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

A specific type of new non-state elite is being formed within the borders of global and regional ethnic communities, communes, diasporas and ethnocriminal groups, whose political influence in the world has grown significantly along with the growth of global migration, the degradation of the institutions of the contemporary state, the erosion of national identity and its partial replacement by the confessional and ethnic.

The omnipresent multiculturalization and ethnicization of classic civil nations is developing in the United States, where multiple ethnic communities, increasingly oriented towards their countries of origin, are becoming increasingly influential and transforming the traditional party system of the United States into a system of ethnic lobbies.

Non-state elites, comprising a social basis of non-state actors of global politics, are not separated by the insurmountable barriers of old elites born out of the nation state. On the contrary, they all intersect and fit together to create a single stratum, integrated by social connections and mechanisms of social mobility.

Non-state local elites, interested in the resource flows of nation states, rather efficiently reach their goals through the mechanism of the intersection of elites, gradually transforming the state, according to Adam Smith178, from political sovereign to night-watchman. At the same time, non-state social actors do not form global elites separated from historical soil, non-mythicized new nomads devoid of cultural identity, but rather globalized strata of national and local elites. These elites play out a liberal scenario of the privatization of national income, nationalization of expenditures, mostly on national and local levels, but also on a global level.

Sketching out the social structure of a new global world, Richard Haass, the chairman of the Council of Foreign Relations, acknowledges the appearance in the social arena of new types of influential political and social actor, comparable in their abilities to the classic territorial state but having at the same time their own agency and interests independent from the state and its institutions.179 The transition of global politics into non-state and non-spatial dimensions, not linked to geopolitical poles and power hubs, is, according to Haass, “nonpolarity”. The situation of nonpolarity provides an organic base for the concept of soft power as political dominance based on the control and exploration of new spheres of non-force conflict in close cooperation with new types of influential social actor, many of which – for example, non-state organizations and private armies – are purposely created as foreign policy tools.

The growth in the number of conflicting sides, typical of contemporary times, the appearance of new dimensions and trans-border connections, and the deepening of contradictions are emphasized by the well-known concept of controlled chaos, reflecting the essential characteristics of globalization as a systemic crisis. This chaos is characterized by the existence of many points where one has to make a choice (bifurcation) during the historical process, with potential governability of such chaos through weak pressure on critical points and processes being another attribute.

In other words, governing the chaos is nothing but governing the flow of crisis situations as special vulnerable points within the social process with consequent purposeful interference of third parties in the resolution of crises, which may be defined as a variant of the multi-crisis approach to global governing.

What may be gained from the multi-crisis approach to globalization as a system of interconnected sub-crises, transforming the world-system that was formed by the end of the twentieth century?

Above all, the model of the development of globalization, as the mutual influence of various sub-crises, gives an adequate idea of the systemic difficulty of globalization, its off-balance and catastrophic dynamics, its ability to give way to qualitatively new social phenomena and agents, first of all challenges and threats. Such a view of globalization as a system of global crises and one catastrophe giving way to another, a system born not so much out of the growth limits of the resource base as the explosive growth of global interconnectedness, allows us to overcome the limited nature of theoretical approaches formed in the last century, understanding the systemic regression of the basics of contemporary civilization as growth expenditures. The very concept of growth, understood as the exploration of the resources of the outside environment, loses its meaning in the situation of fundamental resource limits.

As a result, the multi-crisis model of globalization acknowledges the end of the era of incremental socioeconomic progress, with humankind transitioning to a lower branch of regressive development, from steady growth to self-preservation under the conditions of total instability and antagonism. It means the loss of the most important social opportunities and achievements of the industrial era, at the very least.

An important indicator of social regression is the archaization of social relations and the mythologization of collective consciousness, the increase in the importance of ethnic and religious feelings, or the ethnicization and clericalization of the politics. The fight for the redistribution of resources and minimization of losses is becoming the core of the global process in the situation of the global conflict of civilizations.

The narrowness of the growth limits predicated on the scarcity of resources moves humankind into the territory of self-recycling, where outsider agents – including not only peripheral states, but, first of all, multiple influential strata in developed countries, including the middle class as their social basis – become the chief source of resources for the development.

The era of systemic progress and growth is finishing: the time is coming for an inevitable descent as competition grows.

As a result, the limitation of the resource base gives way to the degradation and primitivization of system-building social institutions, the formation of circles of steadily depressive regions and settlements as the concentration of resources in one sphere requires taking resources from other spheres of existence.

