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

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.

Therefore, the neoliberal concept of globalization that has been taken up by the elites and which presents a condensed expression of their interests, takes on the character of an objective historical factor. Chubais and Popov are typical and influential representatives of neoliberal philosophy and ideology that are also part of the Russian elite.

On the whole, neoliberalism is interesting not so much as a theoretical model of a descriptive type, but rather as a prescriptive theory, which, put into practice in economic policies, is a typical manifestation of globalization.

In particular, neoliberalism, when thought of as a phenomenon of collective consciousness, can be considered a direct result of local elites separating themselves from local communities, a vertical fragmentation and a crisis of post-industrialism nations, as will be discussed below.

Considerable scientific results have been achieved within the socio-ecological approach that looks at globalization from the point of view of a global ecological, resource and demographic crisis. It should be noted that the socio-ecological approach has, since the very beginning, been controlled by representatives of global elites in the face of the Club of Rome and further international organizations and scientific communities.

By manipulating global threats, supporters of the concepts of sustainable development and zero growth motivate states and corresponding social communities to step back from choosing their own developmental path. They promote the creation of supranational institutions of global political power that member states cannot control or see through, using objective necessity to justify the lowering of the life standard and social guarantees for most of the world’s population, even the “inevitable’ decrease in the Earth’s population.

However, the term “sustainable development’ allows us to see clearly the interests of global financial elites behind it, lobbying for the maintenance of and increase in inequality of the global nucleus and the global periphery, to solve global contradictions at the expense of economic and political outsiders of the global community. Notably, Mikhail Gorbachev became a well-known supporter and promoter of global sustainable development, publishing several compilatory works under his name.¹³¹

Nevertheless, Russia’s groundwork in basic natural science could not but result in scientific achievements, important not only in a practical sense but in terms of general philosophy. The most notable in this regard is concept of physical economy and a number of works on globalistics and system analysis of global development by some members of the Russian science community. Geophysicist and climatologist Kondratyev and his associates¹³² should be noted among the latest, as well as the works by Fedotov¹³³ and Subetto,¹³⁴ developing the noospheric approach.

The crisis of the formational approach resulted in a wave of interest in the civilizational approach. The first post-revolutionary reprint of Danilevsky’s¹³⁵ Russia and Europe became a landmark moment for the rehabilitation of the civilizational approach.

The publication of the works of Leo Gumilev, which may not have solved but at least presented clearly the problem of ethnogenesis and the correlation between ethnographic and nation state in the historical process, became an important source of renewed interest in civilizational issues and the overcoming of economic determinism.

However, interest in the civilizational approach sprang mainly from the reality of globalization, namely the crisis of the classic nation state of the industrial epoch and a flare-up of crisis processes of an ethnocultural kind – above all, processes of ethnic and religious fragmentation of civil nations and invigoration of ethnicism, ethno-separatism and clericalism that filled the institutional vacuum born from the crisis of social institutions in the industrial epoch.

The split of the USSR and a number of eastern European states (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) into ethnic enclaves that gained the status of sovereign states entailed the need for a theoretical and ideological basis for corresponding projects of state construction and attempts to create them.

From the point of view of this study, it is of the utmost importance that scientific work on ethno-political issues is carried out, among others, by corresponding local elites that aspire to political separation or a special status within large states (ethnic communities within Russia, for example). The dissertation by Zaripov¹³⁶ is a typical work illustrating this. Stating that “despite expectations of scientists and politicians, ethnicity not only failed to disappear, but showed a tendency for the expansion on a group level. Ethnic identity, ethnic feelings, ethnic solidarity stopped fitting into contemporary globalist tendencies that led to the unification of peoples”, Zaripov presents an idea of strengthening the ethno-confessional regionalization of Russia.

It should be noted that direct or implicit call to raise the status of titular ethnic groups is typical of the many sociological works on ethno-political issues that are being researched in Russia and in new independent states in the territory of the former USSR.

