Probably like most people I have heard a lot about globalization, but I have never taken the time to think about it deeply. The reality is that it is not easy to get a handle on such a complex subject matter. I’ve taken my first step towards understanding globalization better by reading Jehu Hanciles book, Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West. Haciles provides a great summary of his book’s aim when he writes:
The material contained in this study explores the interconnection of globalization, migration, and religious expansion. It advances the argument that while Western initiatives and projects appear to dominate the contemporary world order, the processes of globalization incorporate powerful trends and religious phenomena that originate in the non-Western world and will potentially impact the West in significant ways. In particular, it examines the way in which recent transformations within global Christianity combined with global migration flows (specifically South-North movement) point to the West as a major frontier of religious interactions and missionary engagement. A detailed assessment of African migrations and the formation of African immigrant congregations in the United States provides the main case study. (1)
In this introductory statement he already notes that globalization is not a one way street. My post will focus on Hanciles critique of the dominant narrative of globalization, namely the global culture or cultural homogenization thesis. Hanciles outlines the main three convictions held by the thesis as follows:
First, that economic dominance and technological supremacy are driving the inexorable spread of Western modernization (particularly American consumer culture) in a way that erodes local cultures and indigenous identities around the world; second, that non-Western peoples aspire to be more like northern Europeans; third, that distinct cultural attributes account for the progress and prosperity of some nations and not others. The current reasoning, comments Huntington, is that the West, ‘as the first civilization to modernize …, leads in the acquisition of the culture of modernity’ and ‘as other societies acquire similar patterns of education, work, wealth, and structure …,this modern Western culture will become the universal culture of the world.’(48)
Hanciles argues that this is the dominant narrative of globalization in the West. In order to illustrate his point he quotes from former British prime minister Tony Blair’s address to the U.S. Congress in 2003 in which stated “ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit.” (49). Part of the Western self-assessment has to do with that fact that Westerners understand globalization exclusively in economic terms. Hanciles drawing Noreena Hertz’s writing notes,
The one hundred largest MNCs [multinational corporations] are thought to control about 20 percent of global foreign assets. Moreover, a small group of around twenty to thirty large multinational corporations, the majority of which are U.S.-based, dominate global markets for entertainment, news, television, and so on, acquiring a very significant cultural and economic presence on virtually every continent. (49)
Hanciles continues to explain what connection the global culture thesis draws between multinational corporations and how they are understood to be a catalyst to producing one global culture. He writes,
The dominance of these huge corporations, it is believed, will foster the spread of liberal democracy and stimulate the worldwide diffusion of a consumerist ideology that will increasingly undermine traditional cultures and ways of life. Intrinsic to this assessment is the crucial but often overstated argument that, in an increasingly borderless world, the global reach and economic dominance of such huge corporate entities has significantly eroded (even displaced) the function of nation-states. (49)
Hanciles is critical of the theory of cultural homogenization that underlies this Western perception of globalization. Besides that perceiving of globalization exclusively through economical terms fails to capture religious, ecological and social dimensions of globalization. The problem with the global culture thesis is not that it does not carry some truth or merit but that it is a totalizing and ethnocentric explanation of globalization. Hanciles makes this point when he writes:
Totalizing explanations like the single global culture thesis point to vital aspects of contemporary globalizations: that certain Western brands and products have worldwide presence; that through American dominance of mass media there is global awareness of particular values and lifestyles (including hyper-consumerism); that much of the world has been integrated into a global economic system … dominated by the West; and that Western economic ascendancy remains a driving force behind the spread of modernity. But these conditions, some of which are open to question, represent only aspects of the ‘syndrome of processes’ which contribute to globalization. (68)
The single global culture thesis fails to come to grips with the fact that there is no global without local expression and particularity of experience. Hanciles notes how the single global culture thesis fails to take into account the profound complexity of cultural interaction and encounter. Furthermore it fails,
to take into account ‘the ways in which cultural products are locally consumed, locally read and transformed in the process.’ Sociologist John Tomlinson (1999:84) points out that to equate the worldwide presence of certain cultural goods with the emergence of a global culture implies a rather ‘impoverished concept of culture’; for culture ‘simply does not transfer in [a] unilinear way,’ immune to forces of interpretation, indigenization, or translation. The point of these observations is that in all cultural interactions people interpret and appropriate new concepts and experiences in terms of preexisting views and values. (68)
In his critique Hanciles draws heavily on Samuel Huntington’s best-selling The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. Huntington counters the single global culture thesis with his ‘civilizational paradigm’ through which current global realities are perceived. Hanciles notes that, “Huntington’s analysis postulates a fragmented global cultural landscape defined by competing ‘civilizations’ and incorporates the remarkable assertion that, after centuries of overwhelming dominance and global influence, the West is actually fading as a power and will continue to decline relative to other civilizations.” (74) Furthermore it is pointed out that,
many non-Western societies have modernized without abandoning their own cultures. In fact … modernization in many ways ‘promotes de-Westernization and the resurgence of indigenous culture’ (1996:76). This happens in two ways: at the societal level, modernization accelerates economic and political advancement generating renewed confidence in the society’s culture; at the individual level, the weakening of traditional systems creates feelings of alienation and crisis of identity which in turn stimulate a turn toward religion (as a primary source of identity re-creation). In sum, under the pressures of modernization, the world ‘is becoming more modern and less Western’ (1996:78). And it is precisely the forces of integration hyperbolized by global culture arguments that are generating ‘counter forces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness’ (1996:36). (74)
Thus globalization should not be understood as one-directional movement towards one global culture. Instead it is a multidirectional inherently paradoxical movement which accounts for all players in the process of globalization including non-Westerners. Thus Hanciles is able to say: “that, despite entrenched notions of Western provenance and dominance within the globalization discourse, non-Western initiatives and movements are among the most powerful forces shaping the contemporary world order.” (37)
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