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

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      At the beginning of the 1970s, a secret directive on the policy on global population elaborated by a similarly famous figure, Henry Kissinger, was adopted by the United States National Security Council, wherein the policy on “containing’ the growth of the global population was equal in importance to the defence programmes in terms of US national security.

      Similar reports on the inevitability of the deficit of resources and ecological crisis were received by other expert groups, which is not surprising: the problem of the finite nature of the global mineral and biological resources was up in the air: in particular, it was clearly formulated within Vernadsky’s theory of geospheres. The problem of the limits of growth was posed and solved in the USSR largely independently from the West and based on own scientific potential.

      In particular, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky suggested to academic Moiseyev150, a member of the Computation Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the creation of a mathematical model allowing estimation of how many billion men may fit into natural ecological cycles of the Earth at the current level of technologies. Essentially, the wording of the task and its solution were comparable to the results obtained by experts of the Club of Rome.

      Later, the problem of objective limits of the world’s population, based on some or other boundary conditions and limits, was posed more than once and the scientific community is focused on this now. In particular, the model of the Earth’s population growth made by the scientist Kapitsa151 and research by Kondratyev152 received widespread attention.

      First theoretical estimates of the maximum Earth population date back to the times of van Leeuwenhoek (1679), but most were published in the twentieth century, when humankind neared objective limits of economic and demographic growth. The discrepancy between various estimates is from one billion to a thousand billion people, although the most realistic estimates of contemporary researchers are between two billion and 20 billion people.

      Most of these estimates are based on mathematical models extrapolating the population growth curve based on regional dynamics of population density, forecasts of the accessibility of water and land, estimates of fertility of arable lands, and other ecological and economic indices.

      A well-known model from US demographist Cohen from Rockefeller University forecast a change in population based on the difference between the actual and the largest possible population density, multiplied by a certain constant known as a Malthusian coefficient. At the same time, the Earth’s human-carrying capacity is a function of a range of parameters of various quality, including subjective ones such as investment and economic climate defining the economic possibility of the introduction of necessary technologies.153

      Therefore the population may invest resources in sustainable development or, on the contrary, exhaust the critically important resources that future generations need, which will influence the Earth’s human-carrying capacity in the future as well as in the present. It is typical that liberalization of the economy, orienting businesses towards receiving profit in the present (efficiency as profitability), is forcing capital to borrow from the future.

      In this context, the global crisis of resources and demographics is not made up by neo-Malthusians but is an objective component of the global systemic crisis whose urgency is proved not only by scientific extrapolations, but by actual economic tendencies, reflecting the growing deficit of natural resources as well as the growth of over-population.

      Moreover, it is the crisis of resources and demographics that is the primary reason for crises and catastrophes in the economy. The foremost importance of the physical nature of economy, putting material limits on market reality, was pointed out by such supporters of a physical approach to economy as LaRouche154 and Kuznetsov.155 The inevitable growth of an objective component of global systemic crisis inexorably engenders its subjective manifestations such as altercations between the agents in the global process involved in the fight for limited resources, led not so much by the desire for profit and power but by the need for self-preservation.

      The objective problem of the physical deficit of resources and population density leads to a subjective process of remaking economic and social expenditures and risks of global crisis, taking on the form of growing competition and antagonism between globalization agents.

      Not only is limited access to critically important resources threatening, but the process of fighting for their redistribution is equally so.

      Evidently, with the need to spread out survival quotas when they are in obvious deficit (the Earth’s population at stable development is estimated to be between one and five or six billion people), the dialogue of civilizations at best turns into a cold war of civilizations and other agents of globalization widely using all available forms of confrontation.156

      One should note the appearance of qualitatively new forms of fighting for resources and living space, such as migrational expansion of the periphery, using the inner social vulnerabilities of the nucleus countries and the most liberal ideology, ignoring the issues of ethnicities and identity but incapable of “cancelling’ their objective existence.

      As a result, globalization, as a completely new form of interaction of social agents, leads to the transformation of contradictions into new social forms, largely different from those of the age of industrialization.

      1.2. Attributes of globalization

      Economic determinism, dominant in globalistics, does not take into consideration the social being of historical development, which has social groups and social structures rather than economic objects and individuals as its agents.

      Meanwhile, socio-collective processes and changes, rather than macroeconomic indices, were and will be the stimulus, the result and the measure of historical processes. At the same time, macroeconomic parameters are important indices of social changes, albeit far from the only ones.

      Well-known lists of global problems and global threats are fixating on economy and population growth limitations due to a lack of natural resources, but do not include global social problems.

      Within the paradigm of the economy-based school of thought, which reduces globalization to economy and foreign policy, social mechanisms of globalization – including threats and challenges of a social nature – are not being studied or even recognized as they deserve to be, seen rather as the legacy of industrialism or as transient “growth illnesses’, a historical inevitability, the conscious change of which is useless.

      As a result of the underappreciation of social forms of development with their typical complexity and multifacetedness, existing lists of global problems and global threats focus mainly on limitations on the growth of economy and population based on a lack of natural resources, excluding global social problems of a non-economic nature, in particular the ethnocultural fragmentation of large system-building communities.

      To look in more detail at globalization as a qualitatively new sociohistorical reality, several major characteristics, attributes of globalization, should be singled out.

      Some characteristics of globalization are widely known:СКАЧАТЬ