ETHNOS AND GLOBALIZATION: Ethnocultural Mechanisms of Disintegration of Contemporary Nations. Monograph

The most important features of the global economic system are that, firstly, it functions as a market – i.e. the trade exchange system – and secondly (and of the utmost importance), it does not have external social systems. At the same time, local economic and social systems, while retaining their agency, are becoming increasingly open to external factors, less independent. In other words, the global economic system, moving away from the political regulations of the state, signifies the accretion and expansion of capital.

As a result, the commercialization of the whole world – including the commercialization, mechanization (industrialization) and unification of all spheres of the social life that were previously uninvolved in market turnover – is the main objective developmental tendency.

Adequate conceptual study of globalization leads to a whole range of new methodology issues. In particular, it is widely known that all sociophilosophical theories comprise two components: the descriptive one that explains the world, and a prescriptive one, describing what should be, or the perfect condition of the society and the human being.

Correspondingly, theories of globalization, claiming to be systemic, are forced not only to describe and explain, but also to provide a prescriptive model of social relations, either explicitly or implicitly, which means there should be an ideological component reflecting the interests of the elites, but at the same time calling upon the interests and values of wider social groups, including “panhuman’ ones.

The methodological weakness of theories of globalization lies in the fact that the external form of social theories – built upon the rules of the natural sciences, studying objective natural patterns – are inevitably hiding a subjective, instrumental, ideological component, predicated on the social, civilizational and corporate affiliation of the researcher and, on a more global level, on a certain scientific school of thought or a scientific community. The ongoing global commercialization of science and education makes the latent subjectivity of social studies explicit, as science becomes a commercial market of scientific services, where supply considerably exceeds demand. A so-called buyer’s market appears, where the client dominates and scientific services are more and more often requested by non-state agents.

In any case, the ideological, prescriptive component of theories of globalization should be singled out during the analysis as a model of a society or a type of social behaviour, designed for a certain social group (target audience). One should consider the theory of a certain social phenomenon not only as a model of this phenomenon, but also as a symbolical resource, forming social and individual consciousness.

Thus, existing concepts of globalization, while reflecting the point of view and interests of certain social agents, should be seen not only as theories, but also as instruments to promote these agents’ specific interests. Therefore, constructivist and instrumentalist approaches to sociogenesis, which take subjective moments of sociohistorical development into consideration, are especially important for the theory of globalization.

Are there any universally accepted postulates of globalistics?

Undoubtedly, the fact of the establishment of the global market as a global environment of economic and, therefore, social interaction that is levelling out the spatial disconnection of local economies and the interaction of local social systems, is universally recognized.

Most researchers agree that the objective basis of globalization is scientific and technological progress and the increase in productive forces, used by a range of economically and politically dominant countries (“the golden billion”) and their elites for their own economic and political ends, including the establishment of a world order that generally benefits them.

A certain consensus exists on the necessity of preserving the cultural and civilizational diversity of the world, which objectively clashes with the Western project of globalization.

Most researchers believe that a unipolar model of globalization based on liberal fundamentalism allows no future for the existing local civilizations and corresponding cultural and historical communities, or for the West itself. At the same time, the modern scientific community cannot offer anything except a vague slogan of “dialogue of civilizations’.

The idea of the dialogue of civilizations, as an extremely abstract position devoid of clearly formulated ideas and of any connection to social agents, is formulated in the foreword to the Russian translation of Braudel’s Grammar of Civilizations:83 “Globalization develops at the same time as the multipolar world appears. Civilizations have to learn… to agree to the existence of other civilizations, admit that they will never achieve dominance over others, be ready to see equal partners in others.”

As a result, theoretical consensus on globalistics is limited by the fact-based side of the globalizational processes.

As for the theory of globalization as such, the process is ongoing in terms of theory that reflects objectively the growing antagonism of social agents of global development, principally global and local elites. As a result, the theory of globalization and contiguous scientific areas and disciplines form the stage for a battle between the interests of global and local elites and may therefore be seen as the reflection of globalization processes in the сollective consciousness.

It is therefore evident that the theory of globalization needs to go beyond separate disciplines and local theoretical constructions to consider the interpretation of globalization processes on a sociophilosophical level.

Most globalization models have been based on a multi-stage approach, typically including economic determinism. Within this approach, globalization is seen as an objectively predetermined, largely economic process of the spread and universalization of the Western economic model in its neoliberal version. This has created an impression of the establishment of a global “suprasociety’ (Zinoviev), the announcement of the “end of history’84 and the appearance of the global empire with a Euro-Atlantic civilizational nucleus and several rings of dependable and agentless periphery.

