The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [40]
This might seem superficial, but it isn’t. Women’s clothing is a powerful indicator of a society’s comfort with modernity. Not surprisingly, the Muslim world has the biggest problems with its women wearing Western-style clothes. It is also the region where women remain the farthest behind by any objective yardstick—literacy, education, participation in the workforce. The veil and chador might be perfectly acceptable choices of dress, but they coincide with an outlook that rejects the modern world in other ways as well.
For men, Western clothing is ubiquitous. Ever since armies began dressing in Western-style uniforms, men around the world have adopted Western-style work clothes. The business suit, a descendant of a European army officer’s outfit, is now standard for men from Japan to South Africa to Peru—with the laggard (or rebel) once again being the Arab world. The Japanese, for all their cultural distinctiveness, go one step further and on special occasions (such as the swearing in of their government) wear morning coats and striped pants, the style for Edwardian diplomats in England a hundred years ago. In India, wearing traditional clothes was long associated with patriotism; Gandhi insisted on it, as a revolt against British tariffs and British textiles. Now the Western business suit has become the standard attire for Indian businessmen and even many young government officials, which speaks of a new postcolonial phase in India.* In the United States, of course, many businessmen in new industries dispense with formal dress altogether, adopting a casual jeans-and-T-shirt style. This, too, has caught on in some other countries, especially with younger people in technology-based industries. The pattern remains the same. Western styles have become the standard mode of work dress for men, signifying modernity.
The Death of the Old Order
Westernization is not merely about appearances. Executives all over the world manage their companies by means of what we could call “standard” business practices. The truth is that these standards, from double-entry bookkeeping to dividends, are all Western in origin. And it’s not just true of business. Over the last two centuries, and especially the last two decades, government institutions everywhere have also become more alike, encompassing parliaments, regulatory agencies, and central banks. Surveying several countries in Europe and Latin America, two scholars found that the number of independent regulatory agencies (American-style bodies) rose sevenfold between 1986 and 2002.16 Even politics has an increasingly familiar feel across the globe. American consultants are routinely paid princely fees to tell Asian and Latin American politicians how best to appeal to their own countrymen.
Books, movies, and television showcase distinctly local tastes, but the structure of these industries (as well as many aspects of the content) is becoming more standardized. Bollywood, for instance, is moving away from its tradition of cheap budgets and lengthy run times, toward shorter, more commercial films with Hollywood investors and export potential.17 Walk down a street anywhere in the industrialized world today, and you see variations on the same themes—bank machines, coffeehouses, clothing stores with their seasonal sales, immigrant communities, popular culture and music.
What is vanishing in developing countries is an old high culture and traditional order. It is being eroded by the rise of a mass public, empowered by capitalism and democracy. This is