cultural globalization and the globalization of cultures

Global Culture: modernization

According to modernization theory, the contemporary global culture is totally different from the pre-modern "cultural globalization" which was about globalizing religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam. 20th c. global culture is about the growing volume of trade and exchange of cultural products, the rising culture industry and media, and labor movement (diaspora indentity). Globalization is "the rapidly developing process of complex interconnections between societies, cultures, institutions and individuals world-wide" (Tomlinson).

Homogenization: Westernization

Cultural homogenization was imagined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s as an emerging "global village." To critical theorists, what we are witnessing is "global pillage" by the rich and powerful in expense of the poor. 5 Western news agencies produce 80% of the world's news. Ten large multinational corporations control a large part of global production of information and entertainment. Most Internet traffic is routed through US lines; in 1999, 69% of all the ".com" domains were located in the US, and in 1997, 94 of the top 100 web sites were based in the US. The result of more voluminous global cultural flows is cultural homogenization, a "world-wide standardization of lifestyles" through McDonaldization and Coca-Colonization.

Consequences of Globalization

Holton (2000) presents three major theses on globalization's cultural consequences: 1. Homogenization, where globalization amounts to Westernization or, more narrowly, Americanization; 2. Hybridization, which points to the pervasive global intermixing of cultures that renders obsolete notions of the existence of distinct and pure cultures; and 3. Polarization, which views globalization as producing a series of antagonistic fissures between different cultural worlds. There is a fourth view: deterritorialization, "the loss of the 'natural' relation of culture to geographical and social territories" (Canclini in Tomlinson 1999: 107).

Criticisms: Dependency Theory

Modernization theory was vehemently attacked by Dependency and World-Systems theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. They argued that modernization theorists focused on cultural factors - Western culture is modern and others traditional. Whereas Western superiority is economic, not cultural. This is a Eurocentric view which does not acknowledge that Europe's modernization is due to others' underdevelopment. For 500 years Europe and America's colonial and imperialist policy created a center or "core" and a "periphery" in the world economy - an unequal and dependent relationship. The periphery supplies cheap raw materials and labor; the industrialized core sells finished goods to it at a higher price.

Polarization: Clash of Civilizations

The antithesis of McWorld, Barber argues, is Jihad, the turn towards communalism and the rejection of Western ideals. Samuel Huntington (1993) argues that with the demise of communism, ideologies are no longer important. Culture and the conflicts between civilizations (Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African) will be the defining feature of global struggles over power, particularly the battle between Western and Islamic civilizations: an age of Muslim wars. Responding to 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush espoused his beliefs as a "born-again" Christian with the same zeal that his administration advocated "faith-based" policy initiatives and pursued a global war of "good" against "evil."

Hybridization: Cultural Imperialism

The crucial feature of cultural globalization is the diffusion by Western cultural industries of the most vacuous (empty) and destructive Western ideas and practices outwards, leading to the involuntary demise of other cultures. George Ritzer (2004) argues that "globalization of nothing" increasingly results in the loss of something, "a social form that is generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content." Tourism: Europe 53%, Americas 17%; 1950: 25.3 million tourists ($2 billion), 1995: 561 million tourists ($380 billion). Benjamin Barber (Jihad vs. McWorld, 1996: 8) argues that a "bloodless economics of profit," a social order he designates "McWorld," is coming to dominate everywhere.

World-Systems theory

Wallerstein (1974) refined dependency theory. 1. The core/developed nations - control world trade and monopolize manufactured goods. 2. The semi-peripheral zone (e.g. Brazil, South Africa) has large urban areas like the core but also large areas of rural poverty like the periphery. 3. The peripheral countries (e.g. most of Asia and Africa) that provide primary products for both the semi- periphery and the core. The relationship is more dynamic - countries can move in from the periphery into the semi-periphery (e.g. Asian tigers) or out from the core to the semi periphery (e.g. Britain). Globalisation of the world and the international division of labour is the basis of global inequality For Wallerstein, global culture(s) exists since the 16th century through slave trade, colonial rule, proselytization. The modern world-system has its origin in the European world-economy created in the long 16th century. It expanded to incorporate all the other territories on the earth within its orbit, and has today reached the point of structural/economic crisis. It is transforming itself into something other than the capitalist world-economy that it has been. Today, religious authority has largely waned but proponents of religious secular universal norms (such as capitalism, democracy, human rights) are more powerful and intolerant. The secular proselytizers are defenders of the global culture De-skilling of labour or proletarianization occurs (e.g. call centres, MNCs, migration). Apart from the political arena, a global culture has located itself within various knowledge movements - deconstruction, postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, cultural studies - although they encompass a wide range of views. They do not pose a "fundamental ideological challenge" against the inequities of capitalism. Same is true about the WST. Wallerstein reifies historical, world social systems as he says they are both systemic (they have rules) and historical (they have lives and evolve).

Modernization Theory: Rostow

Walt Rostow's (1960) five Stages of Economic Growth is the best known modernization theory. He was head of policy planning staff under JF Kennedy and security adviser under Lyndon Johnson, and also the chief architect of the Vietnam War. His theory paved the way for neoliberal free market doctrine.