The scope of the research may serve as a basis for the classification of theoretical approaches.

The approach to globalization as an objective historical tendency of the extension of intergovernmental and intercivilizational interactions and contacts was developed in the works of Beck,85 Berger,86 Huntington,87 Goldblatt,88 Castells,89 McLuhan,90 Soros,91 Stiglitz,92 Bratimov,93 Utkin,94 Chumakov,95,96 and others.

Geoeconomic and geopolitical aspects of globalization were studied in the works by Buzgalin and Kolganov,97 Delyagin,98,99 Inozemtsev,100 Subetto,101 Utkin102 and others.

The problem of the influence of globalization on the nation state and state institutions was studied in the works by Beck,103 Bauman,104 Stryker,105 Drucker,106 Butenko,107 Rieger and Leibfried108 Podzigun,109 Kara-Murza,110 Karmadanov,111 Kagarlitsky,112 Pantin,113 Panarin114, E. Pozdnyakov,115 Spiridonov and others.

The world-systems approach to globalization as a process of increasingly multi-faceted and all-encompassing interaction of social agents and beings is used by Braudel116, Amin,117,118 Wallerstein,119 and others.

The approach to global development based on resources and ecology – one of whose variants, the sustainable development concept, became the basis for UN policies on demographics and development – has been considerably influential. This approach is based on objective natural resource limits (the “natural ceiling’), on economic activity and, as a result, on optimal population size. Nevertheless, the concept of the crisis of resources and demographics, while it does single out objective issues, cannot in principle be used to describe and make a prognosis for the social component of this crisis and how it could play out.

The correspondence between convergent and divergent social processes may be the basis for a classification. The philosophers who created the concept of humankind’s multi-stage development towards a single global social community can be considered the forerunners of modern globalistics, and one could single out the fundamental works in this field by Kant, Marx, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, Toynbee, Russell, Jaspers and others.

Representatives of the civilizational approach, who emphasize the unexpectedly stable preservation of sociocultural communities and cultural-civilizational differences even in a connected economic and social community, insist on the restricted nature of the convergent tendencies of globalization in the sociocultural sphere.

Most existing theories and concepts are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon into separate, although significant, phenomena of economic, sociocultural and political character.

In addition to the above, convergent aspects of development (monopolization and unification, including ethnocultural) are being seen in absolute terms and the phenomenon of social regression is being denied as an objective tendency, an attribute of globalization.

It is equally important that globalization is a comprehensive system of major changes – often revolutionary or catastrophic ones – in separate spheres of the social being, a system that is not equal to the sum of its parts and engenders a qualitatively new level of difficulty of social phenomena in the new epoch.

The analysis and the prognosis for development of globalization processes are hindered by the crisis-like character of the changes, increasingly more likely to end in moving from the technical and social progress of the two previous centuries towards growing ungovernability and global catastrophe: the modern world is changing faster than the science community can reach a consensus on the character of the changes.

The threats and challenges posed by globalization are not limited to the objective problems related to resources, ecology and economy on which the scientific community focuses. Global threats of a social kind, subjective in nature and linked to the transformation of the system-building social communities – in particular, national and ethnic ones – play an equally important role.

Ethnocultural fragmentation of civil nations is a new global threat eliciting not only the establishment of new ethnic and religious conflicts and the energizing of the old ones, but also new forms of their establishment and development. Thus, the clash of civilizations assumes not an intergovernmental but an internal, diffusive character tied to the elimination of spatial borders and barriers.

It seems efficient to divide the phenomena that make up globalization into objective components, linked generally to the spike in limits on natural resources and the objectively inevitable establishment of the global economic and social space, and subjective components, linked to the activities of the social agents of global development, including large and socially important communities such as nations and ethnic groups.

One of the leading objective components of globalization is the increase in global connectivity – that is, economic, transport and information globalization, as well as a global crisis of resources and demographics.

At the same time, growth of the objective component of the global systemic crisis inevitably leads to subjective manifestations in the form of a confrontation between the social agents of the global process involved in the fight for the limited resources, not so much by the desire to reap benefits and rule, but by the necessity to save oneself.

Objective and subjective components should be singled out in the theoretical approaches to globalization. It has been established that the theories may be descriptive or prescriptive. When analysing theories and models of globalization, one should single out their objective, descriptive component, and the subjective component that reflects the peculiarities, interests and intentions of the agent that shows a preference for a certain theoretical approach.

