THE CULTURAL DIMENSION OF GLOBALIZATION

Abstract

Cultural globalization refers to the growth in the exchange of cultural practices between nations and peoples. Although this is a process that has undoubtedly occurred for thousands of years, economic and political globalization has enhanced the process enormously in recent decades. In addition, many analysts point to the way new technologies and their exploitation such as commercial air travel, satellite television, mass telecommunications and the internet have created a world where billions of people consume identical cultural products - such as pop music, soap opera and sporting events - and employ cultural practices they would never otherwise have encountered - such as foreign food preparations and foreign words and phrases. At the heart of much of the rise of cultural globalization has been the massive expansion of the entertainment and communications industry fuelled, in particular, by the spread of television. Television has become the key to the development of pop music, news services, advertising, sport and light entertainment with an appeal and enormous money-making potential across the whole world. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

Cultural globalization refers to the growth in the exchange of cultural practices between nations and peoples. Although this is a process that has undoubtedly occurred for thousands of years, economic and political globalization has enhanced the process enormously in recent decades. In addition, many analysts point to the way new technologies and their exploitation such as commercial air travel, satellite television, mass telecommunications and the internet have created a world where billions of people consume identical cultural products - such as pop music, soap opera and sporting events - and employ cultural practices they would never otherwise have encountered - such as foreign food preparations and foreign words and phrases.

At the heart of much of the rise of cultural globalization has been the massive expansion of the entertainment and communications industry fuelled, in particular, by the spread of television. Television has become the key to the development of pop music, news services, advertising, sport and light entertainment with an appeal and enormous money-making potential across the whole world.

Key-words: globalization; culture; civilization; nationalism; Westernization.

Introduction

Few expressions of globalization are as visible, widespread and pervasive as the world-wide proliferation of internationally traded consumer brands, the global ascendancy of popular cultural icons and artifacts, and the simultaneous communication of events by satellite broadcasts to hundreds of millions of people on all continents.

"The most public symbols of globalization consist of Coca - Cola, Madonna and the CNN news. Whatever the causal and practical significance of these phenomena, there can be little doubt that one of the most directly perceived and experienced forms of globalization is the cultural form"1.

Despite the complexity of cultural interactions between societies over the last three millennia, the intensifying movement of images and symbols and the extraordinary stretch of modes of thought and of communications are unique and unparalleled features of the late twentieth and the new millennium.

We have moved from "a world dominated by cultural isolation in a world where intercultural factors dominate, from an era characterized by cultural autonomy of traditional isolated groups to an era of generalized interrelations and communication" 2.

Our time has the great historical privilege of moving from a world of isolated civilizations, based to some extent on different spaces and times, to a single world, which is characterized by the same space (world market) and the same time (synchronicity of all events), birth of a communication and of a world community.

The community has always taken precedence over communication; the latter being first developed inside the group: individuals speaking the same language, sharing the same religion, the same values, the same history, the same traditions and the same memory. At present, we notice a shiftfrom a planet of closed civilizations to a world open to all people through travel and media.

1. Cultural Development

We can state there is a close connection between globalization, history and culture. In this respect, D. Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, in their book "Global transformations: politics, economics and culture", make a detailed presentation of the historical forms of cultural globalization. Thus, the author analyzes premodern and modern globalization.

Before the Modern Age, "world religions and empires offered the most important cultural and institutional complexes that made the cultural interaction and long distance communication possible and through which strong and extended cultural interacting relations might prevail. Trade was a key-vehicle for this spreading of ideas and of artifacts on long distances".3

Because of logistic limitations of the leadership based exclusively on military force, the empire capitals attempted to build lasting alliances among the elites, beyond ethnic and geographical divisions.

Even where the strategy failed from the perspective of building up the empire, there was the possibility that it might leave behind a distinctive cultural heritage. For example, the ephemeral Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great had been the essence for the spreading of Greek language, science, philosophy and Greek literature in the Middle East. The Roman Empire offered the institutional framework through which first the Hellenistic culture and then Christianity could infiltrate in Northern Africa and Western and Northern Europe.

Even though cultures had relations with other cultures, and religions with other religions, the contacts had not always been fruitful. The regional feature of world religions reflects border lines and discrepancies between them and the empires they encountered. Even more, hardly did most of the people understand those great cultural interactions - the identities, the beliefs and rituals were mostly local. Between the village and the great empires, there were very few cultural exchanges".

