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

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, involving increasingly large flows of material, financial, human and other resources, inevitably leads to the appearance of a wide range of unstable social groups as typical dissipative structures, studied under synergetics, some of which will determine the shape of the future while others are doomed to disappear.

Moreover, at the present stage of the development of globalization, one may speak of the sociogenesis vector turning towards divergence, which manifests itself clearly in the ethnocultural fragmentation of local communities, principally in the crisis of identity and ethnocultural fragmentation of nations. In any case, the intensity of divergent social processes will increase as global crisis processes strengthen.

At the same time, one of the leading attributive characteristics of globalization is the existence of powerful tendencies of a divergent nature, including ethnocultural differentiation and fragmentation of local communities and of humankind in general, the increasing multi-agency of global processes, major sophistication and the diminishing stability of the historical process.

1.4. The crisis of the contemporary nation as the manifestation of the essence of globalization

Globalization is a global systemic crisis of a united world-system not only through the unity of economic and informational space, but also through the all-encompassing nature of the conflict of agents of global development, whose interests are objectively antagonistic.¹⁷²

Thus, another attribute of globalization is its crisis-like – or, more precisely, multi-crisis – character. The real globalization is not just a global crisis at the stage of acceleration, but a system of interconnected crises connected in space and time, impossible to reduce to the sum of its parts. That is why increasing complexity, instability, total competitiveness and propensity for conflict are characteristic of globalization.

Everything that was considered part of the expenditures, contrasts or transition processes of globalization is, in fact, its essential content.

The model of globalization as a system of sub-crises of varying quality presents a more acceptable vision of the complexity and dynamics of globalization and its ability suddenly to engender major new social phenomena, including global challenges and threats.

Correspondingly, understanding globalization as an all-encompassing system of interacting crises and catastrophes engendered not so much by growth limits for resources as by the unprecedented growth of global interconnectedness, allows us to move beyond the limits of theoretical approaches formed in the last century that see the destruction of the basis of the industrialized civilization as growth expenditure. In fact, the very notion of growth is losing its primary meaning of exploration of the outer environment resources under the conditions of fundamental limits on natural resources.

Ultimately, the multi-crisis and multi-faceted structure of globalization as a qualitatively new form of systemic social crisis finishes the era of stable socioeconomic progress and signifies the transition to a descending, regressive branch of historical development, from the social progress of the industrialized era to self-preservation under the total antagonism and instability characteristic of the post-industrialized era. This signifies a gradual loss of the crucial social achievements and possibilities of the industrial era up to the loss of agency and dissolution of nations.

At the same time, the multi-agent and critical nature of social challenges and threats, which are attributes of globalization, has a positive side – a possibility to manoeuvre and govern, which is maintained not only on a global level but also on a local one, and is determined by the level of understanding of current social processes.

Therefore, looking at globalization as a systemic crisis connected to the exhaustion of the progress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a transition of the society and system-building social groups into a phase of descent and crisis development allows us to conclude that the most acute social problems of current times are not the legacy of the past, but an objective result of globalization and its characteristics.

This means that the global social problems of the present cannot be solved within the limits of the existing paradigm of global development, which is based on universalization of the money economy, non-state and post-state, post-national forms and development priorities, antagonistic to the state forms of the organization of society.

Correspondingly, overcoming the negative social consequences of globalization and its attributes is possible only through controlled curbing of globalization processes.

On the whole, globalization is the development of systemic social crisis as a multi-dimensional system of interacting crises in various spheres of social being, strengthening one another, which engenders a qualitatively new level of complexity and acuteness of contradictions typical of social phenomena of the new era.

The contemporary, essentially post-globalization stage of the development of the united world-system, which has largely exhausted the potential of convergent processes and convergent development, is characterized by the dominance of processes of divergence and the diversification of local communities. Forced adaptation of social groups and structures to the new barrier-free and transparent but more competitive and unstable world forces them to strengthen their own barrier and protective functions.

Transnational and transcultural convergence and integration that were not so long ago considered leading sociocultural processes of globalization are, in reality, increasingly limited by minimum consumer communication and common consumer standards sufficient for the existence of the individual in a global market sphere and by the extended communicative standard required to work in transnational structures.

While, during the early stages, differentiation – cultural-civilizational, ethnic, political – had a largely spatial character, social differentiation of non-spatial character is dominant during globalization.

Thus, social processes of divergent types, including the direct separation of certain social groups and the increase of barriers among groups, is a vital characteristic of globalization.

The chief mechanism and chief cause of differentiation and divergence is dissolution, the major weakening and loss of social importance of nation states and civil nations as system-building social groups and the degradation and fragmentation of institutions and social groups of a lower order.

Furthermore, differentiation and divergence are direct results of crisis and conflict processes linked to the battle of social agents for the redistribution of increasingly scarce resources, during which not so much separate individuals as whole social groups are being deemed rejects and pushed aside from resources.

