Americanization or Globalization?

When it comes to writing about the "changes" that countries like China and India are undergoing, as a result of globalization, the results are, to say the least, oversimplified and even erroneous.

A recent instance of the oversimplification is Akash Kapur's Op-Ed piece on the Americanization of India in The New York Times.

Mr. Kapur, who divides his time between two villages--the ancestral one in the southern part of India from where his father hails, and a rural enclave in Minnesota, where he spent his summer (attending boarding school?)--writes that of late he has found the landscape of the former village to have undergone radical change: From being Indian, it is now poised to become American.

The two "villages" are starting to look alike, both in tangible and intangible terms:

The tangible signs included an increase in the availability of American brands; a noticeable surge in the population of American businessmen (and their booming voices) in the corridors of five-star hotels; and, also, a striking use of American idiom and American accents. In outsourcing companies across the country, Indians were being taught to speak more slowly and stretch their O’s. I found myself turning my head (and wincing a little) when I heard young Indians call their colleagues “dude.” 

But the intangible Americanization of India is "even more remarkable":

Something had changed in the very spirit of the country. The India in which I grew up was, in many respects, an isolated and dour place of limited opportunity. The country was straitjacketed by its moralistic rejection of capitalism, by a lethargic and often depressive fatalism.
Now it is infused with an energy, a can-do ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit that I can only describe as distinctly American.

What Kapur is beholding is the morphing of an Indian village into an American one.

I understand the part where Kapur registers the "change." But I don't quite agree with the name he gives to the alteration.

The word "Americanization," I feel is a little outdated, and ought to be replaced by or accorded space-share status with the word "globalization."

Earlier, Kapur cites an Indian newspaper's description of the recent entries of Starbucks and Amazon into the Indian market as "the final stamp of globalization," only to dismiss the epithet. 

It is a stamp of Americanization, he implies. Why? because, among other things, Starbucks is a quintessentially American company, "emblematic of American consumerism."

I'd say "no" on two accounts: Yes, Starbucks is a quintessentially American company in many ways, but it does not emblematize American consumerism in a straightforward way. It does emblematize globalization in complex ways.

Starbucks has entered the Indian market in a globalized way, not in a traditional American way. Actually, back tracking a bit, one could say that Starbucks, even within the landmass of America, has self-globalized. A year or so ago the company got rid of the name "Starbucks" on its logo. The Mermaid now stands by itself without the name. If you lose your name deliberately, it means you are willing to let go of the rigid boundaries of your name-imposed identity, and willing to take on whatever identity you are asked to take to adapt and adjust to the demands and quirks of other places, other cultures.

Starbucks' self-willed erasure of its name coincided with its globalization or expansion of its operation abroad. The Mermaid, though a staple of Western fantasy, could be at home anywhere, since it is primarily a mythical construct anyway. The Mermaid has porous borders and in India, for instance, it could become an Indian Mermaid, perhaps coy, with longer hair, darker skin, and a Bollywood-bindi, to boot. 

Starbucks has entered Indian shores as a massive transnational corporation, that transcends American anything. 

Kapur is right in suggesting that consumerism will result due to the entry into the Indian market of corporations such as Starbucks (and Amazon). 

But endless consumerism is precisely the motto of globalization. Economic globalization, if I understand it somewhat, is an engine of the global free-market economy, which seeks to enrich consumers, on the one hand, by creating opportunities for upward mobility, and on the other, it wants to create a global consumer class who will buy, to the detriment of their own long-term economic well-being, products and ideas of the globalized economy, in perpetuity.

As a representative of this global economic urge to spread everywhere--it would set up shop in the Nubian mountains in the Sudan, were the civil war not raging--Starbucks couldn't care less if it were perceived as American or Norwegian. 

So, I would choose the Indian newspaper's designation of the change that the Indian market is undergoing as "globalization" over Kapur's naming it as Americanization.

Now about how Americanization manifests itself intangibly in contemporary India: There too, I have to dissent from Kapur's nomenclature here as well. That Indians are less fatalistic and more "entrepreneurial" and more consumeristic in spirit, can't be simply pinned down as the Americanization of the Indian spirit. Just as the rising popularity of Yoga and a deep interest in spirituality, in the U.S, can't be said to be an emergent "Indianization" of the American spirit.

First off, America, I'm sure, is not the patented creator of the entrepreneurial spirit. More importantly, the entrepreneurial spirit is only recently ravaging the American spirit itself. In America today, we are buffeted by the tornado of a propaganda that to survive the grand turn in the global economic tide, we have to quit depending on salaried jobs or traditional manufacturing jobs and become more "entrepreneurial." 

Sometimes I feel like I should--to ensure I never run out of a monthly paycheck--transition from traditional college-teaching to opening my own "virtual" University, an educational consulting service, or develop a "college-app," that I can then sell and rest my laurels on. 

Indeed, more Indians are getting into the "middle-class" bracket, I hear, but the American spirit of the rich investing in socially productive schemes, is hardly settling into the Indian middle-classes. The Indian rich are unwilling, as Indians traditionally have been, to share or reinvest their wealth in the service of nation-building. What's happening is an "Argentinianization" or a "Venezualization" of the Indian spirit, not an "Americanization."

The American spirit of free-enterprise and hard-work and sharing of the (sometimes unfairly-got) wealth through a trickle-down mentality, has also undergone a "Latin-Americanization." 

Except that, as I see it, the "Latin-Americanization" is now more aptly called "globalization." The recent "Occupy-Wall-Street" revolution teaches us that those who have got fabulously rich as a result of the change in the tide of the global economy, are distinctly un-American in their narrowness of spirit and hoarding-all-to-themselves tendencies. 

What I mean to say is that both America and India are currently under the yoke (or, liberation, depending on the way you see it) of globalization, in its tangible economic manifestation, as well as in the imperceptible one of its spirit. 

As Kapur says, Indians no longer "moralistically" reject capitalism. However, the capitalism that Socialist/left-leaning India rejected, was a different Capitalism that is gradually receding from America as well. What's replacing good, old-fashioned Capitalism within America is globalization.

All of us--even the peaceful pockets of South Sudan--are under the rule, as it were, of globalization, with a capital "G." Or as theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt said in their seminal work Empire, the world has slipped under the regime of a postmodern Sovereignty, which does not look or feel like a Sovereignty and thus can't be resisted easily. Because it eludes specific naming because it operates in non-imperialistic, even anti-imperialistic ways, we can safely call it "globalization."

Eons ago, Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said, the West reveals itself in the image of the East's "future." They meant that the spirit of equality, enlightenment, democracy (like the sort the French Revolution and the displacement of feudalism by bourgeoisie-capitalism ushered in) will first exert itself in its full panoply in the region of their birth, and then travel gradually to the East.

The American sun of capitalism did fulfill this prophecy by traveling from America to the Soviet Union, and the world was exorcised of the evil spirit of Communism. However, the sun that is currently spreading its light and warmth, isn't the American sun per se, but the sun of globalization, which does not rise in America, but in the coteries of Davos.

(Where was Akash Kapur's prognosis when the Agro-giant Monsanto entered India?)

Marx and Hegel's clairvoyance does, however, stand the test of time. We are looking at a Western present that is bleak, and indeed by the logic of the prophecy, in about 20 years or so, the Indian and Chinese future will also go bleak, for if the forces of both economic and societal globalization have wrecked the landscapes of America at large, then this is the image of the rest's future as well.