The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (11 page)

Western (Japan, China, and India). And the fourth, the United States, will be increasingly shaped by its growing non-European population.

Some contemporary scholars, most famously Samuel P. Huntington, have argued that modernization and Westernization are wholly distinct. The West, Huntington argues, was Western before it was modern. It acquired its distinctive character around the eighth or ninth century but became “modern” only around the eighteenth century. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society. “Western civilization,” Huntington writes, “is precious not because it is universal but because it is unique.”
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Add to this intellectual case the visceral strangeness of non-Western lands—the fact that they look, feel, and sound so different. The Japanese offer the most common illustration of this point. Japan is a highly modern nation. In terms of technology—high-speed trains, cell phones, robotics—it is more cutting-edge than most Western countries. But to outsiders, particularly Western visitors, it remains strange and foreign. If wealth did not Westernize Japan, the argument goes, it will not Westernize the rest. A world in which Indians, Chinese, Brazilians, and Russians are all richer and more confident will be a world of enormous cultural diversity and exoticism.

Still, the West has been around for so long and has spread so far that it isn’t clear what the break between modernization and Westernization will mean. So much of what we think of as modern is, at least outwardly, Western. Today’s forms of government, business, leisure, sports, vacations, and holidays all have their origins in European customs and practices. Christmas is celebrated in more places today than ever before—even if it means no more than champagne, lights, and gifts (champagne itself, of course, is a Western invention). Valentine’s Day, named in honor of a Christian saint and commercialized by Western greeting card companies, is becoming a thriving tradition in India. Blue jeans were created as the perfect fit for rugged California gold miners, but now are as ubiquitous in Ghana and Indonesia as in San Francisco. It’s difficult to imagine what the modern world would look like without the impact of the West.

Kishore Mahbubani, a thoughtful Singaporean diplomat and intellectual, recently predicted that, in the emerging world order, non-Western powers would retain their distinctive ways even as they got richer. In India, he argued in a speech in 2006, the number of women wearing saris (the traditional Indian dress) would actually grow.
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But in fact, while Mahbubani was proclaiming the sari’s rise, the Indian press was reporting precisely the opposite phenomenon. Over the last decade, Indian women have been casting aside the sari for more functional attire. The elaborate sari industry, with its different materials, weaves, and styles, is declining even in the midst of India’s heady boom. (Why? Well, ask a young Indian professional to explain whether wrapping herself in six to nine yards of fabric, often starched, then carefully pleating and folding it, is something of a bother.) Increasingly, Indian women are following a kind of fusion fashion that combines indigenous and international styles. The Indian
salwar kurta
(a loose-fitting pant-tunic combination), for example, has gained widespread use. Saris are being relegated to special and ceremonial occasions, just like the kimono in Japan.

This might seem superficial, but it isn’t. Women’s clothing is a powerful indicator of a society’s comfort with modernity. Not surprisingly, the Muslim world has the biggest problems with its women wearing Western-style clothes. It is also the region where women remain the farthest behind by any objective yardstick—literacy, education, participation in the workforce. The veil and chador might be perfectly acceptable choices of dress, but they coincide with an outlook that rejects the modern world in other ways as well.

For men, Western clothing is ubiquitous. Ever since armies began dressing in Western-style uniforms, men around the world have adopted Western-style work clothes. The business suit, a descendant of a European army officer’s outfit, is now standard for men from Japan to South Africa to Peru—with the laggard (or rebel) once again being the Arab world. The Japanese, for all their cultural distinctiveness, go one step further and on special occasions (such as the swearing in of their government) wear morning coats and striped pants, the style for Edwardian diplomats in England a hundred years ago. In India, wearing traditional clothes was long associated with patriotism; Gandhi insisted on it, as a revolt against British tariffs and British textiles. Now the Western business suit has become the standard attire for Indian businessmen and even many young government officials, which speaks of a new postcolonial phase in India.
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In the United States, of course, many businessmen in new industries dispense with formal dress altogether, adopting a casual jeans-and-T-shirt style. This, too, has caught on in some other countries, especially with younger people in technology-based industries. The pattern remains the same. Western styles have become the standard mode of work dress for men, signifying modernity.

The Death of the Old Order

Westernization is not merely about appearances. Executives all over the world manage their companies by means of what we could call “standard” business practices. The truth is that these standards, from double-entry bookkeeping to dividends, are all Western in origin. And it’s not just true of business. Over the last two centuries, and especially the last two decades, government institutions everywhere have also become more alike, encompassing parliaments, regulatory agencies, and central banks. Surveying several countries in Europe and Latin America, two scholars found that the number of independent regulatory agencies (American-style bodies) rose sevenfold between 1986 and 2002.
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Even politics has an increasingly familiar feel across the globe. American consultants are routinely paid princely fees to tell Asian and Latin American politicians how best to appeal to their own countrymen.

Books, movies, and television showcase distinctly local tastes, but the structure of these industries (as well as many aspects of the content) is becoming more standardized. Bollywood, for instance, is moving away from its tradition of cheap budgets and lengthy run times, toward shorter, more commercial films with Hollywood investors and export potential.
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Walk down a street anywhere in the industrialized world today, and you see variations on the same themes—bank machines, coffeehouses, clothing stores with their seasonal sales, immigrant communities, popular culture and music.

