Modernization strengthens local cultures and reduces Western relative power, not the reverse.

Evidence

Modernization, in short, does not necessarily mean Westernization. Non-Western societies can modernize and have modernized without abandoning their own cultures and adopting wholesale Western values, institutions, and practices. The latter, indeed, may be almost impossible: whatever obstacles non-Western cultures pose to modernization pale before those they pose to Westernization. It would, as Braudel observes, almost “be childish” to think that modernization or the “triumph of civilization in the singular” would lead to the end of the plurality of historic cultures embodied for centuries in the world’s great civilizations. Modernization, instead, strengthens those cultures and reduces the relative power of the West. In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 211

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay: the counterintuitive thesis that adopting modern technology and institutions hardens rather than erases cultural identity — evidenced today by e-mail and cassettes used to promote indigenous causes (para 210).
• XREF: Connects to everything read on modernization theory — Inglehart’s postmaterialism, the ‘clash’ thesis itself, and Milgrom’s work on traders modernizing without adopting Western legal forms.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the grafting logic of ‘Grafting & Growth’: living root bridges and tamarisk trees show non-Western societies innovating with their own materials — modernization grafting onto local culture rather than replacing it.