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

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СКАЧАТЬ of social phenomena in the new epoch.

      The analysis and the prognosis for development of globalization processes are hindered by the crisis-like character of the changes, increasingly more likely to end in moving from the technical and social progress of the two previous centuries towards growing ungovernability and global catastrophe: the modern world is changing faster than the science community can reach a consensus on the character of the changes.

      The threats and challenges posed by globalization are not limited to the objective problems related to resources, ecology and economy on which the scientific community focuses. Global threats of a social kind, subjective in nature and linked to the transformation of the system-building social communities – in particular, national and ethnic ones – play an equally important role.

      Ethnocultural fragmentation of civil nations is a new global threat eliciting not only the establishment of new ethnic and religious conflicts and the energizing of the old ones, but also new forms of their establishment and development. Thus, the clash of civilizations assumes not an intergovernmental but an internal, diffusive character tied to the elimination of spatial borders and barriers.

      It seems efficient to divide the phenomena that make up globalization into objective components, linked generally to the spike in limits on natural resources and the objectively inevitable establishment of the global economic and social space, and subjective components, linked to the activities of the social agents of global development, including large and socially important communities such as nations and ethnic groups.

      One of the leading objective components of globalization is the increase in global connectivity – that is, economic, transport and information globalization, as well as a global crisis of resources and demographics.

      At the same time, growth of the objective component of the global systemic crisis inevitably leads to subjective manifestations in the form of a confrontation between the social agents of the global process involved in the fight for the limited resources, not so much by the desire to reap benefits and rule, but by the necessity to save oneself.

      Objective and subjective components should be singled out in the theoretical approaches to globalization. It has been established that the theories may be descriptive or prescriptive. When analysing theories and models of globalization, one should single out their objective, descriptive component, and the subjective component that reflects the peculiarities, interests and intentions of the agent that shows a preference for a certain theoretical approach.

      The prescriptive component of social theory (including the theory of globalization), understood as an ideal model of society, plays a special part in forming nations and other social communities of political genesis. The national idea is nothing short of the social order controlling the masses and forming their common identity.

      Therefore, one should single out an ideological, prescriptive component of the theory of globalization – in other words, a value-based message, aimed at a certain social group (target audience), born out of certain social agents (usually elites), using ideology as a social management tool actively shaping or “building’ social reality.

      Therefore, comparative philosophical-methodological analysis of well-known theories and globalization concepts, created within various science disciplines, shows that most are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon to separate, albeit significant, economic or political phenomena.

      At the same time, most existing globalization concepts, apologetic and critical theories, exhibit absolutization of convergent aspects of the development, monopolization and unification, including the ethnocultural one.

      The aforementioned limitations placed on theoretical approaches inevitably lead to cognitive restrictions that hinder the theory not only from making forecasts, but also from explaining the course of the global development post factum, necessitating a review of the sociophilosophical approaches used in certain social studies.

      Globalization is usually described using the well-known categories of internalization of the economy and integration of states – in other words, from the point of view of economic determinism and the concept of world politics as the interaction of sovereign states.

      However, globalization does not simply weaken nation states that reached their development peak in the twentieth century, including great powers, and erode nations as system-building social communities, but also brings to life new agents in the global game, new centres and power mechanisms that serve as alternatives to the nation state.

      According to one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers and sociologists, the creator of social structuration, Anthony Giddens,120 the process of globalization cannot be reduced to such substantial factors as information and communication technologies and the liberalization of trade and finance.

      The concept of the “hybridization’ of society that presupposes the process of cultural, racial, ethnic mixing and miscegenation121 has gained some traction. Therefore, hybridization is a model of a slowed-down convergence that reduces new entities to mechanic superposition, overlaying already known phenomena and entities.

      According to Guseynov,122 globalization is the transformation of long-standing, rather independent (although capable of complex interactions) cultural-civilizational and nation state forms of social life into a single system including all of humankind. This new system inevitably takes a stand against those forms of collective life which it is supposed to replace in a new, wider, inclusive (to the point of being universal) synthesis.

      The confrontation of the global and the local becomes especially evident, and dramatically antagonistic, when globalization moves beyond economy to take over cultural, political and ideological (in a wider sense, including outlook, mentality) spheres.

      According to Stepin, globalization is a choice between the two scenarios, which are called the “golden billion” concept and the “dialogue of civilizations” concepts.123

      The golden billion concept stems from the idea of globalization as the rule, the triumph of Western civilization and the Western peoples, “the end of history”124 The rest should strive to become more like them under the threat of being relegated to an existence on the periphery or the semi-periphery. In the same manner, the future global society is seen as a semblance of the feudal and hierarchical system in the centre, with concentric circles of various levels around it.

      The concept of the “global human ant hill” (Cheloveynik), as a final and definitive variant of the integration of humankind within the Western paradigm, was sociologically forecast and shown in the work of Zinoviev.125

      The events of the last two decades provide objective proof that globalization, as the establishment of a qualitatively more connected and homogenous global environment, does not lead to the extinction of the formed social communities, similarly to how biological evolution in ecosystems does not lead to a decrease in biodiversity. As a result, despite the obviously outdated nature of religious and ethnic social institutions, the influence of ethno-religious and ethnocultural processes across the world is increasing as the migration flows across states are increasing, the state institutions are losing their significance and, consequently, the nation state identity is weakening, being replaced by an СКАЧАТЬ