Cultural Homogenization Page

Daniele Conversi

One of the most dramatic phenomena of our times, the gradual disappearance of cultural diversity, has never been addressed as a fully-fledged area of research. Because part of this destructive wave has been deliberate, its main perpetrators being political and economic elites, such a research would have clear political implications.

This web page can act as a starting point for those interested in exploring this topic. By linking a few threads, it aims to encourage better understanding of a phenomenon which deeply affects our daily lives, has affected our forefathers', and will keep on affecting our offspring's lives.

This page is the first one to be fully dedicated to the historical exploration cultural homogenization.
 
 

Enters the nation-state

Cultural homogenization is a modern phenomenon, indeed, one could argue, the modern phenomenon par excellence. It was born out of the confluence of two all-pervasive social changes: the industrial revolution and the French revolution, reflecting respectively the primacy of economics and the primacy of politics.

Culture became the first victim of both. In the view of many policy-makers, 'culture' could no longer freely grow in spontaneity. Indeed, it had to be 'cultivated' by institutions (i.e., the state) rather than individuals or local communities. This vision sharply contrasts with both the pre-modern and the non-Western world.

The state began exercising direct control over ever-larger sections of the population through a capillary infiltration of civic institutions, indeed over the very body of each individual (as argued by Michael Foucault).

The advent of the homogenizing state has been achieved with the support of, and often in unison with, the rising capitalist classes. This is, in particular, Charles Tilly’s vision of war-making/state-making elites as ‘protection rackets’.

In the heydays of the nation-state, during the fascist and communist eras, governments ended up controlling nearly all aspects of their citizens' lives, most notably through the use of institutionalized violence and war . George Orwell’s 1984 famously describes the extreme consequence of this centralizing, homogenizing practice.

Thus, violence ‘replaced’ culture, because a new uniform, standardized norm could more easily be imposed upon the citizenry in a highly conflictual and oppositional environment, where the boundaries between the members of the nation and its antagonists were made constantly and repeatedly clear.

A further penetration of the state machinery into the lives of individuals has not been mitigated by globalization

This web-page is dedicated to explore the history of cultural homogenization with a series of links and suggestions, beginning with some of the first attempts at systematic theorization. The focus is on the past, as well as on the present.

Among other things, it explores the issue of whether homogenization is intentional (the intentionalist approach), or it is rather the inevitable outcome of modernity, thus a phenomenon beyond human control and mostly due to broader socio-economic change or the 'nature of economics' (Gellner ‘s functionalist  approach, or Marx’s analysis of the spread of capitalism).

Possible areas to be explored :
Key debates:

Nationalists argue that nationalism is an enriching phenomenon. Nazism and Fascism sometime used a rhetoric of 'exalting' regional differences, while in practice destroyng all 'entropic' nuances which were not easily incorporated in their rigid models of nation-state .

More recently,  globalism, i.e., the ideology of globalization, also preaches the re-evaluation of 'diversity' at a moment when  most forms of diversity are being globally destroyed at an unprecedented pace.

If globalization leads to homogenization, which kind of homogenization is this? One thesis argues that globalization leads to/is homogenization : this is the McDonaldization of Culture Thesis developed by George Ritzer.

Is globalization just a form of global McDonaldization? Has the globe been wholly 'Americanized'?  And which are the effects of this process?

See ‘Globalization and Ethnic Conflict’, in Bryan Turner (ed.), Handbook of Globalization Studies. London: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis, 2009  (in press)

The following articles help to trace the deepening levels of homogenization, standardization and uniformization occurred at various stages of modernity and, recently, globalization.


References and links

'''Homogenisation, nationalism and war: Should we still read Ernest Gellner?’ ,Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 13, no. 3, 2007, pp. 371-394

''We are all equals!' Militarism, homogenization and 'egalitarianism' in nationalist state-building (1789-1945)', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 31, no 7, 2008, pp. 1286-1314

'Democracy, nationalism and culture. The limits of liberal mono-culturalism', Sociology Compass, January 2008, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 1-27 (doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00063.x).  - Reprinted in Kate Nash and Alan Scott (eds), Political Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell, Vol. 1 (2007), pp. 1-30

'Demo-skepticism and genocide', Political Science Review, Vol 4, issue 3,  September 2006, pp. 247-262

  'Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and nationalism', in Gerard Delanty and Krishan Kumar (eds) Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. London: Sage Publications, 2006 (vol. 1) pp. 319-333,  [ISBN: 1412901014]  [DOWNLOAD]

In press
'Cultural Homogenization, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide', in Patrick James, Gallya Lahav, Nukhet Sandal and Robert A. Denemark (eds) International Studies Association Compendium: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration. Oxford/ Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell / ISA- ENMISA, 2009.

' Demolishing walls and building boundaries: Nationalism and globalization in the wider Europe', in Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski and Andrzej Marcin Suszycki (eds) Nationalism in Contemporary Europe: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Evidence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/ Lexington Books (in press, 2009)