Obviously, the goal to justify raising the status of ethnic autonomies is linked to certain support on the part of regional ethnic elites trying to transform ethnic communities into political ones through purposeful artificial construction of the idea of a nation state (ideology) and a corresponding collective consciousness based on the ethnic culture.

On the theoretical level, the goal to assign political status to ethnic autonomies is based partly on post-modern concepts of constructivism and instrumentalism, partly on the ideas on multi-stage transformation of the ethnicity into a nation.

The crisis of the formational approach as a form of economic determinism caused reasonable interest in the civilizational approach which focuses on sociocultural issues.

Yakovets¹³⁷ should be singled out among Russian researchers studying globalization through the civilizational approach.

Yakovets’ “Globalization and interaction of civilizations” proposes several key concepts of the contemporary civilizational approach to globalization:

1. The history of humankind is periodic change in global civilizations that assumes the form of changing global historical cycles.

2. Each global civilization can be presented as a five-step pyramid, with a demographical substrate with its biosocial needs and manifestations as a foundation. The pyramid top comprises spiritual and cultural phenomena, including culture, science, education, ideology, ethics and religion. Social transformation begins at the base and gradually transforms all the floors of the pyramid, which leads to the change of civilizations.

3. The intensity of intercivilizational interactions is increasing with each historical cycle, with humankind gradually becoming a united social system as a result.

4. The contemporary period is the transition from an industrialized to a post-industrialized global civilization.

5. Processes of globalization are a typical attributive characteristic of the establishment of a contemporary post-industrialized global civilization.

6. The main contradiction of a neoliberal-technocratic model of globalization is the fact that it is not in the interests of humankind, but in the interests of the largest transnational corporations.

According to Yakovets, the process of sociocultural unification, the convergence of local communities, is a threat because it lowers the viability and potential for the development of humankind. The formation of civilizations of the “fourth generation” is a response to this challenge. Yakovets discussed his concept built on the idea of the historically evolving structure of local civilizations, which includes the consequential change of civilizational leadership, in several works.¹³⁸,¹³⁹

At the same time. Yakovets believes that at the moment the sociocultural unification of local civilizations is generally prevalent. Therefore convergence of the local civilizations is moving toward the global one – that is to say, it de facto assumes the neoliberal model of global convergence (“Westernization’, according to Zinovyev) as a basis, without seeing or suggesting either alternative development models or agents interested in the alternative development.

Meanwhile, global unification is impossible, not least because peripheral local civilizations are fighting the current dominant Western civilization. Qualitatively new types of social life, social norms and rules, alternative values and models of social life will appear in the course of this fight.

Having swallowed the whole world, the global civilization will inevitably engender new processes of the formation of structures and groups.

However, Yakovets’ rejection of the formational approach leads to the rejection of its main achievement – the understanding of class and group interests as the most important powers behind the sociohistorical development. It also leads to rejection of the achievements and possibilities of sociological structuralism, which sees society as a system of objectively existing social groups and structures which include, in particular, class and ethnocultural communities.

Azroyantz¹⁴⁰ presents his unique model of globalization as a concept of historical cycles, singling out three most important cycles in the evolution of the humankind: the establishment of man; the establishment and development of social community; and, ultimately, the establishment of the global social mega-community as the most advanced moral and spiritual form of human existence.

Development cycles are linked by transition periods during which situations occur where the historical choice of the next road to take must be made. These are seen as the bifurcation points, the arborization of the trajectory of historical development. Each cycle is looked upon as an evolutionary niche, while the transition during which a possible path of development for local or global social community is chosen is seen as a choice and the mastering of a new niche. At the same time, according to Azroyantz, the possibility of fatality cannot be ruled out for local civilizations and for humankind in general in the current global crisis as one of the variants of the development of the situation.

Azroyantz justifiably believes that humankind is experiencing a civilizational crisis that corresponds to the transition from the second cycle – i.e. the establishment of society – to the third one, the establishment of the social megacommunity.

In view of this, according to Azroyantz, the contemporary liberal model of globalization (globalization of scientific and technological progress and of financial capital) precludes moving onto a new level of development, which is why the creation of a qualitatively new “humane’ model of global development is required.