From the point of view of ensuring steady development, it is important that one addresses the issues of interference, mutual strengthening, synergy of crisis processes, the appearance of cause-and-effect ties between crisis processes, the export and outflow of social catastrophes and the phenomenon of their synchronization (the domino principle, trigger process, cascading catastrophes).

It is important to note that crisis processes in separate spheres, like systemic malfunctions in medicine, may provoke or strengthen, but not compensate for one another. Strengthening of the crisis in separate spheres of existence, or regions, may strengthen or provoke crisis processes in linked areas, resulting in the crisis becoming uncontrollable and then entering into the realm of catastrophe. Thus, the phenomenon of synchronization and generalization of local crisis processes that may result in the transition of local crises into a global systemic catastrophe is obvious.

The problem of the synergy and interaction of global sub-crises is characterized, too, by the instantaneous and global nature of digital communications. The lifting of spatial barriers objectively leads to the acceleration of social processes whose development outstrips their study and, as a consequence, does not give way to the possibility of purposeful governing and regulation.

The model of globalization proposed in the current work, presenting it as a dynamically unstable system of interacting global crises, creates a basis for understanding and forecasting social dynamics of the global crisis, removing the methodological limitations of economic determinism.

Moving past economic determinism demonstrates that globalization is not an objectively pre-arranged approach of humankind towards the only possible equilibrium. It also represents a global crisis, the establishment of a development which engenders major, often catastrophic and essentially unpredictable, social transformations connected to the establishment, development and death of a wide range of social agents in the course of a global conflict that is no longer limited by spatial borders.

Having taken in all the available world, global social system continues to develop, maintaining an unreducible complexity and creating within itself new social structures and agents, thus creating the definite possibility and bifurcation of the historical process.

Therefore, the main consequence of maintaining the inner complexity, multipolarity and multi-agency of the world-system is the indisputable ungovernability of the sociohistorical process, reaching its maximum during historical crises.

At the same time, the systemic difficulty and variability of globalization against the backdrop of an increasing lack of vitally important resources and increasing competition among the actors in global politics means a heightened risk of catastrophe for humankind in general, as well as for a wide range of social agents, with ethnic and national communities undoubtedly being the most important among them.

Chapter I conclusions

1. The ontologistic nature of globalization, as the leading modern phenomenon, is essentially impossible to reduce to economic phenomena given the establishment, development and major increase in the interconnectedness of the global economic, political, informational and social environment. The unity and interconnectedness of the contemporary world intensifies the interaction and antagonism of all social agents, taking on the form of a multi-dimensional, connected and therefore increasingly unstable system of interacting crises powering one another. This engenders a qualitatively new level of complexity and the dynamics of the establishment and development of modern social phenomena.

2. Globalization, as a qualitatively new form of interaction of social agents, leads to contradictions transitioning into new social forms, differing greatly from the forms typical of the industrialized era.

3. Well-known theories and approaches to globalization do not fully explore the reasons, scale and consequences of the ethnic fragmentation of the social community typical of contemporary times and of the crisis of the contemporary nation. This is related to the fact that the majority of contemporary theories and concepts of globalization are characterized by absolutization of convergent aspects of development, tendencies for global ethnocultural unification and the denial of social regression as an objective tendency, an attribute of globalization.

4. The existence of powerful tendencies and processes of a divergent nature is one of the chief attributes of globalization, being a process of the establishment of the global environment of interaction and antagonism of social agents. Growing social differentiation and the fragmentation of local social communities and humankind in general is an inalienable part of divergent processes, which are attributes of globalization engendering major sophistication and a more fragile balance of the historical process.

5. Ethnic and ethnoconfessional fragmentation of large and highly organized local communities – in particular, nations and humankind in general – is an inalienable part of divergent processes and systemic social regression, which are typical of globalization.

6. Intensifying interaction among social agents, globalization objectively engenders increasing antagonism of all social agents and communities, including ethnoses and nations, which inevitably takes on a multi-dimensional, connected and therefore increasingly unstable system of interacting crises strengthening one another.

7. One attribute of globalization is the global increase in the number of phenomena of social regression, a symptom and mechanism of which is ethnic fragmentation of the social community and, correspondingly, primitivization and archaization of system-building, social communities and institutions of the industrialized era, and increasing importance of the role of ethnoses and social institutions typical of them.