What is vanishing in developing countries is an old high culture and traditional order. It is being eroded by the rise of a mass public, empowered by capitalism and democracy. This is often associated with Westernization because what replaces the old—the new dominant culture—looks Western, and specifically American. McDonald’s, blue jeans, and rock music have become universal, crowding out older, more distinctive forms of eating, dressing, and singing. But the story here is about catering to a much larger public than the small elite who used to define a country’s mores. It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. The impact of mass capitalism is now universal. The French have been decrying the loss of their culture for centuries, when, in fact, all that has happened is the decline of a certain old and hierarchical order. Did the majority of French people, most of whom were poor peasants, eat at authentic bistros—or anywhere outside their homes—in the nineteenth century? Chinese opera is said to be dying. But is that because of Westernization or because of the rise of China’s mass culture? How many Chinese peasants listened to opera in their villages decades ago? The new mass culture has become the most important culture because, in a democratic age, quantity trumps quality. How many listen matters more than who listens.

Consider the changes in one of the most traditional places in the world. In 2004, Christian Caryl, a Newsweek foreign correspondent, moved to Tokyo, having spent the preceding decade in Moscow and Berlin. He expected to find the exotic and deeply insular country he had read about. “What I have found, instead,” he wrote in an essay, “is another prosperous and modern Western country with some interesting quirks—an Asian nation that would not feel out of place if it were suddenly dropped inside the borders of Europe.”
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“We moved into our new house,” he recalled, “and soon found ourselves preparing for our first bizarre Japanese holiday: Halloween.” He quoted the American scholar Donald Richie, who has lived and taught in Japan for fifty years, explaining that young Japanese students today cannot understand the world of their parents, with its formalism, manners, and etiquette. “They don’t know anything about the family system because the family system doesn’t exist anymore,” says Richie. “So I have to reconstruct it for them.” The traditional, intricately polite version of Japanese used in the movies sounds alien to them, as if it came from a “vanished” world.

What sounds young and modern today is English. No language has ever spread so broadly and deeply across the world. The closest comparison is with Latin during the Middle Ages, and it is a poor one. Latin was used by a narrow elite in a time of widespread illiteracy, and most non-Western countries were not even part of the Christian world. Today, almost one-fourth of the planet’s population, 1.5 billion people, can speak some English. And the rate of English’s spread is increasing almost everywhere, from Europe to Asia to Latin America. Globalization, which brings ever more contact and commerce, creates an incentive for an easy means of communication. The larger the number of players, the greater the need for a common standard. Some 80 percent of the electronically stored information in the world is in English. When diplomats from the twenty-five governments of the European Union gather to discuss business in Brussels, they have hundreds of interpreters. But mostly they all speak English.

Does a common language make people think in similar ways? We will never know for sure. Over the last century, however, English has become the language of modernity. The word for tank in Russian is “tank.” When Indians speaking in Hindi want to say nuclear, they usually say “nuclear.” In French, weekend is “le weekend.” In Spanish, Internet is “Internet.” And increasingly, the English that people speak is Americanized, with certain distinctive features. It is colloquial, irreverent, and casual. Perhaps that irreverence will spill over into other realms.

Of course, that possibility worries the elders. Most newly modernizing societies want to combine their new wealth with elements of the old order. “We have left the past behind,” Lee Kuan Yew said to me about his part of the world, “and there is an underlying unease that there will be nothing left of us which is part of the old.” But even this anxiety is familiar from the Western experience. When Asian leaders today speak of the need to preserve their distinctive Asian values, they sound just like Western conservatives who have sought to preserve similar moral values for centuries. “Wealth accumulates and men decay,” wrote the poet Oliver Goldsmith in 1770 as England industrialized. Perhaps China and India will go through their own Victorian era, a time when energetic capitalism went alongside social conservatism. And perhaps that combination will endure. After all, the appeal of tradition and family values remains strong in some very modern countries—the United States, Japan, South Korea. But in general, and over time, growing wealth and individual opportunity does produce a social transformation. Modernization brings about some form of women’s liberation. It overturns the hierarchy of age, religion, tradition, and feudal order. And all of this makes societies look more and more like those in Europe and North America.

The Mixed-up Future

When thinking about what the world will look like as the rest rise and the West wanes, I am always reminded of a brilliant Indian movie,
Shakespeare Wallah
, made in 1965. It features a troupe of traveling Shakespearean actors in postcolonial India who are coming to grips with a strange, sad fact. The many schools, clubs, and theaters that had clamored for their services are quickly losing interest. The English sahibs are gone, and there is no one left to impress with an interest in the Bard. The passion for Shakespeare, it turned out, was directly related to British rule in India. Culture follows power.

What is replacing these merry bands of minstrels? The movies. In other words, part of the story in
Shakespeare Wallah
is the rise of mass culture. Bollywood—India’s indigenous mass culture—is a cultural mongrel. Because it is part of mass culture, it borrows from the world’s leader in (and perhaps originator of) mass culture—the United States. Many Bollywood films are thinly disguised remakes of American classics, with six to ten songs thrown in. But they also retain core Indian elements. The stories are often full of sacrificing mothers, family squabbles, fateful separation, and superstition. The West and East are all mixed up.

The world we’re entering will look like Bollywood. It will be thoroughly modern—and thus powerfully shaped by the West—but it will also retain important elements of local culture. Chinese rock music sounds vaguely like its Western counterpart, with similar instruments and beats, but its themes, lyrics, and vocals are very Chinese. Brazilian dances combine African, Latin, and generically modern (that is, Western) moves.