The Han Empire in China provided a similar framework for the spread of Chinese writing, literature, science and technology. Although these cultures communicated with other cultures, and religions with other religions, the meetings were not always fertile. The regional character of world religions reflected the cleavages and divisions among them and the empires with which they intertwined. Furthermore, most people have often caught just a glimpse of these great cultural interactions - as identities, habits and faiths were mostly local. Between the stat and the great empires there are very few cultural forms4.

After the fall of Rome and of the Han Dynasty in China and after the first wave of Islamic expansion, empires continued to rise and fall. Nevertheless, up to the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Western imperial adventures began, there are no historical events comparable to the military and cultural expansion of Islam. The great emperors were nomad warriors from the Eurasian steppes. But their cultural innovations did not overcome their military talent. Their campaigns and their conquests led to the reconsidering of the old cultural models and not their transformation. European empires will have finally become efficient instruments of the cultural power abroad, but only starting with the 18th century, after the birth of nationalism and of nation-states in Europe and in both Americas. Inside this area, there had been gradually redefined complex models of cultural streams between aristocrats, as well as the distinctive area of the local folk features.

States were searching for united nations in order to rule them and nationalists were searching for auto-determination through states. Consequently, although the process was uneven and contested, more and more cultural institutions and cultural flows began to fix themselves within the frontiers of the developing nation-states. More and more cultural institutions and cultural streams got to set their place between the borders of the forming nation-states.

Language, school, means of transportation and communication, liturgical ritual and identity, all had been defined more and more from the perspective of the nations territorially bordered. External or foreign influences were rejected or treated in a suspicious and hostile manner. But, in the Occident, the cosmopolitanism and the internationalism continued to exist, as well as the trans-national cultural practices and institutions.

Indeed, from the heart of the European system of the nation-states "ideologies and secular strong discourses had arisen - liberalism, Marxism and modern science - whose rationalism from Enlightenment suggested, entitled or not, the attraction and the universal applicability. Still, generally, nationalism was the one that became the most powerful cultural force, partly because it was systematically and financial supported and displayed by the modern states. According to this interpretation, the climax of cultural globalization is placed in the past, while the most powerful and significant cultural streams and relations developed between the borders of the modern nation-states" 5.

2. Cultural Dimension

Globalization changes the way in which we conceptualize culture, because culture has been localized for a very long time in a certain space. Does global modernism promise to offer us a global culture? In a certain way it might be said that such a culture already exists. As Ulf Hannerz writes, "today there is a world culture, but it advisable to understand what it means. The total homogeneity of the expressional and signifying systems has not taken place yet and there is no probability to be seen very soon. But the world has become a net of social relations and, between its various regions, there is a movement of meanings similar to the movement of people and goods." 6.

What U. Hannerz wants to say is that nowadays we have a globalization of culture in the sense of complex interconnection.

The integration context of the cultural practices and experiences into the web, world wide, may be seen as a global culture. This meaning must be separated from the one according to which global culture is understood as a unique and homogenized signifying system. Global culture "is like the birth of a single culture, gathering all the people in the world and replacing the diversity of cultural systems used before."

Obviously, such a culture has not appeared yet.

Of course, the idea of a global culture has not become possible only in the days of global modernism. The great cultural statements and texts could overpass the linguistic, political, civil and cultural borders provided that they should be translated into the languages of the interested cultural communities. But, along centuries, the process has been delayed by the geographic distances, by the slowness of travelling or by technical difficulties.

Along with the development of globalization, made possible by media and the contemporary means of transportation, the movements of the texts (religious, political, literary, scientific ideas) has speeded up. Political, cultural and religious powers proved themselves incapable of stopping people to travel or the development of communications (parabolic TV antennas, video tapes, Internet), so the circulation of ideas and opinions. We enter the age of the generalized mixture of cultures and civilizations, of discourses and passions.

Cultural globalization "stands not only for empirical human contacts between civilizations (the revolution of the means of transportation), and also for the intellectual instruments of mediation between groups put together in more or less brutal manner".

We should call humanistic sciences those intellectual instruments, giving them a sufficiently extended meaning: History, Philology, Linguistics, Archaeology, Sociology, Philosophy etc.

In the attempt of creating a global culture, speaking some world wide spread languages has an important role. Undoubtedly, in the top of the hierarchy is English language, used in the whole world, in all its forms: written, spoken, formal, informal, and also in its functional styles: economic, legal, technical, journalistic etc. It has become the lingua franca by excellence and continues to strengthen this domination through a process of self-consolidation. It became the central language of international communication in the business, political, administrative, scientific and academic area, at the same time being the dominant language used in global advertising and popular culture.

The main language used in IT is English, being the written code for Windows and Internet protocols. "More than two thirds of the scientists in the world write in English, three quarters of the international mail are written in English and 80% of the information of the recovering systems of world electronic data are stocked in English"7.