The prescriptive component of social theory (including the theory of globalization), understood as an ideal model of society, plays a special part in forming nations and other social communities of political genesis. The national idea is nothing short of the social order controlling the masses and forming their common identity.

Therefore, one should single out an ideological, prescriptive component of the theory of globalization – in other words, a value-based message, aimed at a certain social group (target audience), born out of certain social agents (usually elites), using ideology as a social management tool actively shaping or “building’ social reality.

Therefore, comparative philosophical-methodological analysis of well-known theories and globalization concepts, created within various science disciplines, shows that most are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon to separate, albeit significant, economic or political phenomena.

At the same time, most existing globalization concepts, apologetic and critical theories, exhibit absolutization of convergent aspects of the development, monopolization and unification, including the ethnocultural one.

The aforementioned limitations placed on theoretical approaches inevitably lead to cognitive restrictions that hinder the theory not only from making forecasts, but also from explaining the course of the global development post factum, necessitating a review of the sociophilosophical approaches used in certain social studies.

Globalization is usually described using the well-known categories of internalization of the economy and integration of states – in other words, from the point of view of economic determinism and the concept of world politics as the interaction of sovereign states.

However, globalization does not simply weaken nation states that reached their development peak in the twentieth century, including great powers, and erode nations as system-building social communities, but also brings to life new agents in the global game, new centres and power mechanisms that serve as alternatives to the nation state.

According to one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers and sociologists, the creator of social structuration, Anthony Giddens,120 the process of globalization cannot be reduced to such substantial factors as information and communication technologies and the liberalization of trade and finance.

The concept of the “hybridization’ of society that presupposes the process of cultural, racial, ethnic mixing and miscegenation121 has gained some traction. Therefore, hybridization is a model of a slowed-down convergence that reduces new entities to mechanic superposition, overlaying already known phenomena and entities.

According to Guseynov,122 globalization is the transformation of long-standing, rather independent (although capable of complex interactions) cultural-civilizational and nation state forms of social life into a single system including all of humankind. This new system inevitably takes a stand against those forms of collective life which it is supposed to replace in a new, wider, inclusive (to the point of being universal) synthesis.

The confrontation of the global and the local becomes especially evident, and dramatically antagonistic, when globalization moves beyond economy to take over cultural, political and ideological (in a wider sense, including outlook, mentality) spheres.

According to Stepin, globalization is a choice between the two scenarios, which are called the “golden billion” concept and the “dialogue of civilizations” concepts.123

The golden billion concept stems from the idea of globalization as the rule, the triumph of Western civilization and the Western peoples, “the end of history”124 The rest should strive to become more like them under the threat of being relegated to an existence on the periphery or the semi-periphery. In the same manner, the future global society is seen as a semblance of the feudal and hierarchical system in the centre, with concentric circles of various levels around it.

The concept of the “global human ant hill” (Cheloveynik), as a final and definitive variant of the integration of humankind within the Western paradigm, was sociologically forecast and shown in the work of Zinoviev.125

The events of the last two decades provide objective proof that globalization, as the establishment of a qualitatively more connected and homogenous global environment, does not lead to the extinction of the formed social communities, similarly to how biological evolution in ecosystems does not lead to a decrease in biodiversity. As a result, despite the obviously outdated nature of religious and ethnic social institutions, the influence of ethno-religious and ethnocultural processes across the world is increasing as the migration flows across states are increasing, the state institutions are losing their significance and, consequently, the nation state identity is weakening, being replaced by an ethnic and religious identity.

From that point of view, the epoch of globalization is analogous to the axial age – a pivotal age of the formation of the first local civilizations, introduced by Karl Jaspers – the secession and the setting apart of the political sphere and, as a consequence, the appearance of the largest global denominations that defined the global history for ages to come.126

Consequently, globalization is not a gradual evolutionary approach to the only possible equilibrium point, but a global crisis during which catastrophic and, accordingly, essentially unpredictable major changes occur in the global society, linked to the establishment, development and extinction of a wide range of social agents as a result of an increasing global confrontation that is not limited by spatial barriers.

As a consequence, a global economic empire, even if it swallows the whole world, gives rise to new processes of structuration and divergence inside itself, undoubtedly begetting the possibility of a historical choice, a bifurcation of the historical process.

