Americanization

• 1. Introduction

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  Americanization names something vast and contested: the reach of United States culture, economy, and technology into the daily lives of people who have never set foot on American soil. On the 31st of January 1990, approximately 38,000 customers lined up outside a single restaurant on Moscow's Pushkin Square for the grand opening of the first McDonald's in Soviet Russia. The lines stretched for hours. The store broke company records. The Soviet Union was still officially standing. That moment in Moscow raises questions that go far beyond fast food. How did one country's tastes, brands, films, and habits come to shape so much of the world? Who welcomed that influence and who fought it? And what happens when the most powerful nation on earth begins to see its own culture as a kind of foreign policy tool?

• 2. Hollywood and the Screen

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  Since the 1910s, Hollywood has held a commanding position in the world's media markets. Nearly all of the top 50 highest-grossing films of all time were made entirely or partially in the United States, or were financed by U.S. production companies. That dominance extends even to films that feel resolutely foreign. Certain entries in the Harry Potter franchise, set and filmed entirely in the United Kingdom, qualify as American productions for financial reasons alone. The Lord of the Rings series, drawn from quintessentially British source material, falls into the same category.

  Critics of Americanization point to this coopting of other nations' stories as a defining feature of the process. The ability to absorb foreign cultural works and reclassify them as American is itself a form of power. A 2006 survey of 20 countries, conducted by Radio Times, found seven American shows among the ten most watched programs worldwide. The list included CSI: Miami, Lost, Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace, and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. American broadcasters distribute much of this content through international subsidiaries such as HBO Asia, CNBC Europe, and CNN International.

  The reach of American music follows a similar pattern. Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson have each sold over 500 million albums worldwide. Michael Jackson's Thriller, with sales of approximately 100 million copies, is the best-selling album of all time internationally. Trade negotiations have long reflected Hollywood's commercial weight; Mexico, for instance, abolished screen quotas on foreign films after the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada.

• 3. Brands, Business, and Soft Power

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  Of the world's 500 largest companies, 124 are headquartered in the United States. Of the top ten global brands by revenue in 2017, seven are American: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM. Coca-Cola's one-time position as the top global company by revenue gave rise to its own shorthand. Analysts coined the term "Coca-Cola diplomacy" to describe anything emblematic of U.S. soft power, a phrase that says something about how thoroughly corporate presence and national influence had become intertwined.

  U.S.-based fast food companies, including McDonald's, Subway, Starbucks, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Domino's Pizza, operate thousands of outlets across every major world region. The American fast food industry is described as the world's first and largest. Technology companies deepen that footprint: Microsoft, Apple, Intel, HP Inc., Dell, and IBM together supply much of the world's computing infrastructure, and a large fraction of software purchased globally originates with U.S.-based firms.

  Harm G. Schröter, who focused on the economic dimension of the process, defined Americanization as "an adapted transfer of values, behaviours, institutions, technologies, patterns of organization, symbols and norms from the United States to the economic life of other states." That transfer was already visible as early as the 1920s, when Germany's adoption of American efficiency methods under the label "rationalization" became a significant social and economic force. Rationalization drew explicitly on American models, especially Fordism, and was promoted by industrialists, social democrats, engineers, architects, middle-class feminists, and politicians across party lines.

• 4. Cold War Contest

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  During the Cold War, Americanization served as the chosen soft power method to counter Sovietization. Universities became the primary arena. Resistance inside those institutions slowed the spread of American influence, though even a slowed Americanization outpaced its Soviet rival.

  After World War II, the U.S. government took a more direct hand in occupied territories. In Germany, the American occupation headquarters, the Office of Military Government known as OMGUS, launched its own newspaper in Munich in 1945. Die Neue Zeitung was edited by German and Jewish emigres who had fled to the United States before the war. Its mission was to dismantle Nazi cultural remnants and promote democracy by showing Germans how American culture operated, covering sports, politics, business, Hollywood, fashions, and international affairs.

  A subtler vehicle was children's publishing. The importation of Little Golden Books, published in France under the imprint Cocorico as Petits Livres d'Or, is examined in research by Cecile Boulaire as a quiet way of embedding American liberal economic principles into French cultural life after the war. Even through the Iron Curtain, American influence continued to seep. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the most organized institutional resistance and left the United States as the world's sole superpower.

• 5. European Ambivalence

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  Between 1950 and 1965, American investments in Europe increased by 800%, reaching $13.9 billion. Within the European Economic Community specifically, they rose tenfold to $6.25 billion. Europe's share of American overseas investment climbed from 15% to 28%. That visibility generated considerable anxiety, particularly in France, though concern spread to other countries over time.

  Finland emerged as a distinctive case. Analysts described the country as among the most Americanized in Europe since the 1960s, which prompted domestic efforts to limit American television programming on Finnish channels. Public resentment extended to American advertising methods, personnel practices, and the use of English by American-owned firms. Critics also blamed the dominant position of the U.S. dollar in the international currency system for fueling inflation.

  By the 1970s, the direction of investment had shifted. European capital was flowing into the United States even more rapidly than the reverse, and historian Geir Lundestad observed that talk of Americans buying up Europe had largely quieted. A new wave of anxiety arrived after 2008, when high-speed internet and smartphone technology accelerated the spread of American digital products. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 on what it described as "deep concerns in Europe's highest policy circles about the power of U.S. technology companies," centered on privacy, antitrust, and the possibility that Silicon Valley firms were evading European tax obligations.

• 6. Debate and Dissent

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  Not everyone accepts that American cultural dominance is as total as its critics suggest. Writing in 1902, the British journalist William Stead gave the phenomenon an early name with his book The Americanization of the World, framing U.S. influence as a spreading of "American ideas." That framing has been contested ever since.

  Francis Fukuyama argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 produced a unipolar global capitalist reality that marked the "end of history." John Fousek countered that Fukuyama's triumphalism was itself an expression of American exceptionalism, a contingent ideological position dressed up as a historical conclusion. Mary Nolan offered a different reading: what emerged in 1990 was not American dominance but "a multipolar global order," in which Americanization was a force among others rather than an all-consuming one.

  Vladimir Putin took the debate to the pages of The New York Times in 2013. In an opinion piece, he warned that "it is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation." Some critics tie American exceptionalism directly to policy failures, arguing that the belief in complete U.S. hegemonic power was the driving logic behind military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, each of which exposed the limits of American power on the ground. The rivalry between Americanization and what analysts call Sinicization, the spread of Chinese influence, raises a further question: whether competition between the two might produce a third power altogether, or concentrate bargaining leverage in one of them at the expense of smaller actors.