Westernization

Westernization (or Westernisation, see spelling differences), also Europeanisation or occidentalization (from the Occident), is a process whereby societies come under or adopt what is considered to be Western culture, in areas such as industry, technology, science, education, politics, economics, lifestyle, law, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, diet, clothing, language, writing system, religion, and philosophy.

[citation needed] Later, the Roman Empire took on the first process of Westernization as it was heavily influenced by Greece and created a new culture based on the principles and values of the Ancient Greek society.

[5] Specifically, the extent to which domination, destruction, resistance, survival, adaptation, or modification affect a native culture may differ following inter-ethnic contact.

Islamic and Byzantine scholars added to the Western canon when their stores of Greek and Roman literature jump-started the Renaissance.

The following countries or regions experienced a significant influence by the process of Westernization: Kishore Mahbubani's book entitled The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World (Public Affairs), is very optimistic.[why?]

Samuel P. Huntington posits a conflict between "the West and the Rest" and offers three forms of general action that non-Western civilizations can react toward Western countries.

He states: …the 5.6 billion people who live outside the West no longer believe in the innate or inherent superiority of Western civilization.

In contrast to territorial delineation, others, like the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, consider what is "Western" based on religious affiliation, such as deeming the majority-Western Christian part of Europe and North America the West, and creating 6 other civilizations, including Latin America, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox, to organize the rest of the globe.

[27] Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict.

[28] In Orientalism Edward Said views Westernization as it occurred in the process of colonization, an exercise of essentializing a "subject race" in order to more effectively dominate them.

Said references Arthur Balfour, the British Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, who regarded the rise of nationalism in Egypt in the late 19th century as counterproductive to a "benevolent" system of occupational rule.

The act of claiming coherent knowledge of a society in effect objectifies and others it into marginalization, making people who are classified into that race as "almost everywhere nearly the same."

Said also argues that this relationship to the "inferior" races, in fact, works to also fortify and make coherent what is meant by "the West"; if "The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, "different..." then "...the European is rational, virtuous, mature, normal."

Thus, "the West" acts as a construction in the similar way as does "the Orient" – it is a created notion to justify a particular set of power relations, in this case, the colonization and rule of a foreign country.

From the 1400s onward, Europeanization and colonialism spread gradually over much of the world and controlled different regions during this five centuries long period, colonizing or subjecting the majority of the globe.

Following World War II, Western leaders and academics sought to expand innate liberties and international equality.

Even in countries where large populations of indigenous people remain or the indigenous peoples have mixed (mestizo) considerably with European settlers, such as countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Mexico, Peru, Panama, Suriname, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Belize, Paraguay, South Africa, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Guyana, El Salvador, Jamaica, Cuba, or Nicaragua, relative marginalisation still exists.

As examined by author Bonnie Adrian, Taiwanese bridal photos of today provide a striking contrast to past accepted norms, contemporary couples often displaying great physical affection and, at times, placed in typically Western settings to augment the modernity, in comparison to the historically prominent relationship, often stoic and distant, exhibited between bride and groom.

In contrast, despite many advances in industrial efficiency, Japan has sustained a culture of strict social hierarchy and limited individualization.

After the break-up of the USSR in late 1991 and the end of the Cold War, many of its component states and allies nevertheless underwent Westernization, including privatization of hitherto state-controlled industry.

The comparison with Eastern societies, who decided to ban American social media platforms (such as Iran and China with Facebook and Twitter), marks a political desire to avoid the Westernization process of their own populations and ways to communicate.