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