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

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СКАЧАТЬ and this leads to a new ‘Babel confusion of tongues,’ threatening to crash the Babel tower before it has been built. Strong interests are behind each understanding of globalization. The process of globalization is permeated with sharp contradictions.” A detailed list of key contradictions can be found in the work by Timofeyev.144

      The current stage of economic globalization, whose point of departure is Western victory in the Cold War, is characterized by the ubiquitous and clichéd commercialization and privatization of state monopolies (housing and utilities, power, transport, defence). Commercialization and privatization have affected other, initially non-commercial spheres and institutions of social life (education, science, medicine, culture). At the same time, the objective tendency of the capital to expand and the expansion of the effectiveness of money-for-goods exchanges even at this time, during the peak of corporate globalization and privatization of welfare state, is not absolute and is always within certain non-economic limits. These limits may be material (limited space or resources), political (state borders), technological (transport and communications), related to social stability (social stratification is simply a downside of capital concentration), security and long-term needs for modernization and the construction of infrastructure, which require long-term investments.

      Correspondingly, economic globalization, with its typical ultra-liberal economic model, should be seen not as an irreversible process, as neoliberal ideologues usually see it, but as a reversible and even cyclical shift of equilibrium of powers and interests between elites from various levels and other social groups.

      The objective nature of the labour theory of value (LTV) does not signify the need to cancel limitations of a non-economic type, as the limitations of the LTV allow human social communities to exist. The constant tendency does not cancel out contrasting objective and subjective powers. The objective truth of the law of universal gravitation influences evolution, but does not cancel the living organisms on Earth that exist in constant contradiction with gravitation.

      Liberalization and commercialization engender the degradation of extremely important – especially long-term – non-commercial spheres of social life (science, culture, education, marriage), that make up an essential part of human existence.

      It is quite likely that crises in the global economy and internal affairs of certain states that are prompted by liberalization, commercialization and deregulation will in the future logically lead to the movement in reverse – namely to deliberalization and regionalization, as well as to the reinvigoration of such social institutes as nation states and ethnicities.

      In any case, we see the example of Roosevelt’s New Deal that came to replace the decade of post-war liberalism of the twentieth century. Many other examples of successful deliberalization and deprivatization exist, above all the creation of the European model of the welfare state145 and the construction of a whole range of viable models of socialism and compromise social models based on a number of civilizations and cultures.

      The economy has seen global changes linked to the appearance and growth of transnational corporations and globalized banking and financial structures.

      Manufacturing has long since ceased to be merely national. It is becoming more and more transnational: only some of the work on a certain product is done in any given country, while the item has to go through a long process from raw material to completeness through manufacturing cycles in many countries. Transnational corporations deal with this type of manufacturing, but they do not focus on one activity or one product.

      In the 1990s, the joint sales of 500 largest global transnational corporations were responsible for over a quarter of the world’s GDP, over one-third of global exports of the manufacturing industry, three-quarters of the trade in goods, and four-fifths of the trade in technologies. At the same time, about 40 per cent of global trade happened within transnational corporations.146

      However, it follows from these figures that only about 30 per cent of the economy is globalized, considering national markets, including several exclusively local but very important economy sectors, such as housing, utilities and infrastructure. At the same time, only the high-technology sector of the economy, which is related to basic sustenance, has been globalized alongside finance and its specifics.

      1991 may be considered the watershed moment of the update of another component of globalization – the global crisis of resources and demographics, which was officially declared a global threat by the experts of the Club of Rome. The reports of this elite group of experts ordered by the UN147 were created in correlation with representatives and structures of the global elite. Therefore, the reports of the Club of Rome and its members are not exactly independent research, but rather the position of global elites in relation to the problem of a global crisis of resources and demographics camouflaged as research and illustrated by certain scientific computations. The policy of the “nucleus’ states and international political and financial institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) is based thereon.

      The leading cause of the crisis of resources and demographics was the “baby boom’ in non-industrialized countries on the global periphery (South, “third world’ countries), coupled with the growing depletion and, by consequence, the growing prices of natural resources. These days, the baby boom in countries on the global economic periphery has led to a migration tsunami, irreversibly destroying the ethnocultural integrity of European nations and Russia.

      On the cusp of the 1990s, the growth of the population of the “third world’ exhausted the results of the green revolution – the technological modernization of the agricultural sphere of the third world, initiated by industrialized countries and meant as a means of social rehabilitation of former colonies. The end to the growth of productivity against the backdrop of the growth of population and conversion of arable lands into space used for other purposes resulted in lower per capita grain production as an objective indicator of the lower food security and life standard in general.148

      The stabilization of the fast pace of economic growth typical of the first stage of the industrialization led to the population growing faster than the GDP, which stamped out newly industrialized countries’ hopes for a new consumption level characteristic of the countries in the old industrialized and financial nucleus of the global system.149

      As a result, the contradiction between the limited resources and the unlimited growth of population in countries with a traditional model of demographic growth left the confines of the third world and took on a new quality, becoming a global problem. At the same time, the crisis of resources and demographics is not only manifested as a growing lack of balance between the global population and world’s resources, paving the way for a global catastrophe, even based on an average model from the Club of Rome. The inconsistency of the demographic development, which put demographic and migration pressure on the countries at the nucleus, as well as on the countries of the industrialized periphery (for example, Russia) is no less dangerous.

      How many billion men can our planet feed if the population of the Earth may reach eight billion by as early as 2020? This issue is becoming a matter of life and death for billions, rather than millions, of the inhabitants of the world’s periphery and half-periphery, who do not “fit in” with the competing projects of a post-crisis lifestyle.

      At the end of the 1960s, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence in Kennedy’s administration, who later СКАЧАТЬ