Americanization
[4][5][6] The cinema of the United States has dominated most of the world's medias markets since the 1910s, and is the chief medium by which the international community sees American fashions, customs, scenery, and way of life.
[7][8] The top 50 highest-grossing films of all time were all made either entirely or partially in the United States or were financed by U.S. production companies, even with limited or no artistic involvement.
[9] The top 50 constituents set and filmed entirely in the United Kingdom, like some of the Harry Potter franchise, or with deliberately and quintessentially British source material, like the Lord of the Rings series, count as American productions for solely financial reasons.
Of the top ten global brands (2017) by revenue, seven are based in the United States:[12] Apple Inc., Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM.
During the Cold War, Americanization was the primary soft power method chosen to counter the more hard power-orientated polar process of Sovietization around the world.
[14]: 6 Americanization has become more prevalent since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which left the United States as the world's sole superpower (the full soft power of China as a potential competing influence has yet to manifest within Occidental pop culture).
[8] The major film studios of the United States are the primary source of the most commercially successful and most ticket selling movies in the world.
The first McDonald's in Soviet Russia had a grand opening on Moscow's Pushkin Square on 31 January 1990 with approximately 38,000 customers waiting in hours long lines, breaking company records at the time.
[23] The importation of Little Golden Books (Petits Livres d'Or) to France under the publisher Cocorico after World War II is discussed as a subtle way of implementing cultural productions that "presented the economic principles of American liberalism in a favorable light" in a study by Cécile Boulaire.
One such case is Mexico, which abolished screen quotas after the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the U.S. and Canada.
[30] Baseball's international spread is largely because of historical American influence on the rest of the world; the sport was seen as being connected to military ventures abroad.
[35] Many of the world's largest companies, such as Alphabet (Google), Amazon, AT&T, Apple, Coca-Cola, Disney, General Motors, McDonald's, Nike, Meta, Microsoft, Pepsi, and Walmart, were founded and are headquartered in the United States.
As ideology and practice, rationalization challenged and transformed not only machines, factories, and vast business enterprises but also the lives of middle-class and working-class Germans.
The basic reason for U.S. investments is no longer lower production costs, faster economic growth, or higher profits in Europe but the desire to maintain a competitive position based largely on American technological superiority.
[15] However, by the 1970s, European investments in the U.S. had increased even more rapidly than vice versa, and Geir Lundestad finds there was less talk of the Americans buying Europe.
Putin in 2013 published an opinion piece in The New York Times that attacked the American tendency to see itself as an exceptional indispensable nation.
Americanization has arrived through widespread high-speed Internet and smartphone technology since 2008, with a large fraction of the new apps and hardware being designed in Silicon Valley.
[45] The Wall Street Journal in 2015 reported "deep concerns in Europe's highest policy circles about the power of U.S. technology companies.
Overall, the article tries to show that those who have applied the concept of 'Americanization' to their research on cultural or economic history have been well aware of the complexities of trans-Atlantic relations in this period, whether they were viewed as a two-way exchange or as a process of circulation.
[48][better source needed] Others such as Francis Fukuyama argue that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 prompted a unipolar global capitalist reality that meant the "end of history".
