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

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      • The great scope of globalization, its systemic nature, encompassing all spheres of social life.

      • The crisis of resources and demographics, as a result of humankind reaching the physically and ecologically determined limits of economic and demographic growth.

      • The major acceleration of social processes, engendering the problem of lack of control and therefore instability of development.

      • The establishment of global digital space as a qualitatively new social reality beyond space, whose significance is increasingly closer to the role of physical space and objective brick-and-mortar reality.

      • The crisis of the nation state. The loss of importance of citizen nations and state institutions of the previous industrial era.

      Some other special attributes of globalization, which are not clearly formulated and substantiated by other authors, should be listed:

      • The dominance of processes of divergence and differentiation linked to the disintegration, fragmentation and differentiation of local social communities. Forced adaptation of social communities and structures to a new, obstacle-free and transparent world, which is richer in competition and less stable, compels them to strengthen their functions serving to bar and protect.

      • The invigoration of ethnic and religious communities and corresponding forms of self-identification and collective consciousness as the most significant manifestation of processes of social divergence, differentiation, fragmentation and competition.

      • The multi-agent nature of globalization – namely, not only existence, but dominance of significant subjective factors reflecting extremely important interests of conflicting social agents, increasingly competing for global resources in all spheres and dimensions. Global unity of the world manifests itself in the global conflict of a growing number of social agents which are forced to become involved in the global social and economic environment. Escalation of the increasingly multi-agent and multi-faceted conflict is becoming the essence and content of the global unity of humankind: global conflict unites enemies in a single system much faster and tighter than global peace.

      • The multi-crisis character of globalization as a system of crises and catastrophes influencing and strengthening one another, born out of the uncontrollable growth of global unity rather than resource-based growth limitations.

      • The social backslide assuming a systemic, global character. The exhaustion of resources and reserves of economic, technological and social progress typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries objectively leads to social backslide. The latter manifests itself not only in several countries and regions being relegated to the periphery of global development, but rather in the desocialization of enormous masses of people, alienated and removed from material production, social development and social elevators.

      Let us look at certain attributes of globalization in more detail.

      Undoubtedly, the most important and most obvious characteristic or attribute of globalization is the major decline of spatial, political and other obstacles that no so long ago separated local social communities – the appearance of global social space, which does not mean the convergence of the world’s population into a united culturally averaged community,

      The complexity of globalization as an object of scientific research lies not only in its interdisciplinary nature, but also in its correspondingly systemic nature, the impossibility of reducing the phenomenon to the sum of its parts and of separating scientific disciplines within the terms which are normally used to define globalization.

      In this manner, the all-encompassing nature of globalization – its systemic character, including all spheres of social life – is another attribute.

      The global crisis of resources and demographics, as the result of humankind reaching material and ecological limitations of the growth of economy and population, is a logical step towards global crisis.

      Objective limits of global natural resources and the establishment of a vertical structure of the world-system, which can be divided into the nucleus and periphery spatially and socially (revolt of elites, erosion and desocialization of middle class), lead to an increasingly non-equal development in all spheres of life, on both the global and the local level. Increasing inequality, including social differentiation, is both the cause and the effect of growing competition for all types of resources.

      The global economic system consists of essentially non-equal interacting components, the nucleus and the periphery. The nucleus of the global economic system (developed capitalist countries) is the zone that receives the bulk of the profit during economic exchange, while the periphery is the zone that loses the bulk of the profit. These components were shaped definitively in the twentieth century.

      Twenty per cent of the world’s population – that is, the inhabitants of the nucleus or “golden billion” – saw their per capita income in real terms grow approximately 50 times during the last two centuries. At the same time, 80 per cent of the world’s population saw a growth three to five times at best, while in some cases it remained basically on a medieval level or became even lower than it was before the establishment of a global economic system.158

      Apart from the nucleus and the periphery, a third zone is often marked out in a system, a so-called “half-periphery’, the most flexible element. Its existence is a constant of a kind, but any one state finding itself in it is a variable, conditioned on sharp and continuing competition.

      Admittedly, competition for a place in the vertical structure is being led within the nucleus (the fight between developed countries for hegemony) as well as among the states on the periphery (the fight to enter the half-periphery with the hope of entering, in time, the nucleus of the global economic system). However, the latter have little hope in this fight as the nucleus has expanded its borders as much as it could as a result of possible expansion of the fight for monopoly.

      Nevertheless, a new type of inclusion of the social periphery of the global system in the nucleus is accelerating – migrational expansion (colonization) of the global periphery into “golden billion” states, transforming the old contradiction between nucleus and periphery into qualitatively new forms.

      The global economic system was built on the laws of monopoly, and the vicious fight taking place in the nucleus was a competitive fight not so much for equal access, but mostly for monopoly over global markets – i.e. for redistribution and reshaping of the spheres of exclusive influence.

      Originally, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this manifested itself in the fight for control over sea routes and the most profitable littoral trade hubs in the countries of the East and the New World, through which an intense exchange of trade with Europe was being conducted. Then, starting from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when Europe experienced an industrial revolution, a vicious fight began for the promotion of cheap European goods in Eastern markets. Finally, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the nucleus countries led the fight for a final remaking of the world order, as it concerned not only markets for manufactured goods but also objects of the export of capital – that is, investment targets.

      The state, with its institutions, remains the most important tool in the fight for global dominance. The Western European nation state, since the beginning of the modern era (i.e. the beginning of the functioning of the global economic system) and the expression of interest СКАЧАТЬ