WASHINGTON— One of the most frequent complaints about globalization is that it is equivalent to Americanization. There are widespread fears that in today's borderless, high-tech world, national differences will be overwhelmed by American economic and cultural domination, underpinned by the ever-extending reach of the English language.
So it might seem unusual, to say the least, for a major country to choose to abandon the traditional foundations on which its society is based in order to become more American.
That, however, is precisely what is being proposed in Japan by a special commission on the country's goals for the 21st century, appointed by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.
The commission, in a report issued last week, called for what amounts to a fundamental shift away from traditional Japanese conformity and love of consensus toward American-style individualism, self-reliance and multiculturalism. It said that Japan should ultimately consider adopting English as an official second language.
If Japan is to compete internationally in the coming century, the commission said, it will need a kind of "global literacy" — an understanding of English, computers and the Internet — that it currently lacks.
In many ways, that conclusion is right. America's success in leading-edge information and communications technology is partly explained by the creativeness of its individualistic and innovative society. Pragmatic, flexible English is the language of business, economics, air traffic control and the Internet. The current dominant economic philosophy of free markets in a rule-based system is rooted in Anglo-Saxon thinking and British commercial traditions.
All around the world, governments are moving closer to Anglo-Saxon practices and promoting the use of English to plug into the global economy. Even in France, the country that has probably taken the strongest stand against Americanization, many major multinational companies use English as a working language.
At the same time, many people in France and elsewhere fear that huge American corporations such as the new giant, AOL Time Warner, will suppress their native cultures and their languages by controlling the content of the Internet. But that is by no means a foregone conclusion. The demise of other cultures and languages is far from inevitable. As more and more people in other countries join the Internet economy, the use of languages other than English, such as Chinese and Spanish, will almost certainly increase.
The Internet is more likely to widen choice than to narrow it. The Web site of CNN, a major purveyor of the new global culture, offers several languages, including Japanese, Portuguese and Danish. Half of the "hits" on the Internet site of the French newspaper Liberation, which has no foreign circulation, come from outside France, suggesting that the Internet is enabling large numbers of people who could not do so before to keep in touch with French news and cultural developments.
Breakthroughs in computerized translation will soon allow Internet users to send messages in, say, Spanish, and have them received in Chinese, or practically any other language. Such technologies will also make it far more easy, for example, for an enlarged European Union to preserve all the native tongues of its members as official languages.
People will demand choice. When large, dominant breweries tried to force a tasteless, uniform kind of beer on the English market some years ago, consumers rebelled and precipitated a renaissance of traditional "real ale."
One of the prime symbols of Americanization, Coca-Cola Co., according to reports last week, is planning to decentralize its international marketing to give local tastes and local brands a larger role.
A French entrepreneur who used to complain of the Americanization of France now gleefully cites evidence of the "Latinization" of the United States. In all the talk of the spread of American culture, it is often forgotten that America itself is changing, too.
Because of the increasing diversity of American society, Americanization today does not mean the same as it would have, say, just after World War II. Immigration into the United States is helping to make globalization a two-way street.
As one of the members of the Japanese commission suggested, if Japan plays its cards right, it can absorb many of the advantages of the American way of doing things and remain distinctly Japanese as well.
E-mail address: thinkahead@iht.com
