really covers all of the countries of North and South America from Canada in the north to Argentina and Chile in the south, and it is thus not a trivial matter to insist...