Another aspect regarding the domination of the English language is represented by book translations. Thus, an overwhelming amount of all translations in foreign languages are based originals written in English. In a certain sense, this domination is not at all surprising. "As the destiny of the other languages shows, the use of a language is tightly connected to the rhythms of power. English is the mother language of the two hegemonic superpowers of the modern world, Great Britain and USA. Even more, this power is used in all the fields of human life: economic, political, military and last, but not least, cultural" 8.

As a consequence of the development of information technology, we are also the witnesses of an avalanche of scientific and technical concepts, which are employed in most languages in their English form. Concepts such as: businessman, barter, broker, dealer, computer, marketing, management, manager, dumping, know-how, trend - are used nowadays without a translation. This invasion of English and American concepts can be called a "vocabulary globalization". The problem of the domination of one language and the threat upon the linguistic diversity is connected to another more general problem, that of the cultural imperialism: the idea that a culture may be a hegemonic one.

This pessimistic construction of the idea of global culture was very popular at the end of 20th century. Indeed, the theory of the cultural imperialism may be considered one of the earliest theories of cultural globalization.

3. Culture Globalization

As Jonathan Friedman wrote, the discourse of cultural imperialism from around the late 1960s tended to set the scene for the initial critical reception of globalization in the cultural sphere, casting the process as "an aspect of the hierarchical nature of imperialism that is the increasing hegemony of particular central cultures, the diffusion of American values, consumer goods and lifestyles"9.

This concept of global culture is perceived today as the spread of the American values, goods and lifestyle. Actually the most visible sign of globalization appears to be the spread of American hamburgers and Coca Cola in almost every country on the globe.

In his book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", Thomas Friedman wrote "globalization wears Mickey Mouse ears, it drinks Pepsi and Coke, eats Big Macs, does its computing on an IBM laptop ... in most societies people cannot distinguish anymore between American power, American exports, American cultural assaults, American cultural exports and plain vanilla globalization"10.

The best proof to support this affirmation is the convergence and the standardization obvious in the cultural products in the whole world. "Take any catalogue, from clothes to music, to film and television, and to architecture and you could not ignore the fact that some styles, brands, tastes and practices now have global circulation and can be found almost anywhere in this world"11.

Certain brands and symbols of global mass culture have already become clichés: Coca Cola, McDonald, Calvin Klein, Microsoft, Levis, IBM, Nike, CNN, MTV - some even becoming synonymous with Western cultural hegemony: McWorld, Coca-Colonization, McDonaldization and even McDisneyization.

But what does this homogenous distribution of cultural goods means, if not the power of certain capitalist enterprises to control large markets anywhere in the world?

Considering the presence of such global goods as a symbol of convergence towards the capitalist monoculture means reducing culture to its material goods; instead, culture should be seen as a symbolization and an existentially significant experience.

Benjamin Barber develops this vision of a completely mediated culture by the pure principle of transformation in consumer goods at the level of a all-enveloping global culture, through his idea of a McWorld: "McWorld is an entertaining shopping experience that brings together malls, multiplex, movie theatres, theme parks, spectator sports arenas, fast-food chains and television (with its burgeoning shopping networks) into a single vast enterprise that, on the way to maximizing its profits, transforms human beings" 12.

In spite of the evident problems connected to welfare inequality, the transformation in consumer goods is, currently, deeply rooted into the modern cultural life of the developed world, and this stands for a narrowing and an obvious convergence of the cultural experience.

The aspects of the cultures individually perceived, felt and interpreted in different contexts and local traditions lead to consolidation of cultures and thwart the linear progress of the homogenous capitalist culture. A way of interpreting global culture consists in the emphasizing of the need of historical recuperation of these non-occidental cultural traditions. Indeed, this is what can be found in A Dictionary of Global Culture, in which Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Lewis Gate (1998) bring items that rebalance global cultural representation, counterbalancing the supremacy of occidental figures and themes. Next to Toussaint's L'Ouverture Martin Luther appears, next to Shakespeare, the king Zulus Shaka. But this dictionary does not remove the persistent suspicions concerning occidental cultural domination which we will forthwith analyze.

These suspicions appear in the title of a book written by Serge Latouche, a French political economy specialist, who brings a serious accusation to Westernization as "a tendency to planetary uniformity" and "an international standardization of the ways of life".

J. Tomlinson considers that when we talk about Westernization, we obviously refer to the spread of European languages, especially English and of the mercantile culture, but also to "fashion, to gastronomy, musical and architectural formulas, to a type of cultural expression ruled by media, to a group of philosophical ideas and a set of values and cultural attitudes"13.

