The continued popularity of Western, mainly American cultural exports internationally has given rise to “The West and the Rest” paradigm as a defining feature of cultural globalization. This volume explains “The West and the Rest” paradigm and follows its legacy with analysis of the development of the concepts of cultural globalization, cultural convergence, and their continued proliferation in authoritarian dictatorships, despite strong government censorship. It explains this trajectory in the context of technological innovations that have fueled the evolution of cross-border cultural messaging. This messaging continues to proliferate via largely illicit citizen-managed markets that keep developing ways to evade the censorship of central governments in the remnants of the Communist world. Its popularity with ordinary citizen keeps growing because of showing higher standards of living and well-being. Citizens embrace it as an escapist mechanism and this embrace is analyzed as an outcome of soft power. The dynamic is discussed on two fronts in this volume. One is with a focus on the technological innovations since the end of the Cold War that have increased the breadth, scope, and source of cross-cultural messaging. The other is with a focus on the evolution of the economic structure of the former Communist world. Wealth and digitization are congruent and therefore, a parallel lesion discussion is offered on the change of economic realities of the last decades of Communism and today.
Dr. Nikolay Anguelov is Full Professor of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He has a Ph.D. in Policy Studies, concentration Regional Economic Development, an MPA and an MS in Applied Economics and Statistics from Clemson University. He is the author of five books: The Sustainable Fashion Quest: Innovations in Business and Policy (2021), From Criminalizing to Decriminalizing Marijuana: The Politics of Social Control (2018), The Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society (2015), Economic Sanctions Vs. Soft Power: Lessons from North Korea, Myanmar and the Middle East (2015) and Policy and Political Theory in Trade Practice: Multinational Corporations and Global Governments (2014).