In particular, mass marginalization of the population of industrialized countries – first of all, of the middle class, making up the basis not only of production forces and the inner consumer market but of a nucleus of civil nations – is the result of the globalization of economy.

Desocialization of the middle class is a paradoxical but obvious result of continuing technological progress in the context of the global economy and sharpening global limits on natural resources.

Catastrophic alienation of the population of industrialized countries from material production has obvious reasons: steady growth of the productivity of labour against the backdrop of the deficit of labour objects engenders a lack of vacancies. However, these vacancies either move towards newly industrialized countries as a result of the capital outflow or are lost by the indigenous population as a result of mass immigration of the workforce, destroying not only labour markets but also basic social structures of host states, firstly civil nations.

As a result, globalization creates unsolvable social problems for social communities of old industrialized countries, the very golden billion whose interests motivated globalization, objectively leading to the social regression.

The direct reason behind and a leading mechanism of social regression was the crisis of the nation state that reached its development peak in the twentieth century, and the corresponding system-building social group, a civil nation.

Civil nations, and social groups and structures of a lower order included in them, ensured the full cycle of reproduction of the local social community as a closed system, potentially capable of stable self-sufficient development.

The destruction and loss of importance of the civil nation as a structured social majority whose interests and activities ensured extended economic and social reproduction – i.e. progress – led to an increase in the importance of alternatives to nation and religious and ethnic social groups, as well as the separation of corporate social groups and elites.

The systemic social regression happening globally is not exclusively the consequence of the crisis of resources and demographics. The reasons for the growth of stratification and mass desocialization at the beginning of the twenty-first century have a social, group-like nature linked to major changes in the objective interests of elites, separating themselves from local social communities.

For the first time in history (if one does not count the episode with fences in England) the elites are objectively and consciously interested in the quantitative reduction and qualitative lowering of material consumption of dependent social groups. This is manifested not only in actual social policy but on a conceptual level – for example, in the recommendations of the UN Population Fund.

While the elites were previously objectively interested in quantitative increase, material well-being and the civil loyalty of tax payers, at present, the growing separation of dependent social groups from the process of redistribution of society’s wealth is the source of resources for the elites.

The loss of importance of nations and institutions of civil society leads to an increase in the importance of social groups and identities, providing an alternative to the civil nation – ethnic and religious groups which not long ago were considered hold-overs, relics or phantoms of the pre-industrialized era.

The increase in importance of ethnic and religious groups and corresponding forms of group identity and collective consciousness has taken on such a scale and importance that it may be seen as a separate characteristic of globalization.

Social regression, increasingly typical of our times, takes on a systemic, all-encompassing character and may be considered a crucial attribute of globalization and, correspondingly, a central global problem of the social order.¹⁷³

The exhaustion of resources and reserves of economic, technical and social progress, typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, objectively leads to social regression. It manifests itself not so much in the relegation of certain countries and regions to the periphery of global development as in the desocialization of large masses of people, the establishment and spread of new social strata separated and removed from social development and social elevators. During the industrialized period, scientific and technological progress, increasing labour productivity, average per capita production of material goods and involving natural resources in the economy led to social progress. At the time of globalization, during which humankind is moving towards the fundamental limits of economic growth, physically predetermined by the finite nature of the planet, objective reasons appear for the social regression of a range of social strata, geographical regions and social institutions.

The very situation of total control of interests stipulating that the fight for the redistribution of physically limited resources is a necessary prerequisite for self-preservation and development means that social regression in all its forms and manifestations, unthinkable in the twentieth century, becomes not only a characteristic, but a dominant trait of the current global development.

This means that a global increase in the importance of ethnic and religious communities against the backdrop of the crisis of civil nations is not only an indicator but also a vital social mechanism of the institutionalization of systemic social regression, society going back to archaic forms of social relations and collective consciousness.

At the same time, even the utmost archaization of social institutions, including zones of long-standing ethnic conflict, is coupled with scientific and technological progress, organically and without contradictions, in the form of the increasingly large use of consumer variants of advanced technologies: cellular networks, digital networks and media technologies, satellite networks and positioning, global transport networks, biological technologies (hybrid and genetically modified plants) and others.

This outwardly paradoxical coexistence of social regression and scientific and technical progress characteristic of globalization, however, creates cause for the deeper and irreversible fragmentation and archaization of society on a local and global level.

The united world, on which many hopes were pinned (unable to come true, as is evident today), has in reality become a global crisis, with global catastrophe as a future possibility.

While in the 1990s globalization was thought of as global equilibrium, a compromise signifying the beginning of a new era of sustainable development in the form of a united humankind, it is obvious these days that globalization is the final stage of the economic and social progress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has exhausted itself.

The global unity of the world did not engender a global noospheric synthesis, not a united humankind, but gave way to a global systemic crisis in all spheres of human existence, which is the essential basis of globalization.¹⁷⁴

In two decades of the transitional period to the global world, a complicated system of crises in separate spheres of social existence took form, each not only potentially dangerous in itself, but also capable of provoking a crisis in linked areas.

