Late-20th-century globalization was Americanization plus the fallout of Third World state collapse

Evidence

The name given to the process that emerged in the 1990s, by which the entire world seemed to be integrating into a single capitalist system, was “globalization.” Harvard historian Odd Arne Westad has claimed that a better name for what really happened is “Americanization”—the United States had succeeded in shaping a global economic system and establishing itself as its hegemon. … For sociologist Georgi M. Derluguian, who watched carefully as the old system fell apart in his native Caucasus region, globalization signified the revival of an old idea about automatic human progress, in liberal capitalist form. It was “the latest technological embodiment of the Hegelian universal spirit pursuing its self-realizing plan.” Concretely, globalization was simply “the inter-related consequences of the collapse of the former developmentalist states.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Westad’s Americanization thesis and Derluguian’s ‘developmentalist states’ reading connect to the collapse-of-Soviet-alternatives narrative in Bevins’ earlier chapters and to general anti-neoliberal protest historiography. — connects to: Capitalism’s postwar global consolidation outweighed decolonization and socialist gains — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 98; Post-1970s globalization is continuous with earlier colonial expansion — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 318; Globalisation produces mutually opposed tendencies, not uniform worldwide change — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 167 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Formal decolonization gave way to a neo-imperial global economic order #corroborates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 315
• Fear-driven Americanization drew the most popular support but achieved the least #corroborates (0.84) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1421
• War converted Americanization from cosmopolitan sympathy into coercive nationalist conformity. #expands (0.80) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1483
• State surveillance makes Muslim leaders perform Americanization while policing their own discourse #exemplifies (0.79) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 53
• Coercive Americanization backfired, driving minorities into their own defensive nationalisms #expands (0.78) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1531
• Globalization converted subsistence wellbeing into new mass poverty and social breakdown #expands (0.77) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1501
• Post-1970s globalization is continuous with earlier colonial expansion #expands (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 318
• Globalisation produces mutually opposed tendencies, not uniform worldwide change #complicates (0.74) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 167
• Fordist-Keynesian capitalism expanded globally to absorb de-colonized nations #expands (0.73) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 784
• Capitalism’s postwar global consolidation outweighed decolonization and socialist gains #expands (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 98
• Conflating globalized capitalism with neoliberalism collapses distinct hegemonic constellations #qualifies (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 25
• Neoliberal economists inverted colonial extraction into a source of Third World progress #expands (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 401
• Austerity since colonial times has devastated the global periphery #expands (0.71) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 288
• Capitalism’s global unification paradoxically generated nationalism as fragmentation #complicates (0.71)