At the same time, the main consequence of the variability of global development and the increase in the number of agents in a new global world is the undoubtedly uncontrollable nature of global sociohistorical development that reaches its peak during historical crises.

The concept of the dialogue of civilizations, justifiably assuming that the sociocultural sphere is not a carbon copy of economic processes, proposes the principle of equality of civilizations, cultures and peoples, and sees the ideal global society as unity in diversity.

In fact, the concept of the dialogue of civilizations is a cover for the global periphery already formed to counter the pressure of the West in terms of the unification of culture and values, and to work out its own project for the existence in a united world. Seen from this angle, globalization is a challenge for the cultural, civilizational and national identity, which is applicable to all development scenarios, including the concept of the dialogue of civilizations.127

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the process is currently happening in a somewhat different way – that is to say, an ideology of the supremely wide community, the people of the Western world, the “golden billion’, is being formed, which caters for global confrontation in the sphere that is responsible for material wealth. A confrontation is inevitable within a new global community, as the fight for natural resources is gaining momentum due to the exponential increase in population size, in particular. Ideology is a subjective, collective look at the reality.

At the same time, the idea of the dialogue of civilizations as an ideal and almost conflictless development, presented as an alternative to the reality of globalization and the real strategy of globalization, is not an actual alternative: at best it is an ideal tendency, if not wishful thinking. The idea is rooted exclusively in theory and fails to make it not only through the test of societal practice, but through detailed work, a creation of a local applied model of such a dialogue. While real interests and agents of the global process are behind globalization, the universal theoretical idea of the dialogue of civilizations does not seem to be powered either by economic interests that would outweigh the benefits of globalization for elites, including local ones, or by agents, not only interested in symmetrical, equitable dialogue, but capable of organizing it.

There does not seem to be a referee overlooking the fight, someone interested and capable of forcing dialogue participants to reach a consensus that is not simply defined by economic or some other kind of power wielded by the participants during which life or death issues are being solved. The result of direct interaction between a wolf and a lamb, without any mechanical or spatial barriers, is evident; the weaker side calls for equal dialogue notwithstanding.

Ultimately, the idea of the dialogue of civilizations is at best one of the forms taken by the losers’ plea with the winners for mercy, a form of integration into a Western model of globalization.

Another form of local outsiders’ appeal for mercy aimed at the leaders of global development is the idea of the preservation of civilizational (cultural) diversity, clearly repeating the slogan urging the “preservation of the biodiversity” of the environment. Preservation of the biodiversity is nothing short of a strategy to maintain the physical being of the ethnocultural community at the price of the loss of historical agency and transformation from an agent into an object of guardianship, the transformation of a local community into a guarded biological entity.

Nevertheless, the status of a guarded object has become a relatively successful solution for the trap of globalization for many primitive ethnic groups (aboriginal peoples, few in number, with a traditional economy).

Overall, when globalization is pressuring local social communities and groups, two types of reaction manifest themselves: a short circuit – an establishment of a guardian-like collective consciousness, the transformation of local communities into diasporas; and the urge for local and regional communities politically shaped into states to enter globalization on their own terms, as advantageous as possible.

A third option is available – a creation of one’s own global project – but that route requires plenty of resources and is unequivocally available only to China.

In any case, in criticizing, or rejecting, globalization in its Western, expansionist variant, one should recognize that the problem and relevant challenges will not go away, as the causes of globalization – globalization of the economy, the transformation of local social communities into open systems, the opening of spatial and information barriers, the growing crisis of resources and demographics – do objectively exist and increase.

Therefore, the majority of well-known theories and concepts of globalization are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon into separate, albeit essential, phenomena of an economic or political nature.

Contemporary Russian studies of globalization focus on several theoretical approaches that inadvertently reflect the power dynamics in Russia and around it.

The neoliberal approach to the processes of globalization that has been largely accepted as the official concept of the reformation and development of Russia reflects the views of contemporary Russian elites, whose interests are to a great extent tied to the resource-based economic cycle and global economic structure.

It is essentially a matter of the local adaptation of such classics of neoliberalism as Hayek128, Friedman129 and Popper.130 Correspondingly, negative consequences of the total liberalization of spheres of human being are presented as objectively inevitable and, as a result, as ungovernable phenomena without any alternative, such that an attempt to control them may result in an even worse outcome.

In general, liberal approaches to globalization as an extreme version of economic determinism are characterized by denial of the systemic complexity of social development that, in principle, cannot be reduced to phenomena and patterns of an economic and material kind.