【2010.6.4 纽约时报】America Sees Little Return From 'Knockoff Power'

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/us/05iht-currents.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y


America Sees Little Return From 'Knockoff Power'

By ANAND GIRIDHARADASPublished: June 4, 2010

It is the best and worst of times for the American idea.

The American style of life is thriving worldwide. It is becoming the aspiration of a middle-class-dominated world, from the suburban home to the two cars to the self-help book on the nightstand. The American fashion sense is becoming the world’s, along with its body images, eating habits and psychiatric practices.

But Americans might ask what’s in it for them these days, for this extraordinary spread of what passes for Americanness often yields little useful power. Is the world’s emulation making America’s wars easier to conclude, its allies easier to persuade, its exports easier to promote, its economy easier to heal?

Once the scholar Joseph Nye coined the phrase “soft power” in the 1980s, it became a truism that cultural power translated into old-fashioned leverage. “When you can get others to admire your ideas and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction,” Mr. Nye wrote in 2004.

And yet America now faces a predicament: It appears to wield unrivaled cultural influence, yet lacks the leverage to show for it.
Call it knockoff power: the power to be much mimicked, down to the details of your hip-hop beats and Six Sigma techniques. What distinguishes it from soft power is leakage: As with medicines that go off patent, much of the world is absorbing American manners, but this imitation does not boomerang back in benefits to the United States.

Soft power was a prix fixe menu: If you like our movies and music, then you’ll love our Bill of Rights and elections. Knockoff power is à la carte: Millions of people in modernizing societies wear the veneer of an Americanized way today but beneath it are going deeper into their own culture and becoming more fully themselves — prouder, more confident, less eager to follow a far-off superpower’s lead.

The notion of soft power arrived toward the end of the Cold War, when the collapse of Communism spelled tangible triumph for American values. In the world before this present wave of globalization, classic illustrations of U.S. soft power included Radio Free Europe broadcasts into the East Bloc countries and even the sculpture resembling the Statue of Liberty raised during the Tiananmen Square protests 21 years ago in Beijing.

In an e-mail exchange, Mr. Nye argued that “American soft power remains strong in most parts of the world, even if it takes more subtle forms than in the days of the Cold War.” Nongovernmental actors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation now do what the state once did, he added.

But is this subtler influence bearing fruit in a world where it is just one among a cacophony of cultural claims on our time?
If soft power was about noble ideals, knockoff power is often about less exalted things. Globalization has made Americanesque behavior a ticket to personal success globally. There is a difference between admiring a country’s ways as ends in themselves and as mere means.

It is one thing to stand in Tiananmen Square and cry freedom. It is another thing — perhaps more prevalent today — to be a Chinese student who believes that an American accent will land you a job in an American company, which will get you a Manhattan-style loft in Beijing.

Cultural power can also backfire when the choices of those who embrace Americanness in language, accent, dress or choice of entertainment stir resentment in those who do not. Every time an Indian adopts an American accent and curbs his “mother tongue influence,” as the call centers label it, hoping to land a job, it seems more deviant, and frustrating, to have only an Indian accent. And so the free choices of outsiders can sow bitterness against America through no fault of its own.

Moreover, the more universal your influences become, the more they are taken for granted. Just as you rarely think of the Arabs who gave “alcohol” its name when you sip a Bordeaux, people at American-style birthday parties or brunches may be oblivious to the American provenance of their behavior. Indeed, emulation of Americans by other societies may not make them more like Americans, but rather confuse and destabilize them.

As Ethan Watters argues in his recent book, “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche,” widespread American conditions like depression and anorexia are spreading virally through traditional societies today, with Western ideas of treatment following suit and replacing indigenous ways. In many cases, these ideas don’t fit the cultures they are entering, Mr. Watters argues, and they leave the society more fragile than before.

“There is good evidence to suggest that America has more mentally ill than in other parts of the world and, despite a massive outlay in resources, has worse outcomes for those afflicted,” Mr. Watters said in an e-mail message. “Is it really in our best interest to convince the rest of the world follow our example in this regard?”

Sometimes, too, the very forces bringing American accoutrements to traditional societies — rising incomes, the opening of markets, deepening trade — can have contrary effects: for example, increasing the confidence of long-poor countries like India and China, and with it their reluctance to be bossed around. Many people in these societies are plunging more deeply into their own pasts as resource constraints and inferiority complexes evaporate. They want more cookie-cutter shopping malls, yes, to be signed-up members of the globalized world, but also more indigenous temples to stamp their identity on the cacophony.

Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, describes development in Asia as a process of a “modernization without Westernization” — of picking and choosing from Western life, then weaving the discoveries into the tapestry of their own cultures.

“Look at the Chinese,” he said in an e-mail message. “They have a furious desire to accumulate all the products of American middle-class life: washing machines, cars, computers. But in their souls, they are becoming more Chinese, because for the first time in decades, they can be proud of being Chinese. In short, look beyond the products they are buying and look into their souls.”