S. Latouche considers Westernization to be a global spread of cultural and social totality. He analyzes certain Western elements - its technology, industrial economic basis, tendency towards urbanization, ethical, philosophic and religious systems. But he insists that none of these, taken separately, comprises the essence of the West, which must be regarded as a "synthetic unity of all these different manifestations, in the shape of a cultural entity, a civilization phenomenon".

He considers Westernization to be essentially a cultural phenomenon. Western civilization is for him, therefore, paradoxically anti-cultural, because it opposes through its universalizing tendency, to the survival of a varied group of local cultures. Furthermore, he supports the idea that this Westernization of culture is determined by three factors:

* expansion of transnational companies which have their own culture;

* urbanization process connected to the destruction of rural communities;

* the process of building root-less states.

His critique of the West can be interpreted as a critique of modernity. Thus, we could wonder whether social and cultural modernity is necessary identical with Western modernity, if becoming modern presupposes automatically becoming a Westerner. The Tunisian Islamist intellectual, Rached Gannouchi, describes clearly this path through modernity in a statement quoted by Manuel Castells: "The only way to accede to modernity is by our own path, that which has been traced for us by our religion, our history and our civilization".

A global culture, as A. Smith points out, would therefore be composed of number of analytically discrete elements: "effectively advertised mass commodities, a patchwork of folk or ethnic styles and motifs stripped of their context, some general ideological discourse concerned with 'human rights and values' and a standardized quantitative and 'scientific' language of communication and appraisal, all underpinned by the new information and telecommunication systems and their computerized technologies"14.

It is clear that the author is not enthusiastic with the image he presents. He continues to describe, a potential global culture as being fundamentally "artificial", "narrow", "whimsical" and "ironic", "fluid and shapeless" and lacking all "emotional involvement to what it stands for"15.

Conclusion

In short, global culture is clearly a culture build, without history, outside time and "without memory".

In spite of what it is believed, namely that globalization imposes the hegemony of culture, reality proves that there is a cultural resistance which endures and which becomes, as a value, ever stronger. This resistance enables the existence of cultural diversity, which can promote the common interests of society. The strengthening of identities is used, in many cases, as a control mechanism for chaotic globalization. Furthermore, identity is an instrument based on experience and a generator of meaning for human life. This meaning, which can be religious, national, ethnic, territorial or in connection with equality of rights of gender, is fundamental for human life and defines the world as much as globalization and technologies.

Footnote

NOTES:

1 HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D.; PERRATON, J., Transformari globale. Politica, economie si cultura, Polirom Publishing House, Bucharest, 2004, p. 372.

2 LECLERC, G., Mondializarea culturala. Civilizatiile puse la Încercare, Stiinta Publishing House, Chisinau, 2003, p. 10.

3 HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D; PERRATON, J., quoted work, p. 385.

4 Ibidem, p. 386.

5 Ibidem.

6 HANNERZ, U., Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture, Featherstone, London, 1990.

7 TOMLINSON, J., Globalizare si cultura, Amarcord Publishing House, Timisoara, 2002, p. 105.

8 HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D.; PERRATON, J., quoted work, p. 391.

9 FRIEDMAN, J., Cultural Identity and Global Process, Sage, London, 1994.

10 FRIEDMAN, Th. L., Lexus si maslinul, Cum sa Întelegem globalizarea, Fundatia PRO Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001, p. 400.

11 TOMLINSON, J., quoted work.

12 BARBER, B.R., Jihad versus McWorld, Incitatus Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002, p. 97.

13 TOMLINSON, J., quoted work, p. 129.

14 SMITH, A., National Identity, London Penguin, 1991, p. 157.

15 Ibidem, p. 157.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. BARBER, B.R., Jihad versus McWorld, Incitatus Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002.

2. FRIEDMAN, J., Cultural Identity and Global Process, Sage, London, 1994.

3. FRIEDMAN, Th. L., Lexus si maslinul, Cum sa Întelegem globalizarea, Fundatia PRO Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001.

4. HANNERZ, U., Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture, Featherstone, London, 1990.

5. HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D.; PERRATON, J., Transformari globale. Politica, economie si cultura, Polirom Publishing House, Bucharest, 2004.

6. LECLERC, G., Mondializarea culturala. Civilizatiile puse la Încercare, Stiinta Publishing House, Chisinau, 2003, p. 10.

7. SMITH, A., National Identity, London Penguin, 1991.

8. TOMLINSON, J., Globalizare si cultura, Amarcord Publishing Press, Timisoara, 2002.