Hard power here yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into what I have called a kind of videology that works through sound bites and film clips. The new global culture is a product of American popular culture driven by expansionist commerce Its template is American; its form is style. Its goods are as much images as material, an aesthetic and a product line. It is about culture as commodity, where what you think is defined by what you wear and apparel becomes a species of ideology. Think about those Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac cars that have been hoisted from the roadways to the marquees of global-market icons such as the Harley-Davidson and the Hard Rock They are not about transport any more. You no longer drive them; their iconographic messages drive you. They conjure up synthetic behaviour from old movies and new celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to such popular international chains as Planet Hollywood.The new churches of this global commercial civilisation are shopping malls, the privatised “public” squares and neighbourless “neighbourhoods” of suburbia.

The new products are not so much goods as image exports that help create a common world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, celebrities, songs, brand names, jingles and trademarks. It is shopping that has a common signature around the world today.Shopping means consumption and consumption depends on the fabrication of needs as well as goods. That is English, which Japanese teenagers now prefer to use wherever possible and which is an official, if not the official, language of every international conference held today.Moreover, common markets produce common behaviours of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial pilots, computer programmers, film directors, international bankers, media specialists, oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts, movie producers, demographers, accountants, professors, lawyers and athletes comprise a new breed of men and women for whom religion, culture, and ethnic nationality are marginal elements in a working identity.

And although they produce neither common interests nor common law, common markets do demand, along with a common currency, a common language. Consumers are a new breed of men and women who are equal (potential customers all) without being justly treated; and are peaceful (placid and reactive rather than active) without being democratic.In Europe, Asia and the Americas, markets have already eroded national sovereignty and given birth to a new global culture of international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies such as Opec, world news services such as CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations – the new sovereigns of a world where nation states scarcely know how to regulate their own economies, let alone control runaway global markets.While mills and factories sit on sovereign territory under the eye and potential regulation of nation states, currency markets and the Internet exist everywhere, but nowhere in particular. Iranian zealots may keep one ear tuned to the mullahs urging holy war, but the other is cocked to Rupert Murdoch’s Star Television, which beams in Dynasty reruns or The Simpsons from hovering satellites. The Russian Orthodox Church may remain a bastion of faith in Russia’s privatising world, but has entered into a joint venture with a Californian businessman to bottle and sell natural waters from the Saint springs.This new globalising culture is likely to displace its reactionary critics and its democratic rivals, who dream of genuinely internationalised civil society made up of free citizens from different cultures.For America’s global culture is not so much hostile as indifferent to democracy: Its goal is of a global consumer society composed not of tribesmen – too commercially challenged to shop; nor of citizens – too civically engaged – but of consumers. when Michael Jackson was a viable musical force? It’s hard to believe, but once Mikey was not just a freak, but a freak with skills.” (Amy Linden, Microsoft Music Central review).