When anti-globalization protesters took to the streets of Washington last weekend, they blamed globalization for everything from hunger to the destruction of home-grown cultures. And globalization 
meant the United States. The critics call it Coca-Colonization, and French sheep farmer Jose Bove has become a cult (狂热分子) figure since destroying a McDonald's restaurant in 1999. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, globalization is neither homogenizing (是……同化) nor Americanizing the cultures of the world. 
    To understand why not, we have to step back and put the current period in a larger historical perspective. Although they are related, the long-term historical trends of globalization and modernization are! not the same. While modernization has produced some common traits, such as large cities, factories and mass communications, local cultures have by no means been erased. The appearance of similar institutions in response to similar problems is not surprising, but it does not lead to homogeneity. In the first half of the 20th century, for example, there were some similarities among the industrial societies of Britain, Germany, America and Japan, but there were even more important differences. When China,India and Brazil complete their current processes of industrialization and modernization, we should not expect them to be exact copies of Japan, Germany or the United States. 
    Take the current information revolution as an example. The United States is at the forefront of this great movement of change, so the uniform social and cultural habits produced by television viewing or Internet use, for instance, are often attributed to Americanization. But correlation is not cause. Since the United States does exist and is at the leading edge of the information revolution, there is a degree of Americanization at present, but it is likely to decrease over the course of the 21st century as technology spreads and local cultures modernize in their own ways. 
    Historical proof that globalization does not necessarily mean homogenization can be seen in the case of Japan. In the mid-19th century, it became the first Asian country to embrace globalization and to borrow successfully from the world without losing its uniqueness. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan searched broadly for tools and innovations that would allow it to become a major power rather than a victim of Western imperialism. The lesson that Japan has to teach the rest of the world is that even a century and a half of openness to global trends does not necessarily assure destruction of a country's separate cultural identity.