Chapter II. Notions of ethnos and nation as basic categories of sociophilosophical discourse

2.1. Genesis and evolution of notions “nation” and “ethnos” as categories of philosophical discourse and historical perspective

To analyse patterns of the appearance, establishment and development of such social communities as ethnos and nation that manifested themselves under the influence of globalization processes, one should look into the genesis and evolution of such concepts as “nation’ and “ethnos’ as categories of sociophilosophical discourse, which will allow us to differentiate given theoretical categories and the social phenomena behind them.

The semantics of the concepts in question are comparable in the context of various languages and cultures, where they may have not only different shades of meaning, but often very different meaning in general. It is important to differentiate the almost identical notions of, for example, “nation’ in English and “нация” (natsiya) in Russian.

The meaning of the word “nation’ and related notions differs in various European languages, in particular in French and in German, where the difference in meaning stems from the history of the formation of German and French political nations. While France was formed as a synthesis of historical provinces heterogeneous in terms of language and culture, Germany as a political agent was formed as a result of a political unification of German dukedoms, the population of which was disconnected politically but understood clearly the close links based on culture and history as well as on the German standard language that had by then been formed.

The English term “nation’ has its own cultural and historical particularities, which prove a pattern-like dependence of sociopolitical terminology on the concrete historical conditions under which it was formed.

So, “national’, often translated into Russian directly as “национальный” (natsionalny: национальный Mузей – national museum; национальная безопасность – national security; национальная сборная – national team; национальная история – national history), in fact corresponds better to the Russian terms “state’ and “peoples’, whereas национальный in Russian is widely used when speaking of ethnic minorities and ethnic territorial autonomies included in a federation.

Illustrative cases have been known where a notion borrowed from the English political vernacular via a direct translation, such as natsional’naya bezopasnost’ (national security), is then understood in the scientific and expert community of national-territorial regions of Russia as the security of the state-forming nation (in fact, the state-forming ethnos) of a certain region, but not as a security of the state in general, as it was in English language.

At the same time, the existence of cultural and linguistic particularities in the interpretation of the term “nation’ only highlights the fact that the term has a stable range of meanings, shared by various cultures, on which, according to the author, the objective existence of nations as social communities is based.

In a historical retrospective, the concept of “nation’ that has entered all European languages cam stemmed from the Latin nasci which meant “birth’ and was contrasted by Roman citizens with “barbaric’ communities based on family and tribal relations and common law.

Thus, the term “nation’ appeared and was used in Ancient Rome attached to a meaning rather close to the contemporary one, especially during the emperors’ Rome with its developed civil society and watered-down Roman ethnos.

After the Western Roman Empire fell, feudal states that appeared on its former territories took on, along with the Latin language as a universal European lingua franca, the dichotomous use of two words, natio and gens (the latter directly translated as “tribe’) to designate civilized (Christian) nations as opposed to barbarians (pagans).

It is especially important that the original natio-gens dichotomy, highlighting the difference between the developed civil society of the empire of Rome and the primitive social institutions of the barbaric periphery of Rome, finding itself at the stage of dissociation of the tribal lifestyle, echoes the modern nation-ethnos dichotomy.

This becomes all the more important in light of the fact that the Greek word ethnos, introduced into the wide scientific vernacular not so long ago, has, in reality, almost the same meaning as the Latin gens, denoting cultural and genetic commonality with undeveloped political institutions (at the pre-state development stage) or taken without consideration of the political component.

It is also important to consider the medieval period in order to differentiate clearly between the concepts of “ethnos’ and “nation’. Characteristically, tribes (to be more precise, tribal nobility, elites) of the former barbaric periphery of Rome that were part of the empire of the Carolingian dynasty which gave names to historical provinces and feudal dukedoms (the Burgundians, the Lotharingians, the Bretons, the Franks, the Bavarians, the Saxons and others), insisted on calling themselves “nations’ for a long time after the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Obviously, in calling their lands “nations’, feudals did not emphasize the ethnocultural particularities of their subjects. They were raising their political status within the Holy Roman Empire from provincial or even tribal to imperial. Thus, medieval political elites legitimized their political ambitions to subjugate and swallow neighbouring political entities.

Thus, in the early medieval period, the concept of a nation (natio) as a social unity was inseparable from the state and political component, basic institutions of which were directly inherited from Rome, but was at the same time linked to local political entities and historical provinces typical of the Middle Ages.

