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

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СКАЧАТЬ the contemporary historical process, are almost exclusively formed by economic interests and relations. Nations and national (local) and global elites are usually considered such historically important groups. As for ethnos and ethnicity, actual ethnicity and ethnic identity are being accepted almost exclusively as belonging to isolated marginal ethnoses, adhering to a traditional lifestyle.

      At the same time, the ethnic identity of members of political nations is either completely denied or admitted only as part of a sociohistorical phantom, a historical relic. It is significant that constructivism, as one of the leading movements of the theory of sociogenesis, denies the inseparable evolutionary character of cultural continuity, considering the contemporary flare-up of ethnic consciousness as a result of purposeful political propaganda in the interests of marginalized elites. Admitting, albeit under pressure, the consistent maintenance of ethnicism and ethnic identity beyond archaic communities, constructivism denies the existence of the modern ethnos as a real social community.163

      Globalization is considered to lead to crisis and the extinction of civil nations and nation states, which lose their economic essence by transforming relatively closed-off national economies into open social and economic systems. Based on that, one may come to seemingly logical conclusions about the inevitability and global character of convergent development engendering a certain global “suprasociety’ in which national, cultural and religious differences are being relegated to marginalized subcultures and will, in the foreseeable future, be completely eroded.

      Correspondingly, within this approach, state nations, great powers and their blocs – and, since the second half of the twentieth century, transnational corporations – have been considered as actors in the global process. Globalization of national media markets and then educational systems, with global digital space as the technical basis, is the most important tool of ethnocultural convergence.

      Therefore, from the point of view of economic determinism, the globalization of markets and the flows of goods, money, information and migration lead to the convergence and unification of humankind, the erosion of cultural and civilizational borders, and the formation of a new global identity without any alternative as a product of a global melting pot.

      However, processes of real globalization, contrary to the logic of economic determinism, suddenly moved toward ethnic, civilizational and confessional divergence.

      In this context, we may see the increasing contradiction of economic determinism as a dominant theoretical approach and the reality of globalization.

      In 1991, following the triumphant actualization of the Western scenario of the convergence of two global systems, the actual process of globalization – despite the destruction of economic and political borders forming local social communities – moved towards ethnic and confessional divergence. That is why none of the theories of ethno- or national genesis that appeared in the twentieth century can sufficiently explain the post-industrial increase in ethnic and religious feelings.

      The long foretold crisis of civil nations became not the synthesis of global supranational and supra-ethnic unity, but the fragmentation of post-industrial nations into ethnic and confessional groups.

      Despite expectations, melting pots on the regional and global local level did not lead to the creation of a homogenous society with a common identity.

      An example of an unexpected crash of the melting pot theory in the course of globalization is the United States itself, where the term “melting pot’ appeared as an idea of a polyethnic, multicultural and multiconfessional immigrant nation. Strictly speaking, the US melting pot has not been functional since the migration wave of the end of the nineteenth century. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the US society has been made up of a range of ethnic communities (Italian, Irish, Chinese, African-American) steadily maintaining their identity in an urban social environment.

      Ethnocultural fragmentation of US society not only persists but is increasing, despite the higher mobility of the workforce than in Europe. Notably, at the end of the 1960s, the United States was forced to abandon the melting pot model and turn to multiculturalism under the pressure of several ethnocultural minorities, especially African-Americans.

      According to Lozansky164, author of the monograph “Ethnoses and lobbyism in the United States’, ethnic minorities and diasporas in the United States are becoming more and more separated, creating within the bodies of power all the more powerful lobbies compared to the corporate lobby (of transnational corporations), and even a party system. At the same time, ethnic lobbies in the United States purposefully lobby the interests of the states from which they came: diasporas within themselves not only turn into diasporas for themselves, but are becoming the tools for ethnic metropolises to influence states admitting migrants.

      Orientation of the United States toward the formation not of a single alloy in the ‘furnace’ of many nationalities, but toward forming of a motley multi-faceted multiculturalism led to logic results, a strengthening of positions of ethnic minorities.165

      To prove his theory, Lozansky emphasizes that other US authors are worried about the threat of ethno-confessional fragmentation of the American nation, up to the possibility of Balkanization.

      In particular, Huntington remarks on the increasing influence of civilizations in global politics and the stability of the links between immigrants and their countries of origin, believing that the basis for unity in the United States and the USSR is ideology, not a single national culture.166 This points to the fact that the role of ethnic cultures and ethnic communities remains rather important. State ideology plays a vital part in the integration of society in this case.

      The United States is a leading power hub in the contemporary world order and may be seen as an accurate enough model of the global post-industrialized society. Hence it follows that the increasing role of ethnicity seen everywhere in the world, the ethnicization of politics and the conversion of diasporas into agents of local and global politics, is not a chance paradox but one of the key attributive characteristics of globalization.

      Despite the expectations of the end of the twentieth century, the globalization of the economy with its convergent focus engenders processes of ethnocultural divergence. This partly reflects the ubiquitous strengthening of competition for vitally important resources, objectively caused by the deepening of the global crisis of resources and demographics, but cannot be reduced to economic competition.

      The erosion of borders of nation states and national economies has brought to life the process of the reconstruction and regeneration of ethnicities, including the process of reinvigoration of large state-forming ethnoses of the Old World, buried by the theoreticians of the twentieth century.

      The ethnicization of collective consciousness and the politics of the states of Eastern Europe and the former USSR may be seen from the viewpoint of social constructivism, understanding the reinvigoration of ethnicity as a purposeful reconstruction of ethnos in the interests of local elites, creating an ideological base for their nation state project.

      The widely discussed ethnocultural crisis in Germany, provoked by the increasing lack of loyalty of diasporas to the host society, is an example of the recuperation and regeneration of state-forming ethnos from the bottom up, happening largely in contradiction to the interests of German political elites, avoiding accusations of German nationalism and ethnicism.

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