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

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СКАЧАТЬ new phenomenon has not been studied and has not yet been fully realized. Despite the forecasts, the global system has not became a global state with its usual attributes. Despite declarations, this system does not regulate or freeze conflicts or contradictions, local or global. Global unity of connections has not solved contradictions and has not led to the convergence of parts into a harmonious noospheric whole. Moreover, we may see a noticeable lowering of the stability of development on the level of elements and on the level of the whole.

      The unity of the world born out of globalization has become not only a sociocultural synthesis for all humankind but a global conflict whose reason is the increase in global interconnectedness. The world united as the field of an all-encompassing global battle in which the fate of all actors in the global fight is decided, of peoples, states, social communities. At the same time, the important consequence of globalization is the impossibility of avoiding conflict because of its all-encompassing character. From this point of view, a global systemic crisis is similar to the arena of the Roman circus, which was impossible to escape.

      Characteristically, just like in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, researchers focus on sub-crises in separate spheres and their particular aspects and, as a result, considerably underestimate the catastrophic nature, irreversibility and lack of control of globalization.

      Many theoretical researchers reduce the global systemic crisis to its economic, political, resource, demographic or ecological components; sociologists study the crises of separate social institutions without taking into consideration the connections between crisis processes.

      The illusion of predetermination, the pre-arrangement of the historical development typical of major religious systems and of national and civilizational projects whose ideologies are detailed self-fulfilling prophecies, stands in the way of the realization of the threats of the global crisis.

      The certainty of political and religious leaders and the masses in the fact that all historical development trajectories inevitably lead society to a pre-determined, ideologized social ideal – the open society, the heavenly kingdom on Earth, the global caliphate, communism or noosphere – stands in the way of understanding the essential unpredictability, instability, catastrophic and regressive character of the ongoing global process, which does not, in principle, fit into the limits set by the theories and ideologies of the twentieth century.

      Compared to the twentieth century, the attainability of social ideals has become much lower under conditions of global openness coupled with the lack of resources.

      Globalization turned out to be a transition from an era of progress that has exhausted its development potential to a regressive descending era of development whose characteristics include complexity, catastrophic nature, instability, liability for conflict and competitiveness.

      The transition to regressive development does not mean simplification and primitivization of the social reality, even in cases of the death or disappearance of significant social structures and agents.

      The appearance of new connections and degrees of freedom under the conditions of sharpening of wide range of divergent processes, during which new social agents and structures appear.

      The all-encompassing social dissolution, with enormous resources previously collected by humankind, inevitably gives way to a new social complexity, a wide range of dissipative structures engendered by the openness and off-balance nature of social systems.

      At the same time, processes of social regression often imitate progressive development (reforms, modernization) or fit into system-building social institutions, state ones mostly. From this point of view, the growth of organized crime and corruption and their integration into power institutes is a typical indicator of the transition of humankind into a phase of protracted regression.

      The strengthening and collecting of contradictions, objectively coming from the lack of vitally important resources, gives objective cause to the new differentiation, fragmentation and polarization, to the appearance of qualitatively new non-spatial borders among conflicting social agents, creating cause for new social synthesis, the birth of new agents of the global development. So, processes of unification, typical of globalization, engender compensating counteraction on a local level, taking on various forms of ethnic and regional separatism, regional fundamentalism and other forms of social fragmentation and group antagonism.175

      But the dominant aspect of globalization is deep social change, predicated on the crisis of state institutions and religious and ethical bases of leading global civilizations defining history of the last two thousand years.176

      The antagonism of peripheral and dominant social communities and groups will engender essentially different, alternative values, models and forms of social life. Having swallowed the whole world, the global empire engenders and nurtures within its borders new processes of the formation of structures.

      To sum up, globalization is a process of the synthesis of the systemic whole, but similarly a deeply fragmented and antagonistic global social community that cannot be reduced to the mechanical sum of local communities and local economies.

      The synthesis of civilizations and states forced by globalization into a single, albeit heterogeneous and contradictory supra-system does not signify the expected transformation into a global state. Actors in the global development become participants in an increasingly multi-faceted and multidimensional conflict, wherein a global war unites conflicting parties into a single system much faster than the global world.

      While the difference between peace and war may be defined as a major reduction in the intensity of the interaction of agents, as peaceful coexistence does not pose issues of life and death for the sides, the opposite is also true: increasing intensity of interaction (globalization being the intensification of the interconnectedness of the global system) inevitably grows into conflict.

      Thus, the erosion of spatial barriers and borders has led not to the dismissal but to the aggravation of contradictions between agents, including intercivilizational and social ones, to the transition of old geopolitical conflicts into new non-spatial dimensions – legal, informational, cultural, demographical – whose importance is steadily increasing and will grow in the foreseeable future.

      As a result, the situation in which spatial barriers are falling during the aggravation of contradictions and competition often leads not to the dissolution of social groups involved in the global process but to their additional consolidation and radicalization, the strengthening of non-spatial mechanisms of separation and the formation of identities, initially ideological and ethnocultural. In brief, it leads to sharp invigoration of sociogenetic and convergent processes.177

      Persisting under the conditions of globalization, local social systems can no longer be adequately described or adequately ruled outside the systemic context, be it a global cooperation or a global conflict.

      Collapsing in on itself in the space, the contemporary ecumene takes on previously unseen complexity through new, non-spatial changes. Geopolitical agents continue to lose their spatial geographic localization and take on a qualitatively new topology which cannot be accurately described using the categories of pre-globalization, when space was a universal regulator and a limit-setter for external impacts, a leading system-building and structuring factor of ethno- and nation-building.

      Due to a major increase in social mobility and transparency, national, corporate and ethnic elites СКАЧАТЬ