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

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СКАЧАТЬ a manifestation of a general tendency toward globalization.

      Erosion of the economic and political borders of nation states, while not overcoming the contradictions of the global crisis of resources and demographics, transforms the conflict, transferring the contradictions from the interstate level to the level of social groups including ethnic communities.

      As a result, the link of ethnic and national self-identification to the economic model,167,168 quite fitting to the reality of the twentieth century, is becoming increasingly contradictory to the reality of globalization. As a result, nation and ethnos, seen as relics of bourgeois and even pre-state eras, are exerting more and more influence over the collective consciousness and global politics. The expected corporate globalization in reality turned out to be the globalization of ethnic diasporas and ethnoses.

      Therefore, the reality shows that as globalization and the crisis of nation states strengthen, ethnocultural differences are not smoothed over: the contemporary ethnos does not assimilate or integrate into a global multicultural environment, but steadily maintains its identity.

      At a time when social institutions of the nation state are living through a deep crisis, ethnos and ethnic and religious self-identification are experiencing a period of revival and are in active demand among the masses.

      The forced realization of the “ethnic renaissance’ of marginalized ethnoses and emigrant communities does not preclude the scientific community from ignoring the main problem of the current theory of ethno and national genesis, the problem of the existence of large state-forming ethnoses as the most large-scale social communities, making up the basis of the social community, largely independent from state institutions.

      Driving forces and social mechanisms of the ethnocultural fragmentation of the contemporary society and their connection to globalization on the one hand and to the crisis of the contemporary post-industrialized state on the other, have not been sufficiently studied either.

      It would be logical to suppose that the objective driving force behind sociogenesis processes, transformation and the competition of social communities during globalization is their ability to satisfy the most important needs and interests of their members, ensuring that members of the communities have additional opportunities and advantages in a more competitive and conflict-ridden global environment, devoid of protective spatial and political barriers.

      The cause of the divergent fragmentation of contemporary nations into ethnocultural parts was the narrowing of the state’s social functions, born out of the globalization of local economies The state of the industrialized era has in a relatively short period abandoned a whole range of social guarantees and functions, vitally important to citizens and making up the institutionalized basis of the social state in the middle and the end of the twentieth century. The post-industrialized state is increasingly losing the functions of largest employer, social guarantor and social regulator, including the role of regulator of ethnoconfessional relations and migration processes.

      No less important is the state’s steady abandonment of its most important function as basic social elevator, carrying out principles of equality and ensuring vertical social mobility, uniting participants with the help of a united social future, the most important function for sociogenesis.

      While classic European nations and national elites of the industrialized era were formed by state systems of universal education, the post-industrialized privatization, commercialization and globalization of education means not only a lowering of the previously attained educational level but also of the social attractiveness of the nation state and its institutions, rendering them less and less capable of creating a social future for members participating in the nation as a social community.

      The “revolt of the elites’ plays an important role in the ethnocultural fragmentation of contemporary civil nations, signifying the increasingly open abandonment by former national elites of key social responsibilities of earlier compatriots that created the basis of the welfare state and civil society in the second half of the twentieth century. Obviously, the abandonment by the state of system-building social functions leads to the devaluation of the nation as the most important social community for the population, ensuring the individual and group interests of its citizens.169

      Elites’ abandonment of social cooperation and support within the nation forces an individual to search for alternatives to a nation – social communities – increasing competitive ability and security and allowing him or her to adapt to a new structure of society, changing his or her identity.170

      Sociological research has shown that the choice of a new basic identity is predetermined by the individual possessing an alternative ethnic identity which takes the lead under the new conditions. As the system of social relations of a citizen with the state and its institutions are deconstructed, the citizen almost inevitably chooses an alternative ethnic identity, seeing him- or herself as a member of an ethnos first of all. Evidently, ethnic affiliation predetermines the choice of religion in many cases.

      As a result, globalization, while dismantling the social institutions forming nation and national identity, engenders the ethnocultural fragmentation of polyethnic nations into ethnoses, which under certain circumstances become politicized, giving way to hidden and obvious ethno-confessional contradictions and conflicts.

      Therefore, the understanding of globalization as ethnocultural unification and convergence born out of economic determinism is not proved by the social reality. The crisis of the civil nation as a system-building social community in the industrialized era in the course of globalization stimulates processes of divergence and fragmentation of nations, including the reinvigoration of ethnicity, the consolidation of global ethnic diasporas and religious confessions as agents of global politics.

      Transnational corporate elites, linked to global economic and global finances – and, as large and significant social groups on a global scale, possessing their own identity – have been formed in the course of globalization. Nevertheless, social roles and statuses proper to such groups, which would have significance for most individuals, have not been formed.

      Therefore, instead of convergent development leading to a synthesis of a united humankind, one may see largely forced contact between local communities and groups, caused by the essential characteristics of globalization and leading to a battle for resources and increasingly non-spatial separation of competing social communities. Having created a united global field for competition for limited resources, globalization has strengthened processes of stratification, separation and group cooperation – that is, the processes of social divergence.171

      Globalization, while bringing major change to the forms of social interaction, not only transforms and destroys previous civilizational, cultural, ethnic, national, political, state and other forms of civil life and corresponding civil communities, but also, out of necessity, engenders a growing diversity of social agents and manifestations of their appearance and development. First of all, those forms which, during the preceding historical development, have achieved a sufficiently independent local existence undergo a transformation.

      Divergent processes – that is, the creation of new, more or less unstable social communities and other phenomena of a collective nature as a result of the transformation and fragmentation of previous agents and forms of social life – are inevitable in the course of this transformation. This flow of transformation, СКАЧАТЬ