Therefore, the interaction of separate crises gives way to a new, systemic quality, a possibility of catastrophic generalization of crisis phenomena.

While crisis in a separate sphere of life – for example, an energetic or demographic one – is usually a gradual and predictable accumulation of imbalance, an establishment of positive feedback describes a catastrophic character to the crisis, similar to self-accelerating physical processes such as chain nuclear and chemical reactions.

Basically, particular global crises include the financial-economic crisis, resources and demographics crises, political, ecological and other crises, each of which may provoke global instability.

The crisis of system-building social structures and institutions has been realized even less, with outward manifestations such as the growth of social stratification, the crisis of family and marriage relations, the lack of social elevators and the growth of social tension.

One of the most important aspects of the global social crisis is the crisis of the nation state as a system-building element of the global political and economic system. While in previous historical stages the crisis of separate social systems had a local, isolated character, globalization is transforming local communities into open off-balance systems, linked by economic, information and migration channels as a spontaneous outflow of instability and purposeful export of instability, which has significantly reduced the stability of separate states and of the whole global system. At the same time, the crises in separate nation states have a ubiquitous, almost simultaneous character, having similar mechanisms and development scenarios.

The appearance of a global supra-state social system may be considered a fait accompli; however, the character of global unity as a qualitatively 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 are obtaining degrees of freedom that are more significant than in the time of the nation states, to the extent that it is possible for them to be completely separate from the national soil and state institutions. Non-state social institutions and structures, such as corporations, ethnic diasporas and social networks, which become full-fledged actors in global and local politics, are becoming the new elite generators.

While previously the world consisted of relatively closed-off social systems, at present, local systems maintain and strengthen the regional and civilizational specific character, including confessional and ethnic particularities.

The social mechanism of the influence of globalization on the social sphere consists of the establishment not so much of global markets of goods and finance but of new mechanisms of the reproduction of the elites as influential social groups standing behind the actors of global politics and forming it with their interests.

Characteristically, every large actor in contemporary global politics has a corresponding mechanism of social mobility behind it, a generator of skilled workers, or social elevators, alternative to traditional mechanisms of vertical mobility, connected to the institutions of the nation state.

It should be noted that the resource of new, non-state actors derives from the policy of utilization, well understood by the alternative non-state elites: the policy of the interception of the resource base of states and nation states is often defined as privatization of the welfare state. Not only are top managers of large transnational corporations and international financial structures part of new non-state elites, but so too is an influential, although relatively narrow, group of the so-called international bureaucracy, managers at the IMF, the UN, the European Union and other influential international organizations.

A specific type of new non-state elite is being formed within the borders of global and regional ethnic communities, communes, diasporas and ethnocriminal groups, whose political influence in the world has grown significantly along with the growth of global migration, the degradation of the institutions of the contemporary state, the erosion of national identity and its partial replacement by the confessional and ethnic.

The omnipresent multiculturalization and ethnicization of classic civil nations is developing in the United States, where multiple ethnic communities, increasingly oriented towards their countries of origin, are becoming increasingly influential and transforming the traditional party system of the United States into a system of ethnic lobbies.

Non-state elites, comprising a social basis of non-state actors of global politics, are not separated by the insurmountable barriers of old elites born out of the nation state. On the contrary, they all intersect and fit together to create a single stratum, integrated by social connections and mechanisms of social mobility.

Non-state local elites, interested in the resource flows of nation states, rather efficiently reach their goals through the mechanism of the intersection of elites, gradually transforming the state, according to Adam Smith¹⁷⁸, from political sovereign to night-watchman. At the same time, non-state social actors do not form global elites separated from historical soil, non-mythicized new nomads devoid of cultural identity, but rather globalized strata of national and local elites. These elites play out a liberal scenario of the privatization of national income, nationalization of expenditures, mostly on national and local levels, but also on a global level.

Sketching out the social structure of a new global world, Richard Haass, the chairman of the Council of Foreign Relations, acknowledges the appearance in the social arena of new types of influential political and social actor, comparable in their abilities to the classic territorial state but having at the same time their own agency and interests independent from the state and its institutions.¹⁷⁹ The transition of global politics into non-state and non-spatial dimensions, not linked to geopolitical poles and power hubs, is, according to Haass, “nonpolarity”. The situation of nonpolarity provides an organic base for the concept of soft power as political dominance based on the control and exploration of new spheres of non-force conflict in close cooperation with new types of influential social actor, many of which – for example, non-state organizations and private armies – are purposely created as foreign policy tools.

The growth in the number of conflicting sides, typical of contemporary times, the appearance of new dimensions and trans-border connections, and the deepening of contradictions are emphasized by the well-known concept of controlled chaos, reflecting the essential characteristics of globalization as a systemic crisis. This chaos is characterized by the existence of many points where one has to make a choice (bifurcation) during the historical process, with potential governability of such chaos through weak pressure on critical points and processes being another attribute.