New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

220 The New Imperialists
by terrorists. 92 The final paragraph of Fraser’s text typifies the Americacentrism
that guides his moralistic rationalization of American soft
power: “America’s weapons of mass distraction are not only necessary for
global stability, but also should be built up and deployed more assertively
throughout the world. The world needs more M.T.V., McDonald’s,
Microsoft, Madonna, and Mickey Mouse. Yes, things really do go better
with Coke.” 93
Let us review Fraser’s argument. America is an empire, a “uni-polar
superpower with no likely rival in the foreseeable future.” 94 Although
American empire rests on military and economic power, American
empire is also an “essentially cultural construction” 95 that represents an
American way of life, a set of ideological values, and a system of belief
(rugged individualism, laissez-faire free-market capitalism, competition,
consumerism, “democracy,” and so on). American soft power (a code
word for America’s global cultural industry and its commodities)
transmits and legitimizes – though not without contradiction –
American cultural values to non-American populations. 96 By globally
popularizing American cultural values, soft power, in turn, assists the
foreign policy imperatives of the U.S. imperial state. Soft power establishes
economic and ideological conditions that correspond with and
strengthen the political interests of the American nation-state and the
economic interests of America’s internationalizing capitalist classes. 97 In
sum, American soft power has historically “led to the emergence of an
American Empire.” 98 And at present, American soft power is an
instrument of a U.S. foreign policy that seeks the “extension and maintenance
of American imperial power.” 99
As we see, there is nothing conceptually original in Fraser’s discourse
on American soft power; it simply regurgitates and then affirms the
processes and effects that Marxist critics of U.S. cultural imperialism
have attempted to understand and challenge for the past thirty years.
Paradoxically, though Fraser goes to great lengths to illustrate and
celebrate the economic and ideological instrumentality of America’s
global cultural industry to American imperial domination, he simultaneously
attempts to deny the reality of U.S. cultural imperialism by
debunking the claims made by its original Marxist authors.
Fraser argues that Marxist critics of U.S. cultural imperialism “believe,
falsely, that merely because America exports massive amounts of television
programs, the automatic result is cultural homogenization. The