At the same time, the use of the natio concept was linked to feudal entities’ claims for territorial and political expansion, at the very least a new level of political sovereignty, which is exemplified by the history and titling of the hold-over of the empire of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, later the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Germanicae, Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Teutonicae) or, in German, Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation. This complicated political aggregation of feudal states that existed in 962—1806 and in its most prosperous period included Germany, Northern and Central Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and some of the French regions.

During the late medieval period, nations assumed new social meaning. Although chronicles and documents call certain peoples and the population of historical provinces “nations’, starting from the fifteenth century the term begins to assume yet another meaning, closer to its contemporary use: the concept of the “German nation’ appears, albeit without lower classes included in it.

At the same time, the concept of “nation’ keeps obtaining new meanings. In universities, fraternity-like student corporations were called nations.180 Ex-territorial social and political institutions typical of the Middle Ages, such as cathedrals, religious orders combining knighthood and spirituality (Maltese, in particular), guilds and other corporate organizations were also based on nations. Therefore, nations were territorial entities of corresponding social institutions, linked to certain kingdoms, dukedoms and large historical provinces.

Thus, the use of the concept of “nation’ in the Middle Ages shows that this term’s semantics, albeit different from today, were closely related to the developed and rationally organized political and social institutions inherited from the empire of Rome. These institutions were contrasted with more primitive social structures characteristic of the geopolitical periphery of the Christian world of the time.

Initially used to distinguish the civilized population of the geopolitical nucleus of the empire from tribes on the barbaric periphery with their different cultures, the concept of “nation’ was used during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to designate rationally organized social groups often corresponding to territorial division into political entities and historical provinces.

According to Ziegler, during the Middle Ages,

Natio is a union with a purpose, a local administratively subgroup, as a faction, a governmental unit, etc. This word does not have the full meaning as a representative political subdivision. It does not mean a predetermined form of the community, does not contain any indication toward the chief line of the social connection or division.181

According to Yury Granin,

…evolution of the meaning of the concept “nation’ in the Middle Ages corresponded to the evolution of the European society of the time, with its typical corporate (guild and estate) social structure and feudal fragmentation, which preserved local communities as they were and prevented large economic and cultural spaces from being created. That is why the next stage of the evolution of understanding of what “nation’ means was historically linked to the transition of the economic sphere to the capitalist (industrialized) method of producing material goods. In terms of politics, this phenomenon was linked to the process of the formation of centralized bourgeois-democratic states in Europe, which in the course of time united their territories’ multiple linguistic and ethnic groups into relatively homogenous communities, culturally and politically.182

In terms of collective consciousness, the objective process of the dissolution of feudalism and the inclusion of village communities and social lower classes into the economic, political and cultural life of the state manifested itself in a steady contrast between the concepts of “nation’ and “people’.

Initially, only nobility and aristocracy by birth, as well as clergy, claimed the right to be part of the “nation’, thus limiting “nation’ to social elites. The third estate’s claims to being part of the nation signified a watershed moment followed by the crisis and fall of the feudalism.

So, in the eighteenth century, the third estate, gaining strength, did not want its members – traders, financiers, lawyers and freelancers – to be part of “people’, believing it deserved to be part of the “nation’ alongside nobility and clergy. In connection with this, Kozing notes that as early as Abbé Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate? the bourgeoisie was unequivocally considered a “nation’ – that is, “included in elites and separated from the peasantry which remained a tax-paying estate that did not participate in the political life”.183

At the same time, one cannot help but notice that the evolution of the concept of the nation, from Rome with its developed civil institutions to the Middle Ages and then to our times, serves as an adequate reflection of the evolution of nation as a social group whose main feature is direct (albeit passive) involvement in the functioning of the social and political institutions of the state and the civil society.

In Rome, with its developed civil society, the whole population of the empire was in one way or another involved in the activities of the state institutions, and the concept of the nation included all citizens of Rome. At the same time, the barbaric periphery of the empire, which was at the stage of tribal unions and the dominance of tribal relations, was objectively closer to tribes (gens).

During the medieval period, the concept of the nation and the social class that considered itself part of it understandably narrowed down to the elite of the stratum, linked to the political and church power and state governing. Thus, medieval nations were relics of the late Roman Empire’s civil society, surrounded by the seas of natural economy and tribal archaisms. Nevertheless, the concept of the nation remained as the name for a system-building social group, defining the system of power (political) relations.