The financial force that has powered the new era is the free movement of capital. Books, movies, and television shows are becoming more standardized in order to attract the largest possible audiences.

Clothing has become similar from blue jeans to Western business suits. Government institutions have become more alike, encompassing parliaments, regulatory agencies, and independent central banks. Companies are run according to 'standard' Western practices, starting from double-entry bookkeeping, which is of Italian origin. The developing countries' adoption of the Western model of modernity has led to almost one-fourth of the world's population (1.5 billion people), speaking some level of functional English.

The West's relative decline is therefore a result of its success of having exported its thinking. The West's share of the total diminishes, while the less developed countries are catching up after having adopted Western economic principles. In 2006 and in 2007, 124 countries grew at a rate of 4% or more. The growth has taken place almost throughout the world, i.e. Zakaria argues that we are now living a power shift, which he calls ' the rise of the rest', as countries all over the world have adopted originally Western modern thinking with the result that they are experiencing unprecedented economic growth. Europe was followed by the rise of the United States in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when the industrialized United Sates became the most powerful nation since the imperial Rome. The years between 14 marked, according to Zakaria 'the most significant break in human history - between faith, ritual, and dogma, on the one hand, and observation, experimentation, and critical thought, on the other' and produced modernity in form of science and technology, commerce and capitalism. Men like Copernicus and Galileo gave birth to modern science. The rise of the West started in Italy in the fifteenth century during the period called, maybe misleadingly, the Renaissance. It is not a question of America's decline as such, but about the rise of everybody else, which will end the Western world's hegemony in world affairs. Zakaria argues that America 's relative weight in the world is in decline. Below there is a summary of the book as for a background for the interview.

Above there is an interview with Fareed Zakaria by the New Perspectives Quarterly about his book 'The Post-American World'.

The post american world