Izations of the World: Americanization, Modernization and Globalization

Abstract

We can all agree with Robert Cox (1996: 21) that it is ‘particularly important’, with a concept as ‘fashionable’ as globalization, that we ‘place it in historical perspective’. But which history? In the current debate over economic globalization, critics have queried the novelty of the geographical scale of contemporary connections by citing past economic patterns which were seemingly equally world-wide in nature. For instance, Paul Bairoch (1996: 190) has recently shown how analysis of ‘one century of external trade and foreign investments’ shows international tendencies ‘alternating with drawback’. Accordingly he is able to conclude: This fact gives a different perspective on the thesis of globalization as an irreversible movement’. Such uses of history are important for the debate but they do not necessarily provide an appropriate historical setting for analysing globalization. Most studies focus on just the last few decades, as in Cox’s (1996: 21–2) own brief analysis. This time frame is favoured also by scholars approaching globalization from a more cultural perspective. For instance, Jan Pieterse (1995: 47) refers to globalization theory as ‘the 1950s and 1960s revisited under a large global umbrella’. Mike Featherstone (1995: 87) adds a further link interpreting globalization as ‘the relentless modernizing force of American cultural imperialism’. In this paper, I take my cue directly from such cultural linkages but develop an analysis much closer to Bairoch’s time scale. In short, I take the idea of the twentieth century as the ‘American Century’ seriously and interpret globalization as its final expression.